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I started building my collection of flac files. Is it the same quality as ALAC?

post #1 of 7
8/21/12 at 12:09pm
Thread Starter 

I like using itunes since i am so used to it.  I just want to know if FLAC will sound better than ALAC? if it does then i will stay with foobar2000. :)

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post #2 of 7
8/21/12 at 12:44pm

Just containers, no difference unless you use files with 24-bit depth (which was not supported by ALAC last time I looked.)

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post #3 of 7
8/21/12 at 12:48pm

Short answer: they sound the same.

 

Long answer: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), as the name suggest is lossless, i.e. there is no quality loss. Same goes for ALAC. Since there's no 'sound' to these codecs, the question whether one sounds better than the other doesn't make sense.

 

edit: @Radio_head: Afaik, both FLAC and ALAC support 24-bit, 192 kHz.


Edited by xnor - 8/21/12 at 12:52pm
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post #4 of 7
8/21/12 at 1:08pm
Thread Starter 

Thanks a bunch!  Which is the best software to convert my flacs to ALAC?

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post #5 of 7
8/21/12 at 1:11pm

In my experience:

 

dbpoweramp (with .m4a extension) on windows

XLD on mac

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post #6 of 7
8/21/12 at 1:58pm

Or you can unpack the FLAC files using the FLAC GUI, then encode all the resulting WAV files with iTunes.  dBPoweramp will be quicker to use, but that program will only take 16-bit, 44.1kHz files.

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post #7 of 7
8/22/12 at 1:43am

foobar converts just fine and since you already have/know it, why not just stick with it ?

It's also a pretty good player IMO ...

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