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is apple lossless real lossless?

post #1 of 99
2/11/13 at 11:43pm
Thread Starter 

is apple lossless real lossless? i have been using apple lossless for quite some time, my music is usually in apple lossless. i always thought apple lossless is like flac but for apple devices. however, recently theres a guy in youtube claiming that apple lossless is not real lossless... his comment baffles me... below is his exact words

 

 

Actually... Applelossless isn't really lossless... if you google it, you'll find that Apple kinda re-defined the meaning of the word 'lossless'.

 

 

 

 

 

so tell me is apple lossless real lossless?

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post #2 of 99
2/11/13 at 11:56pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by reddragon View Post

is apple lossless real lossless? i have been using apple lossless for quite some time, my music is usually in apple lossless. i always thought apple lossless is like flac but for apple devices. however, recently theres a guy in youtube claiming that apple lossless is not real lossless... his comment baffles me... below is his exact words

 

 

Actually... Applelossless isn't really lossless... if you google it, you'll find that Apple kinda re-defined the meaning of the word 'lossless'.

 

 

 

 

 

so tell me is apple lossless real lossless?

You mean this guy?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=673778

 

Lossless is lossless. ALAC is just like FLAC really (lossless audio compressed in a .zip-like container).

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post #3 of 99
2/12/13 at 12:05am
Thread Starter 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEVAvzxn2IY

 

 

look for cheuk long cheng's comment. 

 

 

and yes, thats what i thought, i always thought apple lossless is just like flac and other lossless. they all sound the same except they are compressed and wont take as much space as like aiff or wav

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post #4 of 99
2/12/13 at 12:36am

http://alac.macosforge.org/

Quote:
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes.  ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information.  A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.

 

I think the person at the MacRumors thread had a bad rip or something. That song definitely doesn't sound like it would be ripped with an average bitrate of 300 kbps if it was ripped to ALAC. Never mind, I guess his track had a lot of silence between tracks, which would lower the average bitrate.

 

I personally use FLAC just because it's more widely accepted amongst media players. I can't tell the difference between 256 kbps VBR MP3 and FLAC though. XD


Edited by miceblue - 2/12/13 at 12:46am
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post #5 of 99
2/12/13 at 1:20am
Thread Starter 

i have many songs in apple lossless because i used to use ipod. now i can use both apple lossless or flac, both are compatible for my dap. 

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post #6 of 99
2/12/13 at 5:22am

I googled it like the dude said, and found this thread. And it says that it is.

 

People tend to equate bitrate with quality, which is way wrong with lossless files. The lowest bitrate FLAC file I have is 5kbps.normal_smile%20.gif

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post #7 of 99
2/12/13 at 5:34am

It's nothing new that there are deluded people that don't accept facts and spread nonsense.

 

Lossless = lossless = lossless.

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post #8 of 99
2/12/13 at 9:56am
Thread Starter 

yep, i think he was thinking compressed lossless is not really lossless because its compressed but compressed lossless should sound exactly the same as uncompressed lossless but just takes up less space... thats probably where he misunderstood apple lossless as not being a lossless format

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post #9 of 99
2/12/13 at 10:17am
And there are those pesky Apple-haters out there.

Edit: How stupid would Apple have to be to call it Apple Lossless, and then make it lossy? Wouldn't that be like bad press when that came out? And, of course, it would absolutely come out.
Edited by jaddie - 2/12/13 at 10:21am
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post #10 of 99
2/12/13 at 10:50am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaddie View Post

And there are those pesky Apple-haters out there.

Edit: How stupid would Apple have to be to call it Apple Lossless, and then make it lossy? Wouldn't that be like bad press when that came out? And, of course, it would absolutely come out.


They could probably convince people that their hip new style of lossless is much better than old boring actual bit for bit lossless. I mean they have people convinced that 32GB of RAM is worth almost a grand so I think they could pull that off.

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post #11 of 99
2/12/13 at 11:27am

Too many people equate file size with sound quality. It isn't an accurate measure.

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post #12 of 99
2/12/13 at 11:27am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaddie View Post

And there are those pesky Apple-haters out there.

Edit: How stupid would Apple have to be to call it Apple Lossless, and then make it lossy? Wouldn't that be like bad press when that came out? And, of course, it would absolutely come out.

 

I can think of several occasions when Apple have told equivalent lies - eg in the press coverage for the release of the original iPad they more than implied the CPU was a custom design with significant IP when it was actual an ARM. They also ran adds when they first start shipping machines with SIMD units showing how much faster they were than PCs using equivalent benchmarks.. Not mentioning that the PC cpu of the time actual had better SIMD than the Apple, but they'd just faked the result by running one test without SIMD and the other with. The first is a major violation of investor information laws, the second of consumer protection and advertising regulations.

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post #13 of 99
2/12/13 at 11:32am

Doesn't matter. ALAC is open-source since late 2011. If you don't trust a simple decode(encode(input)) = input test you can take a look at the source code...

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post #14 of 99
2/12/13 at 11:35am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaddie View Post

And there are those pesky Apple-haters out there.

Edit: How stupid would Apple have to be to call it Apple Lossless, and then make it lossy? Wouldn't that be like bad press when that came out? And, of course, it would absolutely come out.

So it just came out. And we are part of this "bad press". Apple is evil.


Just kidding. I took me one minute to find this:
Quote:
What I provide here is a C implementation of a decoder, written from reverse engineering the file format. It turns out that most of the algorithms in the codec are fairly well known. ALAC uses an adaptive FIR prediction algorithm and stores the error values using a modified rice or golumb algorithm. Further details are in alac.c.

But Apple is still evil smily_headphones1.gif
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post #15 of 99
2/12/13 at 11:56am
Thread Starter 

maybe he thinks apple is so evil that they make a lossy format called apple lossless to deceive people? lol tongue.gif

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