I am going to convert my flac files to alac for use with my iPhone and plan on deleting the original flac copies to save hard drive space. I want to make sure I can go back to flac with no quality loss should I decide flac better suits my needs in the future.
I know that they are both lossless and I should be able to go between flac and alac all I want with no degredation, but I think I might be doing something wrong.
Here is what I did:
FLAC to WAV in foobar2000
I took that WAV file into iTunes and converted it to ALAC
I then took that ALAC into foobar2000 and converted it back into WAV so I could compare the md5 checksum and make sure nothing was altered.
The checksums did not match
To test things I then ripped a fresh WAV from a CD
Using foobar 2000 I converted the original WAV to FLAC and back to WAV (this WAV matched the original WAV checksum)
Using iTunes I converted the original WAV to ALAC and then used foobar2000 to convert it back to a WAV (this WAV did not match the original WAV checksum)
What is it about ALAC that is preventing me from getting my original WAV file back? Am I doing something wrong? I am not messing with any tags whatsoever in iTunes. Is iTunes sticking tags into the file during the ALAC conversion anyway?
Thanks!
Edited by Splorfus - 3/20/13 at 2:11am
