FLAC to ALAC, myths and questions
May 27, 2012 at 12:22 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 3

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Just curious here, I've got Jay Z's Gray Album, not something you can buy and just rip sadly, I'm sure your all aware of it. It is in FLAC and I need it ALAC for my iPod and iTunes.
 
I've got a conversion program, and I did some tests. I can hear no audible difference between the two files.
 
At FLAC it was actually 36% compressed and is now 35% compressed in ALAC form.
 
I've heard FLAC can be exported back to WAV with no loss. True? Cause I wonder if that is what my converter did? I can't figure any other explanation for the compression difference and slightly larger file size in ALAC (Apple Lossless m4a)
 
(I'm using Poinko soft Easy CD Extractor, seems to be a better job and the interface is nicer than dBpoweramp, to me anways)
 
May 27, 2012 at 1:00 AM Post #2 of 3
A difference in compression/file size doesn't necessarily correlate with any 'loss' of audio information, they just roll with different compression algorithms and what not.
 
Don't sweat it, it's lossless.
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May 27, 2012 at 1:04 AM Post #3 of 3
It uses a different compression algorithm.  Slightly different file sizes are to be expected, because there are differences in how the algorithms compress and store the data.  With FLAC there are even different encoding settings you can use, that trade off encoding time (from short to really short) vs. file size.
 
All lossless formats will decode back into the original uncompressed data (uncompressed PCM audio data is often stored as WAV), so there's no difference in quality.  It's not like your files change if you compress them into a .zip vs. a .rar.
 

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