Note: I got lazy and I didn't want to proof read this....... Hopefully you will get the gist of My Opinion.
I don't know why I am posting on this topic because it usually gets very heated when discussing music file processes, formats and "quality". I know I'm going to get my chops busted, so here it is, my one and only post. But I am all for being corrected when I muck up the facts....
FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, MP3 are all music / media file types. How the bits are assembled into a file. Just as .doc is a Word file.xls is an Excel file, .jpg is and image file and .raw / .nef is a raw image file
Converting from one format to another will not change the data. In fact, it might limit it. Save an Excel file as a .pdf and you can't edit the .pdf, however a browser can now see the file as an image. iTunes can't read FLAC so it needs to be converted to a format it can read, AIFF or ALAC.
An MP3 removes data, so should be removed from this list. AIFF and WAV are raw data file types. ALAC and FLAC are compressed (e.g.: rather like zipping a regular file).
IMO, the quality, or sonic complexity of a recording is based on a couple things. First the analog stuff: The studio, as opposed to say live, the recording equipment mice, tape machines, how the tracks are mixed or mastered. Then the digital stuff.
At this point the analog recording gets picked up by the ADC (Analog to Digital Converter). The ADC "samples" the analog files it picks up. The microphonic vibrations analogue waveform is are sampled at "X times a Second" This is "Hz" or a "cycle" or a "Clock rate". The standard rates are
44,100 88,200 96,000 176,000 and 192,000 this is how many time each second the ADC "samples" the analog source. The samples are assembled into either 16 bit or 24 bit "bundles"
16-bit and 24-bit refer to the number of possible values available for each sample.
The recordings are would then be differentiated by a combination of these factors. Remember Hz hertz is times per second and kHz is 1000 times a second. So a recording could be 44.1kHz/16 or samples 44,100 times each second and assembled into 16 bit bundles.
Another might be 192 kHz/24 192,000 x per sec "sample rate" into 24 bit "bundles"
Then the files are encoded into ….. Mp3, 320 Mp3, FLAC, ALAC, etc…. The key consonant is "L" That means lossless. (Let the bashing begin…) You get all the bits that the ADC picked up from the analog source. If the sample rate was 88.2kHz twice as many samples were taken than a 44.1kHz rate. The file is bigger. Most of the tracks I purchase from HD Tracks are over 90MB per track. An iTunes Mp3 is about 6MB. Same song. Media files are not like a .zip file where you decompress the file after you load it. You DAC does not decompress files. You are listening to what the encoding algorithm re-represented the sample bits to be. The "low hanging fruit" for a compression algorithm is repetitive data like silence. It picks up a bunch of sequential silence and represents it as a couple of bits.
See above about the difference between MP3, which removes data, and FLAC and ALAC where the data is simply compressed. The computer de-compresses it and sends it to the DAC as PCM data.
I am a photographer, I like to use the analogy of .jpg versus .raw files. It's the same thing. The camera sensor, when set to .jpg, re-represents what it picks up and writes it to a reduced file. Big boy cameras record every bit the sensor picks up and writes it to a "raw" file. Compression is compression and the camera makes a great analogy to music. IMO IMO IMO
I don't have the link handy but the way cameras save JPG data is radically different to the way the RAW data is handled. The only similarity to audio is the amount of data being removed is considerable, but the compression itself is completely different.
When you zoom 400x or 800x into a RAW image you can see a finer matrix of pixels. More important you can see the "Transitions" of color between between the matrices. A jpg image has far fewer pixel components, there are fewer transitions to work on. Hence you touch up the image with anywhere near the accuracy of a RAW file. Prints from RAW have much more depth. If you google an image there will no double be duplicates of the same image in multiple resolutions. If you enlarge them the resolution of the smaller image will break up as it is enlarged.
You can't zoom 400x or 800x into a RAW image. We don't live in the future like you see in the movies where you can zoom endlessly into pictures. I think you mean 400% or 800% on your screen, which is far lower resolution than the image from a good, modern camera. A jpeg file has the same number of pixels as a RAW image but the data is compressed to a degree that the finer detail of the image is often lost, as well as some colour information that makes fine tuning of the file's colours impossible.
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