Quote:
Originally Posted by J-Pak
Apple lossless is useless since it's a closed format and has quite poor compression. And can't be converted to anything other than one of their other closed formats
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Umm... if you want to disparage something, it really helps to have the facts straight
iTunes supports the following audio formats (and makes it extremley easy to convert from one to another):
MP3 - I don't think anyone here considers this a "closed" format.
AAC - Yes, despite much uninformed "fact" to the contrary, this is an open format.
AIFF - Used by Apple, SGI, and several high-end audio packages. Also supported by various free players for both Mac and Windows (as well as UNIX and Linux, I suppose).
WAV - This is as "closed" a format as AIFF.
Apple Lossless - This is a "closed" format, except someone has already decoded it, so open source players should be available for any platform.
So, I guess 1 out of 5 come close to being a "closed" format.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duckspeak
Vote for Apple Lossless for above-mentioned reasons: it's easy and it's fast and it's supposedly optimized for iPod playback.
Conversion is almost as easy as it gets, although it kind of annoys me how it interlaces the converted files with the originals--good solution to that is to make a smart playlist that orders all of your songs by when they were added to your library. Then just do a conversion and all the new files are lined up nicely in that playlist. (of course, to delete again, you need to do something clever--I change the Artist field for all those files to "BALEETED!" and then go back to the library view for the kill)
...the best solution, of course, is to bend iTunes to your will using Python scripts...
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Since I have both ALAC and AAC versions of each song in my Library, I made Smart Playlists that sort by file type. That way, it's easy to look at only AAC or only ALAC files.
What they really need, is a filter option. Kinda like an on-the-fly-Smart-Playlist.