Best Digital Format For Music

Currently converting all my C Ds into FLAC from freshly made AAC files, because if the autistic nutters of this world who care about preserving music from the coming data decay apocalypse don't do it, who will? :P

Seriously though, I'm interested in hearing an explanation as to whether AAC is better than FLAC or vis versa. Because as soon as I ripped my new Icehouse: White Heat - 30 Hits CD to my computer and turned it into FLAC, I BELIEVED.

I'm kind of pissed off that mp3s decay over time. It means some of the DRM free albums I bought devoid of iTunes malarkey will decay over time too I imagine.

Help understanding the formats for a music n00b on the cusp of enlightenment?

Hell Hasn't Earned My Tears

Apple Lossless (.alac) isa pretty interesting format. It uses the kind of encoding process that produces "lossy" files to create smaller lossless files. It's quite nice.

That said, I'm really an MP 3 at 320/256 VBR man myself. The change in quality is basically undetectable, and unlike AAC, MP 3 allows for a 48 kHz range.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

FLAC is supposed to be without lost of quality but the average person can't tell the difference from a nice 320 bitrate mp3. Also, they have way bigger file sizes than other formats.

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I have always wondered how one tells the difference at all. I've compared the most lossless of lossless with the default settings iTunes has for ripping CDs, and I could not detect any difference, even listening as closely as possible.

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Depends on the quality of the CD, the production, your headphones/speakers, and a lot of other things.

I can definitely tell the difference between 128kbps AAC and MP 3 and higher quality files, although distinguishing between each degree is more difficult, and above, say, 320, it really doesn't matter to me. It's all exceptionally clear.

However, vinyl, CD and cassette tape all do have distinct sounds that transfer to digital in different ways, with differing degrees of success. Even within those types, a flexi-disc is going to have a very different sound from a 180-gram 12" at 45 rpm.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Are you saying that you went from CD -> AAC -> FLAC? If so, that's not a good use of the codecs, because data gets lost in the conversion to AAC, and converting AAC to FLAC won't restore that data.

If you want lossless digital copies of your music, every step before the final file needs to be lossless as well. Either rip directly from CD to FLAC, or go CD -> [uncompressed format, like WAV or AIFF] -> FLAC.

From what I've read on the topic, bit decay happens to all electronically-stored digital files; lossy audio formats (mp3, AAC, ogg vorbis, etc) aren't any more susceptible than lossless ones.

Yes, some data loss is inherent to the lossy audio formats (hence the term), but this occurs once, when the file is first converted to mp3 or AAC or whatever. Further data is only lost if you take that lossy file and convert it again into another lossy file.

edited 21st Sep '12 9:26:01 AM by MetaFour

I didn't write any of that.