Not exactly what I was saying.
Per Wikipedia, Apple uses the same file extension (m4a) for both lossy and lossless formats. So, if someone is basing their belief on a lossless format because of the file extension, then that’s not necessarily so. This discrepancy would explain why one might think uncompressed files just sound better, if they were conflating the two, so to speak. Of course, if the file was ripped by the user, then that’s not a consideration.
Yes, because what you said was incorrect. You said that ALAC is not necessarily lossless. But ALAC is Apple Lossless, hence always lossless. What you meant was that M4A is not necessarily Apple Lossless, thus could be lossy.
AJ
This is what I went on to say.
Really, is it worth this tempest in a teapot? You seem to specialize in hair splitting.
People posting online have a responsibility to be correct. Spreading misinformation – even unintentionally – does a disservice to others.
In this case, your inaccurate original assertion, though well meaning, could have caused numerous other people to believe and perpetuate that ALAC is not always lossless.
AJ
Slim seems to be the argumentative one in more than a few threads - muted.
I cleared it up in the post that you actually replied to, so really what;s your point?
Actually @xxx… you didn’t clear it up because what you said was
… when you should have said “The .m4a extension comes in both flavours” (ALAC or AAC).
ALAC is not a file extension which is why you’ve had all this hassle from geeks like me!!
You didn’t clear it up! ALAC is NEVER lossy. ALAC is ALWAYS lossless.
@Dan_Brown, @Speed_Racer -
This is what I said in the post that was replied to by @WiWavelength -
Yes, my first post was lazy and I didn’t proofread what I wrote. To make it sound like I ruined lives, is ridiculous.
Duly noted. What does ‘muted’ mean?
It means the topic controls were set to muted. Ie the topic was no longer followed and no further notifications were received by that user.
Just highlighting this for any interested parties. “Uncompressed” FLAC is an esoteric and poorly documented command line option of the FLAC codec. It’s not the same as simply encoding FLAC at 0 compression. There are some threads about it on various forums and that’s very cool if it’s supported out of the box on SonicTransporter.
It is, as @agillis says, a wav file with a FLAC header. Worth looking into if you want robust tagging and compatibility, yet feel there is an audible difference between .flac and .wav.
I have no opinion on the matter, no response is neccessary
Yes that’s exactly what we are doing not FLAC compression 0 but WAV with a FLAC header. The sonicTransporter is built for audiophiles and it has a lot of features that audiophile have requested over the years. Ripping directly to uncompress FAC is one of them.
If you think WAV sounds the best on your gear then this is the way to go. You get all the metadata and compatibility of FLAC and the true uncompressed PCM nature of WAV.