Apple Lossless?


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The lossless AAC codec just tweaks the standard format, getting rid of background noise in the samples, it isn't higher or any different, just cleaner (and slightly smaller too) :)

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I just imported Global Underground 013: Sasha in Ibiza CD 2, using the lossless codec. The cd was 746.8 MB the songs ripped afterwards totaled 506.7 MB. One song, in this case BT - Mercury and Solace is 54 Mbs, at a rate of 1007 Kbps. Overall the quality is great, the bass sounds cleaner, channel panning is clear, overall is sounds awesome. As close as you can get to CD quality without a CD imho.

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The lossless AAC codec just tweaks the standard format, getting rid of background noise in the samples, it isn't higher or any different, just cleaner (and slightly smaller too) :)

uhhm NO... WRONG

what the hell are you guys talking about....

lossless is lossless, its the exact same digital numbers 10101010110 as on the CD... just compressed, the exact same sound as on the CD

the compression ratio is around 50% depending on the complexity... it looks like it is FLAC or a newer version of it BTW

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To go along with the above post, there is no such thing as AAC lossless. There is however, going to be a MPEG-4 lossless codec but that's still in development.

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A lossless compression/decompression is exactly like Zip. It gets compressed as much as possible, and when uncompressed (played) it is bit-for-bit exactly what went in.

A lossy compression (like almost all of the audio compressions) is like a good JPEG picture. Looks like the original. At the bit level you will see differences. And recompressing/resampling/converting will further muck up your image (or song). If all goes well, it is hardly noticeable.

Lossless cannot compact nearly random bitstreams very well at all. Lossy ones can, and achieve a great compression while maintaining a good quality output.

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A lossless compression/decompression is exactly like Zip. It gets compressed as much as possible, and when uncompressed (played) it is bit-for-bit exactly what went in.

A lossy compression (like almost all of the audio compressions) is like a good JPEG picture. Looks like the original. At the bit level you will see differences. And recompressing/resampling/converting will further muck up your image (or song). If all goes well, it is hardly noticeable.

Lossless cannot compact nearly random bitstreams very well at all. Lossy ones can, and achieve a great compression while maintaining a good quality output.

Yup, music lossless is the same sort of compression as a zip, just optimized for music. Zips are for any type of data.

While browsing over at HydrogenAudio, I came accross this neat AAC graph. Its pretty leet.

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It is not FLAC. It is MPEG-4 ALS.
Partially correct.

You are correct when you say that it is not FLAC, but it is MPEG-4 ALS either! ;)

The new codec from Apple is called ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec).

There is a big difference between MPEG-4 ALS and ALAC.

* ALAC is a proprietary lossless codec in a MPEG-4 container. It is not part of the MPEG-4 standard.

* ALS is the official MPEG-4 Lossless standard, which is still undergoing development before it is finalised.

The FLAC developer say they might be using some techniques from FLAC, but he can not tell from analyzing bitstreams.

So at the moment the origin of the codec is unknown!

Source: www.hydrogenaudio.org

Solaris

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the bad thing is that why would you want 54mb songs on your computer? for the people that maybe have 3-5 cd's on their rig, i can understand. but for people who have their entire cd collection on one hard drive, the lossless format really isn't the way to go.

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I don't see much (personal) use in lossless codecs either. It is cool that it is possible, but storage wise it is quite useless for a general consumer.

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AAC is a lossy codec, so there is no such thing as Lossless AAC (except possibly in Apple's PR), but MPEG4 standard includes (since somewhere February) LPAC which is a lossless codec. That's what Apple is supporting now. Flac is not used because no one submitted Flac for review to MPEG body.

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Partially correct.

You are correct when you say that it is not FLAC, but it is MPEG-4 ALS either! ;)

The new codec from Apple is called ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec).

There is a big difference between MPEG-4 ALS and ALAC.

* ALAC is a proprietary lossless codec in a MPEG-4 container. It is not part of the MPEG-4 standard.

* ALS is the official MPEG-4 Lossless standard, which is still undergoing development before it is finalised.

The FLAC developer say they might be using some techniques from FLAC, but he can not tell from analyzing bitstreams.

So at the moment the origin of the codec is unknown!

Source: www.hydrogenaudio.org

Solaris

Umm... no.

http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/proj...s/mpeg4als.html

See that icon in the top left corner? :p

MP4-ALS (which apple is using) is based on LPAC, not FLAC and the FLAC author is on crack. ;)

http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/wer/liebchen/lpac.html

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Umm... no.

http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/proj...s/mpeg4als.html

See that icon in the top left corner? :p

MP4-ALS (which apple is using) is based on LPAC, not FLAC and the FLAC author is on crack. ;)

http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/wer/liebchen/lpac.html

Are you telling me the entire basis for your argument is the icon on some webpage that doesn't even mention Apple? Sorry, there are less holes in swiss cheese....

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Are you telling me the entire basis for your argument is the icon on some webpage that doesn't even mention Apple? Sorry, there are less holes in swiss cheese....

No but it it is a visual indicator. If you read the page and looked at the both links, you would see that these guys were the ones that came up with MPEG4 ALS. It would be a bit strange to use Apple's iTunes icons if Apple was not using their technology.

I'm not the only one. There have been several reports that this lossless codec is infact ALS. It is definately encapsulated in an MP4 envelope. It is lossless and apple has been known to use established formats before instead of rolling their own.

Why would apple create a new format enclosed in MP4 for lossless audio if one already exists?

Edited by aristotle-dude
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There are much better lossless codecs out there: Monkey Audio, FLAC, OptimFrog.

i believe OptimFrog offers the best compression at about 45% average original file size.

the basis for all of these lossless codecs is huffman coding which replaces patterns of 0s and 1s in the original file with shorter strings. so say your entire song just happens to be 0010001 repeated over and over in its digital form, huffman coding would turn it into A or something and then have a legend of some sort to say that A is 0010001 and then you could extend the song infinitely long and it should never change file size (theoretically).

it gets more complicated though as you can huffman code the huffman code and it's done in trees and so on and so forth.

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