OT: FLAC vs M4A audio

[FearTheVoices]

Is there a difference?

 

Will i lose quality if converting from FLAC to M4A?

 

Are any of these lossy codecs ever going to make it mainstream???

[ben_allison]

I believe FLAC is a lossless compression.

 

M4A is lossy.

[MegaTom]

M4A/AAC/MP4 can be lossless.

 

Where are you listening to your music from? Chances are that unless you are playing it through some super top of the line headphones or amp/speaker setup, you will notice little to no difference between lossless and M4A @ 256kbps or better. I prefer to keep most of my CDs and LPs archived in the lossless AAC format (a.k.a. ALAC, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec), but on my iPod I have it all in 256kbps AAC to use less HD space and not use as much battery life.

[FearTheVoices]

M4A/AAC/MP4 can be lossless. Where are you listening to your music from? Chances are that unless you are playing it through some super top of the line headphones or amp/speaker setup, you will notice little to no difference between lossless and M4A @ 256kbps or better. I prefer to keep most of my CDs and LPs archived in the lossless AAC format (a.k.a. ALAC, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec), but on my iPod I have it all in 256kbps AAC to use less HD space and not use as much battery life.

 

I can tell the difference between my 320s and my flac files easily, maybe I just have a good ear for that stuff. I do have about 4k into my speakers and receiver though(klipsch reference series and denon)

 

I imagine the only hold up making lossless codecs mainstream is hd storage. I think once we start seeing 1tb drives come standard on pcs then they will start to become more popular.

 

I am wondering though which one will come out on top, I was thinking how big. A following apple has, they could easily set the standard and get the word out about m4a

 

question though, If I have a library of m4a files, does iTunes automatically convert them to mp3 when you drag them to your iPod or iPhone?

[Agreed]

FLAC isn't lossy. The biggest barrier to lossless compression becoming mainstream is precisely the confusion that consumers have over what it all means.

 

I don't use WAV for anything in my DAW (REAPER) because it supports FLAC natively. It provides at least 20-25% more compression than zipping a WAV. I once spent an hour in a thread on Gearslutz trying to convince professional audio engineers that archiving their audio files in FLAC would be more efficient and useful than archiving with ZIP, but their confusion that any compression with audio means you're losing data was very difficult to overcome. I've found the best way to describe it to help people understand is to tell them that it is basically a ZIP you can listen to and work with live, but with the added benefit of being far more efficient than ZIP because its compression was designed specifically to store audio.

 

Any lossless codec will provide the same sound quality as the input source, so it comes down to other considerations. Apple's might win because the iPod will play it and everybody has an iPod. But FLAC is a better codec, more efficient in compression and decompression (in two senses - it can make moderately smaller files, not by much but by enough that if you're archiving projects in the studio it adds up, and also in the sense that they have managed to get it to a state where it's not too processor intensive to decompress either); it also has the benefit of being open source, meaning no licensing fees and what have you and it can be seamlessly integrated into anything you care to integrate it into (DAWs, media players, etc.)

 

There are some hybrid formats which provide lossy compression with an additional file generated at the time of compression which acts as a key to restore all of the discarded data to allow them to be decompressed into the bit-correct original, but I don't see the point in those myself.

[ben_allison]

Exactly.

[Alicel]

FLAC is lossless, so its sound quality is paramount and is quite popular among people. It is not so clear that if M4A is lossless. Compared to M4A, the audio size of FLAC files is much bigger. Meanwhile, FLAC files cannot be played in Apple QuickTime Player and iTunes, either. What is more, it cannot be played in Apple iPod, iPhone and iPad. It will better to convert FLAC to M4A using FLAC to M4A Converter.

[SmoggyTwinkles]

Don't make the mistake I did which was:

I worked in a used CD store for like 10 years and ripped so much music to my HDD, all in WMA-Lossless (facepalm) Can't be bothered to convert everything because my PC does that for me when I transfer it to my MP3 player or phone so whatever.

 

If I could go back and do it again, I would simply do 320Kbps MP3 for compatibility. 

FLAC is a lot more popular so it's not the worst thing to do, but I'd really suggest that if you have the space rip everything to .WAV for archiving and rip again in MP3 for universal compatibilty. 

Or, just do MP3 at 320 since can you really tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC if someone blind folds you? I'm not sure I can (hey it's good to be honest with yourself lol)