pfarrell Wrote: > Any lossless format had better sound identical, or it isn't lossless. Quite true! But then, that's sort of my point. =) There might be a bug in the ALAC encoder, or perhaps just false marketing. I was just trying to be sure nobody knew of any such issues that would make ALAC a bad choice.
pfarrell Wrote: > But one of the drivers in the argument about closed formats is that > there are no guarentees about them at all. The owner of the format can > do whatever they want. (...) Whether the version of ALAC that runs on > Windows SuperVista will allow transcoding is the theological discussion > topic. That's quite true. In my particular case, I'm on a Mac and OS X, so I (hopefully) don't have to worry about the Windows side of it, but obviously if Apple kills transcoding on Windows, they're likely to do it on OS X as well. I don't want to start a theological or philosophical war on this =) but given that Apple's DRM is one of the most flexible in the industry, I think they're unlikely to kill transcoding of ALAC anytime in the near future. (No flames please, I'm NOT trying to justify Apple's DRM, just stating that it is less inherently evil than other DRMs.) I'd think that if anyone were to kill transcoding of proprietary formats, MS would do that for WMA Lossless well before Apple would for ALAC... and hopefully we'll all have plenty of warning from the rumor mill if they DO decide to kill it. That being said, I'm not actually getting *rid* of my CDs, just putting them into storage, so on the off-chance that this does happen, it would probably just cost me a lot of wasted time in re-encoding the CDs... pfarrell Wrote: > There is also a small chance that in the future, no one will care about > FLAC, and so it may not be easy to install on Mac OS-99 or SuperVista > 2025. But with the source code available, you can always get the source > and compile it, or pay someone to help you compile it. Quite true, that's certainly a benefit if I have to move to a new format. I'm not too worried about this happening either, of course... if there are still people out there who care about 20-year-old video games (witness MAME), there will still be *someone* who cares about FLAC 20 years from now. =) Unfortunately, iTunes does happen to be the easiest solution for ripping my CDs, and I do prefer it for library management as well. On a Mac, the only good tools for ripping to FLAC with proper tag support seem to be Max and its companion, Tag... unfortunately, both require OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and I'm running 10.3, so I would have to upgrade to use them. Also, both are still very much in development, with some major bugs and missing features, although I'm quite eager to see how they evolve and mature. I do have access to a Windows machine (a laptop with XP) so I could use EAC or other Windows utilities for FLAC encoding... but I think I'd rather keep everything self-contained on the Mac, and as I mentioned, I do like iTunes for library management... That being said, it would seem the ALAC seems to be the easiest and "best" solution for me at the moment, at least until Max and Tag mature and/or iTunes becomes FLAC-compatible somehow. I just wanted to be sure that there was no overwhelming reason to abandon ALAC... pfarrell Wrote: > At least until all computer are quantum based. Well, let's not get started on the physics of that statement. ;-) pfarrell Wrote: > We were all new to this not all that long ago. True, and I definitely appreciate the assistance! I'm just pre-apologizing for asking "beginner" questions in the audiophile forum. =D -- cepheid ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cepheid's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3845 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22635 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
