One thing that I think a lot of people aren't really aware of is that, while aiff and wav files are functionally similar (i.e., uncompressed formats and I believe they are actually just minor variants of each other), iTunes treats them differently in one VERY important way. If you rip directly into iTunes, it will tag both formats and allow you to add/modify tags for other files not ripped into iTunes. However, for wav files, that information is stored in the iTunes database file, not in the sound file itself. For aiff files, this information is stored in the actual audio file (even under Windows).
So, if you rip to wav's and rearrange (or move) your audio library in some other program (or move the library from one computer to another), iTunes will "lose" most of those tags. If you always use iTunes to manage/move files (and keep your iTunes database backed up), then this probably won't be that big a deal. However, with aiff files all the tagging info is stored in the file, so it doesn't matter if you have to do some library maintenance outside of iTunes; when you rescan, it's all still there. Other programs (including Slimserver) can read those tags as well (though I'm not sure that other programs would be able to modify those tags). I discovered this when I first started ripping a couple of years ago, but don't see it mentioned in many of these discussions. Since I was still experimenting with different storage strategies (internal vs. external vs. network drives), this became an important issue for me. This was before ALAC came out, so I'm not sure if I were starting all over today whether I would still go aiff, but I suspect I would. If you use an iPod, FLAC files won't work, so that would require an extra transcoding step to use those files on an iPod. ALAC would work, but last I checked, the Squeezebox doesn't support FF or RWD within ALAC files (aiff files are fine). WAV really has no advantages I can see over aiff and the (to me) very important disadvantage I mentioned. I have considered moving to FLAC anyway, but iTunes doesn't support it and there really don't seem to be all that many other alternatives on a Mac (I use both Mac's and Windows, so the dual-platform nature of iTunes is a real advantage). -- mmcguff ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mmcguff's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5278 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27729 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
