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Topic: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac) (Read 5288 times) previous topic - next topic
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AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Hi, Just notified that  B.&W.;s 'Society of Sound" now only providing AIFF & not Flac as previous.
My obvious question is, will Foobar play these files. Or, if not, (in that I use a PC & only know as to Foobar) could someone please provide information as to how to actually play these files.
Much appreciated,
John Haines

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #1
Yes foobar2000 should be able to play AIFFs and also convert them to a compressed lossless format like FLAC.
Who are you and how did you get in here ?
I'm a locksmith, I'm a locksmith.

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #2
You can easily convert these files with foobar also.

I have no clue why they switched formats by the way.

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #3
Thank you for the replies.
I do need a clarification, & that being that both replies mention "converting" the AIFF files.
I need to know if Foobar can play these files without any need for any conversion.
Also, (in that I thought AIFF was 'Apple' related) that a Windows PC can play the files using Foobar.
Thanks,
John H.
 

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #4
I believe they mentioned converting because keeping the files as they are makes little sense. Uncompressed AIFF files take a lot of space, have limited software support and even more limited tagging support. It makes a lot of sense to convert them to your preferred lossless format.

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #5
AIFF is uncompressed PCM audio just like WAV, the only real difference is that AIFF is big-endian and WAV is little-endian, signifying whether the least or most significant bit is first in the byte order.

Both formats are favored by placebophiles, because they're uncompressed and "pure", and because they believe the sound quality is better. Utter nonsense, of course.

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #6
AIFF is uncompressed PCM audio just like WAV, the only real difference is that AIFF is big-endian and WAV is little-endian, signifying whether the least or most significant bit is first in the byte order.
That was true at the time Apple was using the PowerPC
When they changed to Intel, they also made a little-endian version of AIFF
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #7
Does this mean that among those who believe they hear differences, there are hardly any who "favour" .WAV over .AIFF?

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #8
Does this mean that among those who believe they hear differences, there are hardly any who "favour" .WAV over .AIFF?
Sure. Since aiff relates to the apple universe it must be better. I did read more than once about it ar CA.

A short googler found it the other way around "....to these ears, but AIFF vs WAV is very close, but WAV wins with slightly lower noise floor and more space-between-notes kind of thing..." :)
https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/7839-aiff-vs-wav/?do=findComment&comment=91315
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #9
As a big B&W lover I was very surprised to read this on their site:

http://blog.bowers-wilkins.com/music/digital-music-a-quick-guide-to-the-best-lossless-files/?utm_source=Bowers+%26+Wilkins&utm_campaign=5abdd11678-20170420_SOS_April&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_22ec1c80b7-5abdd11678-54729425&mc_cid=5abdd11678&mc_eid=2702c527ef

"Because FLAC is unzipped on the fly, the sound quality is highly dependent on the software you are using to do that. Therefore, even though it is theoretically lossless, there are still barriers to overcome when listening to the music contained within."

Really.....? I never expected that they would fell for that kind of bullshit. This is just not true. FLAC is lossless, so every bit that is read is exactly the same as the original wave file. Even so when playing the decoding of the flac file doesn't even barely touch the CPU. In the meantime the PC is doing many other things at the same time, like background tasks and the GUI etc etc...

Does AIFF even checksum the file like FLAC and WAVPACK to make sure it IS really lossless?

I....just....don't.......get it......



PS. more nonsense: http://www.hifi-advice.com/blog/audiophile-insights/digital-info/lossless-audio-flac/

"While the differences between Apple Lossless versus AIFF were in the temporal and dynamic department, for FLAC and AIFF-converted FLAC files it was more to do with fullness, colour and soundstage size. The converted files clearly sounded flatter and less full, somewhat leaner in balance. Not bad at all, but bad enough for me to decide not to convert the FLAC files I have but instead aim for native playback. Otherwise you would be stacking problem atop of problem: Lossless is already compromised and by converting the file you would remove even more quality."

Right, when you convert a FLAC back to wave, you get EXACTLY the same file it was before. These people are so ignorant that they claim the quality is compromised after unpacking the file. No matter what scientific evidence you provide.

That's like saying that your documents you zipped are a bit blurred after beeing unpacked back to .doc . Really.... :D

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #10
"Because FLAC is unzipped on the fly, the sound quality is highly dependent on the software you are using to do that. Therefore, even though it is theoretically lossless, there are still barriers to overcome when listening to the music contained within."

Had they said "hardware" rather than "software", there would still be barriers if you were to use it with ... uh ... what kind of CPUs? Those which cannot playback MP3s even?

(Didn't the Squeezebox firmware once make an issue with certain FLAC files? Of course, if one piece of software once refused to decode a file, that must mean that the decoding is just somewhere in the continuum between useless and perfect, uh?)

Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #11
"Because FLAC is unzipped on the fly, the sound quality is highly dependent on the software you are using to do that. Therefore, even though it is theoretically lossless, there are still barriers to overcome when listening to the music contained within."

Had they said "hardware" rather than "software", there would still be barriers if you were to use it with ... uh ... what kind of CPUs? Those which cannot playback MP3s even?

(Didn't the Squeezebox firmware once make an issue with certain FLAC files? Of course, if one piece of software once refused to decode a file, that must mean that the decoding is just somewhere in the continuum between useless and perfect, uh?)

The squeezebox had an issue with a certain blocksize IIRC. That had nothing to do with playback, more with skipping or buffer underruns.


Re: AIFF files, (as B&W;s 'Society of Sound" now AIFF & not Flac)

Reply #13
On the AIFF vs WAV: WAV wins for me on better application support but both fail on being practical when it comes to pure wasted space, and error detection ability.  Forget tagging these formats as well because application support is also limited when it comes to reading those tags.