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Topic: Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca (Read 3609 times) previous topic - next topic
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Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

To Ensure No Loss In Quality Can I convert FLAC straight to ALAC or Do I need to convert FLAC to WAV to ALAC.

I'm not sure how it all works with formats but I guess they have different coding methods so I don't want a bunch of poor quality transcodes - or is transcoding between lossless formats all good?

Any OSX software recommendations whilst were at it?

The reason for doing this is for mixed in key and ipod compatibility

Cheers,
Pete

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #1 –
Conversion from lossless to lossles is always, well, lossless. And since wav is lossless too, whether you go through wav as an intermediate form or not, the final result is still lossless.

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #2 –
Transcoding: connverting from one format to wav and then wav to another format.

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #3 –
FLAC (or any lossless format) cannot be converted "straight to" ALAC (or any other). The source file always must first be decoded to PCM, which you can usually think of as being equivalent to WAV. See this topic: Is WAVE the same as PCM

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #4 –
XLD will do exactly what you need.

ALL [compressed format]-to-[compressed format] transcodes involve an intermediary PCM stage, whether you see the data as an actual WAV file on a drive, or whether it only briefly resides in a RAM buffer.

The end result is identical, with the WAV-less version being faster, of course.

edit: What dv1989 said.
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #5 –
But aren't we just splitting hairs here?  From the OP's point of view, he's wondering if he needs to manually convert his FLAC files to WAV and then convert that to ALAC.  And the answer is no, software exists that from his point of view will do it all in one step.  Yes, behind the scenes it is decompressing the FLAC to an uncompressed format and then recompressing it into ALAC, but most users don't need to concern themselves with that level of technical detail.

I second XLD and also Max (sbooth.org).

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #6 –
It's not splitting hairs to correct and explain a misconception. If we'd just said "Application X will convert directly for you", the OP may have went away (still?) thinking that converting to WAV or another uncompressed format was somehow suboptimal. In reality, as has been covered, it's exactly the same audio data.
 

Transcoding Between Lossless Formats - To Ensure No Loss In Quality Ca

Reply #7 –
I agree, and I wasn't trying to start trouble.  When normal, non-computer people ask questions it is all too easy for us technical types to get picky about details (I'm guilty of that all the time).  I agree with the answers here, I just wanted to add one thing to it, because the OP asked a specific question and I didn't feel that the answer was as clear as it could be to him.