MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Is it worth it - trade off between file size and sound quality?
If you have good equipment to play it through AND good ears to hear it with, yes.
I sometimes use it but often stick to 256kbit/s AAC which is good enough for my ears!!
Rachel
It's "lossless", so no reduction in sound quality. Files are bigger than compressed formats. What do you want to do? I use FLAC as an archive format, and high quality MP3 for playback
Can you play FLAC files or are they just for archiving?
You can playback FLAC, yep.
On an iPod too if you install Rockbox 🙂
showing my ignorance here... what 's rockbox!
Installs alongside the original in your iPod (other players are supported too). Adds a lot more funtionality, including greater file format support.
Ah great thanks!
I think it depends on what you are doing with it. If you are just listening to your iPod or plugging it in to some hi-fi or iPod docking station using the iPods own 10p DAC then I am not sure I would bother, although no harm in experimenting, perhaps others feel differently
If you are using an external DAC and streaming from ITunes/iPod to the DAC then the sound quality is much better - not CD quality in a direct A-B comparison but very listenable to rather than just for background music.
I use Apple lossless streaming wirelessly to a Musical Fidelity DAC with an Apple Airport Express. It is simple relatively cheap works well (only the occasional drop out)
Apple tell me there is a way of ripping lossless but when syncing to the iPod doing the compression to AAC . I haven't worked out how to do this, and obviously the sync time would be longer (but presumably not a real issue for small incremental updates).
This would seem to provide the best of both worlds - high quality files on the PC that can be streamed to a hi-fi or some other device, controlled perhaps using the Apple Remote App) and low quality but lots of compressed files on the iPOD.
If anyone knows how to do this compression at Sync time can the please let me know
Gary
If you've got the space I'd use lossless to archive/playback from computer. You can then burn a new CD if you want from it.
If you really want both, then you can convert in iTunes from lossless to mp3/AAC and keep both versions in parallel in iTunes. Think you select your tunes, change bitrate and it'l ask you if you want to keep the originals (say yes to that!).
Just use a smart playlist to pick out all the low bitrate songs and use that to synch up to your Pod.