I've discovered Lossless Audio Compression and it's all thanks to, well, it comes down to Simba, my MacBook :). When setting up Simba, I was looking for a CD ripper. I read around a bit and heard a bit about Max so I went with that. Now, that was all well and good until I needed to actually rip a CD. See my last post about the release of Citipointe Live's new album and you do the math :). I like having my music available without needing to use and potentially damage my original discs. I usually rip to 320kbps MP3 files which I did and that was all well and good until I saw the option for FLAC. Now, I'd heard of FLAC before, heard many people swear by it in fact... well, more read, but still... So I did a bit more reading up and discovered what it actually stood for (Free Lossless Audio Compression) and that it meant that the audio quality would be the same as the original but just a smaller size (like an archive file). Sounded good to me so I ripped the CD again in FLAC format and played them both. Not at the same time obviously... well, truth be told, I did try that, but it didn't sound so great. This was done from Simba through my Logitech Z-5500 digital speakers. FLAC sounded marginally better. The file sizes are much bigger though. The full album is about 450Mb in FLAC format while it's about 160Mb in MP3 320kbps format. This posed another problem though. iTunes doesn't play FLAC files natively, at least not at this point in time. VLC does which I have installed as well but I want to manage my music and copy it to my iPod. So... off to find FLAC support for iTunes. I did manage to find it by way of a QuickTime component (I'll post about that later when I post some more Mac OS X software I've started using). Unfortunately, another brick wall yet again. iPods don't play FLAC files without a third party firmware like RockBox. RockBox doesn't let you use your iPod with accessories that connect to the dock connector. This includes my car's head unit so that wasn't an option. I did find out that Apple have their own lossless audio compression called ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Compression) which iPods DO play. Unfortunately, this meant more converting and hard drive space. FLAC support is said to be coming in Mac OS X Leopard. Apparently it works in the betas but whether it makes it to the final or not... well, we'll see. Here's hoping! Hopefully this will come with a firmware upgrade for iPods to support FLAC :D For now though... I have ALAC M4A files on my server to load onto my iPod via Floola along side the FLAC files on my server and my MacBook. I want Leopard though :) I'll probably still rip to MP3s for portability and do away with ALACs once FLACs can be played on iPods. Where possible though, I'll be steering away from MP3s for playback and definitely staying away from AACs.
