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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
09/19/09
09/19/09
09/20/09
The size difference is irrelevant unless you're encoding for a player that can't store an adequate amount.
09/20/09
Considering that my music collection is larger than any portable media player can handle, then yes it is relevant.
09/19/09
For anyone who keeps their music on their built-in hard drive and have a laptop, lossless is not a very good option of course. However, if you can spare the space, have a desktop, or an external drive for your music library, this is my opinion for Lossless:
The advantage of Apple Lossless is simply that it plays so easily with iTunes/AppleTV/iPods/iPhones. It's easy, quick, and pretty seamless to rip this format in iTunes.
The disadavantage of course is that if you want to use those lossless files on anything non-apple you're going to need to re-encode them. However, the chances of your device supporting FLAC is probably more slim than it supporting ALAC. If this is your (rare) case, than it is fairly quick and easy to just re-encode all your ALAC files to FLAC using Max in OSX.
Bottom line: if you use Apple devices ALAC is probably going to give you the least amount of fuss. Lossless is lossless.
09/19/09
Despite the name lossless codecs do loose a small amount of data, FLAC looses less than ALAC, and being open source will be around long, long after it's completely obsolete. If your purpose is to archive your music then these are key differences and give FLAC the edge.
If you care enough about your music to rip to lossless, might as well jump through an extra hoop or two to get the best.
09/19/09
09/19/09
09/19/09
Even if you didn't have this list built-in, you could make your own Smart Playlist that could do the job. Scripting: It's Actually Pretty Useful, And Not That Hard.
09/19/09
This isn't an Apple article but all the shots are
Apple and OSX and OSX comes before Windows....
News flash Applemodo, osx global market share is not even 5%!!!
09/19/09
The vast majority of people don't use it since they're running PCs. Only people with iPods or iPhones are locked into using it and while there are a lot of them - they're still a fraction of all the phones out there, and not everyone who listens to music on their computers use PMPs (most don't, in fact).
The majority of Windows users I've talked to really don't like iTunes.
This came up on the 'modern smartphone' comparison when 'iTunes compatibility' was one of the points - which basically was a free point for the iPhone.
09/19/09
Lossless is lossless, as in it doesn't lose any information.
How is Apple lossless a "less than great" encoder? How is it any worse than any other lossless encoder?
(Agreed on the wonky album art, but frankly, I couldn't care less about the art, all I care about is the music.)
09/19/09
How much does Best Buy charge to do this?