128 to Apple Lossless Conversion?

I imported some CDs at 128k. iTunes gives me the option of converting tracks to Apple Lossless compression. Doing this changes the file from about 4mb to about 20mb. If I imported using 128k "lossy" compression, am I really regaining the data I would have had from an Apple Lossless import? It doesn't seem logical, but it would sure save me some re-importing of CDs. Thanks mucho for any insight on this.
Steve

Converting from any compressed format to Apple Lossless will gain you nothing but an increase in file size. It's not possible to get quality back from any "lossy" codec such as AAC or MP3; that data is permanently gone. So if you want the quality of your CDs with the file size reduction of Apple Lossless, you'll have to reimport from your original CDs.

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Mp3 to apple lossless conversion

is there any audio advantage converting mp3 to apple lossless in iTunes?
Ken

No. You will get a much higher file size, but no additional quality.
The advantage of Apple Lossless (and other lossless formats like FLAC) is that it allows you to convert high fidelity sources (like CDs) to smaller file sizes without any loss in quality. This allows you to be guaranteed of CD audio quality, and it also allows you store a long-term archive of lossless file and convert them to different lossy formats to suit different needs, without additional quality loss.
If your source is lossy, like an MP3 file, than any additional fidelity that was present in the original source has already been lost. Apple Lossless will provide a lossless conversion of that MP3 file (meaning you won't lose additional quality, like you would if you converted an MP3 to an AAC file), but it cannot restore the already-lost information.

Library size after Apple Lossless conversion

Hi,
I've converted my itunes library to Apple Lossless format in the belief that I could get more songs onto my iPod, however, even though I've deleted the old format song from the music library, my library has nearly doubled in size. Anyone got any idea how to slim it down?
Thanks

If you converted from MP3, the ONLY thing you did was increase the file size by about 5 times.
Once it is converted to MP3, the file size is ~10% of the original. A lot if data is thrown out. Converting that MP3 to Lossless will not get back any info since it no longer exists.
I'm looking for the smallest size with the least loss from the original
You need to RIP from the original CD to Apple Lossless.
Apple Lossless is still gonna be ~50%-60% of the original file size, which is usually ~30MB to 60MB.
AAC at 192 kbps is ~1.5 MB per minute and unless using a high end stereo equipment and a high end sound card, most users will not be able to hear any difference.
I suggest you RIP the same CD a few different way and compare them. Check the file size and audio quality.

ITunes conversion of Apple Lossless to AAC not working

Hello:
I have all my CD's ripped to Apple Lossless. I then use iTunes to convert to 192 kbs AAC for use on my iPod. When I do this, though, the size is barely changed. Instead of taking a 23 MB lossless file down to 1 MB, it rips to about 20 MB. Has anyone else seen this? Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks.
pmb

pbombach wrote:
Hello:
Instead of taking a 23 MB lossless file down to 1 MB, it rips to about 20 MB. Has anyone else seen this? Am I doing something wrong?
Even if it is working correctly, it does not shrink it by that much. AAC at 192 with constant bit rate uses about 1.5 MB per minute of music, or 6 MB for a 4 minute song. If you use VBR, it will be higher.
As Kay suggests, make sure that your import settings are correct. Also, note that conversion creates a new file and leaves the original in place, so make sure you are looking at the new file. Its Date Added will be the date of conversion, and its "Kind" will be AAC.

Converting "Apple Lossless" back to "AAC" - More than 1 track at a time...

Hello,
Short version: I have hundreds of tracks that need to "Create AAC Version", and I can't right-click 8,536 songs in my library one at a time to find them all. Is there a method to sweep the entire library and convert all songs to this format if they are not already?
The problem with this is it still creates a duplicate of the song and the other original needs to be deleted.
Note - the file name changing (it appends a "1" on the M4A file), the "tag" displayed in iTunes retains the song name.
Thanks!,
Joseph
Long version: For the benefit of people facing the same problem and combing the forums for help, here's the rest of the story...
I'm not entirely sure when this changed (and I've reset my Import settings back to AAC 128-bit now), but I've managed to import a good number of CDs at this higher quality "Apple Lossless" format. Essentially, that's overkill - I listen to an iPod classic with headphones the majority of the time (98%) and I won't hear the difference.
CHECK: Edit | Preferences | "General" tab | "Import Settings" button
Essentially my hard-drive space has been disappearing at a rapid rate. I downloaded a tool (WinDarStat) and found my iTunes folder is 50% of my 200GB used. (Yes, I'm on an older laptop -- HD=220GB -- and am getting the 'out of space' warnings.) I found some folders for recent CDs were over 1GB alone and started digging.
I happend to have REM's studio "Man on the Moon" on here twice. The IN TIME version is AAC 128-bit and only 4.9MB in size, whereas the PART LIES version is Apple Lossless 1068-bit and 8x's larger at 39.9MB.
If you right-click a track, it provides option to "Create [other] version.", depending on going to/from ACC to Lossless or vice-versa.
Once I did this for "Man on the Moon", I got 75% of the song's space back ... from approximately 40MB to 11MB.
It does create a second copy of the song, so the original has to be deleted - be certain to "Move the song to the Recycle Bin" when warned.
A better option - all be it more time consuming - is to re-import the CDs.

For backup see this user tip.
The Create <Format> version tool uses whatever the current import settings are.
You can create a playlist of things that need converting as Ed says above.
To ease the conversion process, and keep your current ratings, playcounts, and playlist membership, plus recyle the old files automatically see my script ConvertFormat. Test on say a single album first to make sure it works as you expect/need.
tt2

Syncing Apple Lossless Files As Something Else

Hi all,
I am a proud new iPod Touch owner with 60+GB of lossless music in my itunes library, automatically organised, in ALAC (Apple Lossless) format. As my new iPod only holds 8GB, I would like to sync (as much as possible of) my music to the ipod in 192 or 256kbps, whilst keeping the lossless files as well for playing off my computer. Apart from having two computers with two identical yet distinct libraries, one Lossless and the other not, is this at all possible?
Thanks,
Ross

On-the-fly conversion is only available on the iPod shuffle. The iPod shuffle (probably because of it's limited capacity) has the option to "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC". This option is not available for any other model iPod. For the larger iPods the files have to be converted in iTunes first or indeed have to have been imported in a compressed format prior to transfer. so if you want to keep your files in lossless format you would need to make a separate copy of those files in another compressed format if you want to sync those to your iPod. You could use either a separate library to sync the iPod or sync it from a distinct playlist of compressed songs within your existing library:
Using multiple iTunes libraries -Windows
iPod - Syncing Music

Can't Import Songs To iTunes Using Apple Lossless Encoder

I have about 4,000 songs in FLAC format (which is a lossless format) on my external hard drive. I want to import them into iTunes using the Apple Lossless Encoder. I called Apple support and asked them how to do this, and they told me to go under "Preferences" in iTunes and chose to import using Apple Lossless Encoder.
I did this using Preferences>General>Import Settings, and then went to File>Add Folder to Library, however, it still imported my songs as AAC Audio Files. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.

iTunes cannot read nor import FLAC files - not without third-party plugins, anyway, and I don't know of any that will allow iTunes to convert a FLAC file to another format - so I'm a bit confused as to the procedure you're following. If all you're doing is using the Add to Library command and choosing the FLAC files, it's quite possible that iTunes is misinterpreting the format and adding what is in reality an invalid link with erroneous format information.
If you have some sort of third-party plugin for FLAC for iTunes, please post that information and perhaps someone here can determine whether iTunes can do a conversion successfully.

Want to replace Wav Files with Apple Lossless in the same folder...Scripts?

Hello!
I have about 4,000 wav files (wow) that I digitized from Vinyl. I organize my media folder myself (I have the organize option unchecked in preferences) and most of the songs are not properly tagged. I would love to convert the wav files to apple lossless and have Itunes save the file in the same folder from where it originated. I havent found a way to do this yet. Its weird to me that I can select a song in a playlist and hit "Show in Finder" and it knows exactly where it is yet when I convert files to apple lossless they end up in the "unknown artist-unknown album" folder. Anyone have any ideas or is there any scripts that can do this for me ? thanks so much!!
I had found one script that deletes the original wav files but still the new apple lossless are still put in the unknown album folder.....
Zeke

When iTunes converts a file, it does not allow you to direct the location of the output file, but rather places it according to the Artist/Album tags, which in your case are unknown.
Almost every other conversion tool allows you to direct the location of the output. There are not a huge choice that run on the Mac and support Apple Lossless, but a good one is Max.

Apple Lossless hiccups/drop outs/pauses

Hi
Has anyone tried Apple Lossless files with the Shuffle 3G yet? Does it choke on them, i.e. hiccup/drop out/pause a few seconds into a song, like the Nano 3G did?
I'd like to know before buying, as this was a major irritation for me, and this is the first shuffle to supposedly support lossless.
TIA

Hi I'm wondering what you tried. I have a 3G Shuffle that "stutters" during playback for my Apple Lossless songs also.
I loaded them using sync "checked music" to select the playlist that would sync.
When I let iTunes drop the bit rate down to 128 AAC and sync the same selection of checked playlist there is no skipping. I have tried this on 2 different computer and using 2 different Shuffles. I get the same results consistently. The skips happen in the same songs every time. Lastly, it does not happen with every Apple Losses song.
The songs play back fine on the computers, my 1G Touch and my 120 GB Classic. I haven't tried this on any Nanos yet. But this feels specific to the Shuffle

Control Button not working for Apple Lossless Music

I have a brand new black iPod shuffle and the control button in the middle has been problematic, at best, with my Apple Lossless music that I had on my PC.
When I push the control button, I get nothing. Only the female voice telling me what that track name is. I've attempted different "button pushing" methods such as once, twice, three times, as well as durations, 250 ms, 500 ms, 1 second. Nothing seems to work, I don't have any 128 kbps (garbage in my opinion) to try it out on.
Suggestions?

Thanks for the response, couple of questions...
1. Do you have the "Manual Music Manage" or similar button checked on your 3G shuffle?
2. Did you put the lossless CD tracks in a playlist, or just "heap" them in a giant list (like I have, I don't do playlists)?
3. Did you use iTunes (8.1.x) to do the ripping, or an older version. These lossless tracks are quite old, I don't even think that I had v8 when I originally did them.
Message was edited by: NKS Guy

Apple Lossless file type question....

I rip CD's with my preferences set to Apple Lossless. I import from the iTunes store, also supposedly Apple Lossless. However, the music files are labelled as AAC or protected AAC (get info>file type)
Why is this?
Fabian

I thought that all content from the iTunes store was Apple Lossless files (either 128 or 256 for +).
It isn't. It's AAC content at those bitrates. Apple doesn't sell Apple Lossless songs.
Shouldn't the file type come up as Apple Lossless rather than AAC?
See above.
Isn't AAC a lossy file type, different from Apple Lossless?
AAC is lossy.
(40753)

Converting from Apple Lossless to MP3: loss of quality?

Hi,
I have made the "mistake" of importing dozens and dozens of CD's using the Apple Lossless encoder. Nothing bad about the encoder, on the contrary. But my iPod is now full.
Is there a way I can convert all these tracks to MP3? Will there be a loss of quality from the re-conversion beside the one inherent to MP3? (since we are not starting from the original CD) And will I have to re-create my playlists?
Mmmhhh... doesn't sound too good, right?
Xavier.

Go to Preferences in iTunes. Then go to advanced and importing. In importing change the import using to MP3 encoder.
Quit out of this menu. On the top tool bar you have Advanced and under here you have convert option. If you select the songs that you want to convert and use this convert option they will go to MP3s

WMA lossles to Apple Lossless

I have the same problem and the wish like this guy:
"I’ve also been migrating of my music library from WMV Lossless to AAC Lossless.
I initially tried to drag a big folder full of nested album folders containing WMV Lossless media from a networked drive (SMB) over to iTunes on the Mac, but it did… absolutely nothing. So now, my $700 Dell is cranking away at 95% CPU on both cores, converting a list of more than 5,000 songs, many of which are long, classical tracks. It is maintaining a conversion rate of 11.8x, which Victor says is pretty fast.
At 3am this morning, iTunes had converted more than 3,000 songs in 26 hours when Windows forced a reboot due to software updates. ARGH! So I had to dig around to find the 2,000 songs hadn’t been converted yet and drag them over again. Needless to say, I have disabled Automatic Updates.
Keeping both lossless and compressed versions of music is not easy. I was telling Victor last night that I wished iTunes supported “stacking” of music not unlike what Aperture does with photos. My main music library should be able to track compressed versions alongside lossless versions, or at the very least, have an option to auto-compress when sharing music or transferring music to portable devices (like what iTunes does when you attach a Shuffle). What I want to do is to have access to my lossless media at home and my compressed music on the road."
http://echeng.com/journal/2006/09/13/converting-wma-lossless-to-apple-aac-lossle ss/
is there any hope to have this features ???
I need something like this too
Thank you

Thanks Bottlerboi - a useful distinction between lossless compression for space saving, and lossy compression. I am partly interested in this because of my general interest in hi-fi, and Naim Audio in particular. Naim are just launching a new product which is essentially a CD player with 2 hard drives (albeit one is a back up of the other). The Naim HDX is said to store approximately 600 albums on 400Gb hard drives while making bit-for-bit copies, which I assume from what you have said, to be in WAV format (clearly even Apple Lossless would be many more albums than this). A great piece of kit until they tell you it costs £4,500 sterling...

How can i convert my whole library to flac or apple lossless

how do i convert my whole library to flac or apple lossless?!!?!!?!?!?!

First, FLAC is not supported by iTunes and the same probably applies to the iPod.
Second, are all your files currently in AIFF or WAV format, or on CDs? If you have mp3 files or AAC files the only thing that will happen by you converting them to lossless is you will use up more space for the music with no gain in quality. Quality is lost when you convert to mp3 or AAC and converting it to lossless won't get it back.
It looks like current ipods support Apple Lossless. Still, the whole idea behind ipods is to use compressed format so you can fit on the most music. Read http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=85227
If after doing all that you still want Apple Lossless, you need to set the preferences to ALAC in your iTunes preferences, then convert with the Advanced menu command. Mind you, I use an older iTunes so you may have to explore a bit to find where they have those features now. This conversion will place a copy of the file in iTunes in the new format but also leave the old one there, so you'll need to delete the old ones if you don't want them.
Message was edited by: Limnos

How to copy AAC format to another hard drive but leave apple lossless

I've created duplicates of my mostly Apple lossless files as AAC versions in iTunes 11.1.4, that bit was easy. Now I only want to copy the AAC files and the folder structure to an SD card to play in Golf Mk VII that won't accept cable connection of an iPod. Finder sees all files as mpeg4 so I can't filter them in finder.
How do I go about this?

iTunes Preferences > Advanced, and set "iTunes Media folder location" to a new temporary place. Now do the conversions to AAC.
This puts the new AAC files in their own Artist/Album folders, not intermingled with the Apple Lossless originals.
Now, you can simply copy over those entire folders to your SD card.

128 to Apple Lossless Conversion?

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