Forum Archive Home -> Audio -> ALAC vs FLAC?
ALAC vs FLAC? | ||||||
| Nitro89 posted 2009 Oct 27 04:40 | ||||||
| hello, I know both these formats are lossless, however, I ripped a song from my CD in ALAC and FLAC, when analyzing the file using Mediainfo, the ALAC file had 1075kbps where as the FLAC file had 1066kbps. Whats the deal here, I thought lossless meant no loss of quality seeing as a WAV file has 1411.2kbps. | ||||||
| Gavino posted 2009 Oct 27 04:52 | ||||||
| All this means is that FLAC has slightly more efficient compression than ALAC, squeezing the same information into a smaller space. In both cases, the compression is lossless, meaning that the original WAV data can be recovered exactly, so no loss of quality. | ||||||
| Nitro89 posted 2009 Oct 27 04:55 | ||||||
| but I don't get it, if the file is converted and you get a new bitrate, doesn't that mean the file has lost some quality? | ||||||
| Alex_ander posted 2009 Oct 27 05:02 | ||||||
No, it doesn't. Same as with zip and rar archives. | ||||||
| Nitro89 posted 2009 Oct 27 05:12 | ||||||
| then why does the bitrate come out different then? | ||||||
| lordsmurf posted 2009 Oct 27 05:37 | ||||||
| kb alone does not determine quality. | ||||||
| Alex_ander posted 2009 Oct 27 05:46 | ||||||
The file gets smaller size. Bitrate here is file size divided by playback time. Playback time remains the same, so... | ||||||
| Nitro89 posted 2009 Oct 27 05:55 | ||||||
| so as result of conversion, bitrate is sacrificed for file size? | ||||||
| jagabo posted 2009 Oct 27 06:21 | ||||||
Here is some uncompressed data, 100 zeros:
Here's the data compressed with my simple plain english lossless encoder:
My lossless compression scheme reduced 100 bytes down to 18 bytes. So the compressed bitrate is about 1/5 of the source. Now follow the instructions in the compressed version:
The final result is exactly the same as the original data. MediaInfo is reporting the bitrate of the compressed version of the audio. But after decompression the data is exactly the same as the source. Now do you understand? | ||||||
| Nitro89 posted 2009 Oct 27 06:27 | ||||||
| yes thank you, I just thought that the rule above only applies to the file size, not the bit rate.
Also, when the file is read, does it get uncompressed to read the WAV underneath? | ||||||
| jagabo posted 2009 Oct 27 06:34 | ||||||
Yes. The codec decompresses the audio and gives that decompressed data to the sound card to play. So the sound card gets exactly the same data it would have gotten if the file had not been compressed. Lossy codecs (like MP3) throw away some of the original data in order to get higher compression ratios (lower bitrates in the compressed file). When the data is decompressed it's not exactly the same as the original data. |
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