Lossless Question

[ShinKen]

Hello everyone,

I am about to re-rip my music collection to a lossless format, and I am trying to decide which format to move to (ie WMA/AAC Lossless, Flac). For one, I use an iPod (3G and the wife's mini) as our main DAP, and do not see that changing, also I am planning on building a MCE box (and also getting my hand on the MCE extenders) to supplement my tivo box.

What I am leaning to at the moment is rip my cds WMA Lossless, and then let iTunes convert the files to AAC for the iPods. This is the best I could come up with that will give me the ability to stream to the MCE boxes. Also the reason that I am leaning towards a lossless format is that I can transcode it to a lossy format without having to pull out the CD.

Has anyone had in problems doing something similar, and are there any problems with converting from WMA lossless to AAC? Or should I go with another lossless format, like FLAC?

Thanks for any comments!

[James Fee]

I've never tried to convert from WMA lossless to AAC. Have you checked to make sure it was possible? I've only run into two issues with lossless.

1. The format isn't always supported. Apple Lossless isn't AAC, it is its own format so it can't be played on with any player other than iTunes. WMA lossless also has issues where it can only be played with certain players. FLAC is even more limited as both iTunes and WMP won't play it. The safest format is probably the highest bitrate that MP3 can support since very few players don't play MP3. Converting from WMA to AAC has been quite disappointing for me. I only had a few WMA tracks and I ended up just ripping them again into 320 kbps MP3.

2. Apple Lossless is a very nice format on its own, but it fills up the buffer on iPods making it pause when you skip songs. I'd assume any player that supports any lossless format will have that problem.

You could just rip twice, once into any lossless format and once into AAC or MP3 (since you have an iPod). That way you'd have a high quality "backup".