bit rate general question

[415jao]

I have imported all of my cd's as apple lossless onto a Network drive. In Itunes for each song it gives me various bit rates (example) 963 kbps and a sample rate of 44.100 khz. When I read articles or specs on a DAC that I am looking at it says the maximum that it plays is 96khz/24-bit. I guess my question is what is the difference between the two bit rates. How come when I import a cd as lossless the bit rate is so high, but lower end DAC can only handle up to 24bit. I think I understand the difference in the sample rate.

Thanks

 

[Bob Stern]

The short answer is that the bit rate of a losslessly compressed file is irrelevant for purposes of music playback.

 

The long answer is that bit rate is the ratio of the size of the audio file to the duration of the music. Therefore, bit rate is inversely proportional to the degree of compression achieved by the compression algorithm (in this case, Apple Lossless) relative to an uncompressed WAV or AIFF file.

 

Different tracks with the same uncompressed bit depth and sample rates will have different bit rates according to how predictable each track is according to the compression algorithm.

 

[goldsdad]

"I guess my question is what is the difference between the two bit rates"

 

In your examples, they both do provide a sample rate (kHz) but only the first states a bit rate.

 

963 kbps is a (compressed) bit rate

24-bit is a bit depth, also known as sample size

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth