I'm thinking of ripping my CDs in AIFF, but would there be any problem with that down the line?

[pionphil]

I thought it would be a good idea as I noticed that all music playing apps on Android seems to support AIFF. Also AIFF can have album covers whereas WAV can't. Also it's easily playable on iPhones through iTunes (If I ripped in FLAC I wouldn't be able to play it on iPhones.) Not only that, I can use make playlists on iTunes and sync both iPhone and Android phone with same playlists (on Android, using doubleTwist to sync with iTunes).

 

However are there any problems that you can think of that I could encounter later on? Anything that you can think of that is incompatible with AIFF?

[AudioDoctor]

I always rip in AIFF, I haven't had a problem yet.

[The Computer Audiophile]

You may find some helpful tidbits in a ripping article I wrote 11 years ago. 
 

 

 

[bluesman]

8 hours ago, pionphil said:

If I ripped in FLAC I wouldn't be able to play it on iPhones.

You can play FLACs on any iPhone or iPad running iOS 11 (2017) or later.  I think FLAC is a more usable and versatile format than AIFF.  It's now supported by Apple / Mac, Android, and Windows.  FLACs are significantly smaller files than the same material ripped to AIFF because FLACs are compressed and AIFFs are not.  Some believe that AIFF sounds better, although most (including me) do not agree - each should become an identical PCM bitstream when played with proper software.  

 

One potentially important caveat you'll read about is that FLACs are said to degrade in SQ if edited after ripping.  I don't know, as I've never found a reason to do this.  I've ripped a few thousand CDs and records to FLACs and am very pleased with the format.  If I'm converting live recordings I've made as wavs, I do all the editing in the wav format before ripping.  I also do this for vinyl rips.

 

So I recommend ripping to FLACs. There are 8 compression levels, with 5 being the default for most convertors.  The higher levels mean more compression (still lossless, but done with different algorithms) into smaller files.  Higher levels of compression mean more work for the processor when playing the files but are otherwise transparent (except for smaller file size). I've always used 5, as I hear no SQ differences using lower levels.

 

I store all album art that's not automatically retrieved from the web by my players as jpegs in the album folders, e.g. front.jpg, back,jpg etc. With some players, you can also store them all in a separate folder called "covers" or whatever you like - but you then have to name them for their source albums, so the player can find and associate them with the album you're playing.

[stefano_mbp]

1 hour ago, bluesman said:

You can play FLACs on any iPhone or iPad running iOS 11 (2017) or later.

That’s true, but the problem seems to be that iTunes/Apple Music do not still (and never will, as it is said almost everywhere ) manage flac files therefore it is impossible to create playlists in iTunes and synchronize them with iPhone.

Alac is the Apple equivalent of flac and is not bad at all, it is a lossless compressed file format.

The big minus of alac is that multi item tags are not supported and this can be a issue if you are an “ossessive” tagger (think about Artists ...)

 

[yamamoto2002]

AIFF specification is well written with clear metadata embedding method (definitely better than WAV) and its reader/writer is easy to code.

 

One drawback is, on AIFF, sample value is stored with big-endian byte order for 30 year old Motorola 68000 Macintosh or 20 year old PowerPC Mac while almost all the modern computers are little-endian and endianness conversion is necessary to play it. (there is AIFFC/sowt, little-endian byte order AIFF variant but its music player support is not good).

[bluesman]

2 hours ago, stefano_mbp said:

the problem seems to be that iTunes/Apple Music do not still (and never will, as it is said almost everywhere ) manage flac files therefore it is impossible to create playlists in iTunes and synchronize them with iPhone.

True enough - but the OP specifically said that...

 

12 hours ago, pionphil said:

...[i]f I ripped in FLAC I wouldn't be able to play it on iPhones.

And that’s not correct.

[stefano_mbp]

@bluesman but it seems clear that he want to use iTunes... this is the constraint 

[pionphil]

3 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

AIFF specification is well written with clear metadata embedding method (definitely better than WAV) and its reader/writer is easy to code.

 

One drawback is, on AIFF, sample value is stored with big-endian byte order for 30 year old Motorola 68000 Macintosh or 20 year old PowerPC Mac while almost all the modern computers are little-endian and endianness conversion is necessary to play it. (there is AIFFC/sowt, little-endian byte order AIFF variant but its music player support is not good).

 

Would this conversion cause a loss of quality in sound? Do you rip to FLAC?

[pionphil]

5 hours ago, stefano_mbp said:

That’s true, but the problem seems to be that iTunes/Apple Music do not still (and never will, as it is said almost everywhere ) manage flac files therefore it is impossible to create playlists in iTunes and synchronize them with iPhone.

Alac is the Apple equivalent of flac and is not bad at all, it is a lossless compressed file format.

The big minus of alac is that multi item tags are not supported and this can be a issue if you are an “ossessive” tagger (think about Artists ...)

 

You mean ALAC will only show one artist when there are multiple artists?

Another thing is I heard ALAC sounds worse than FLAC and WAV/AIFF sounds better than both FLAC/ALAC:

 

 

Quote

 

ALAC requires the most amount of processing. Try loading an hour long lossless track into Audirvana Plus and you can  visually see the buffer line. ALAC takes the most time. FLAC is a bit better. AIFF and WAV are significantly better. WAV very slightly beats AIFF.

After testing and some assistance, I found ALAC to the be the worst, followed by FLAC, and very close between AIFF and WAV...Ultimately went with WAV. It works and sounds the best across every system from any year or platform.

 

Full discussion here: http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=139572.0

 

 

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, stefano_mbp said:

@bluesman but it seems clear that he want to use iTunes... this is the constraint 

I could be wrong.  But his statement that he "...wouldn't be able to play [FLACs] on iPhones" suggests to me that he believes there's simply no way to do so with any player.

 

I hope that the advantages of FLAC over AIFF might move him from iTunes to a more versatile player.  For example, VLC is a wonderful player for all file types on all platforms.  Paid apps like Golden Ear & FLAC Player are also great.  And he can use programs like Foobar2000 or JRiver Media Center to stream his FLACs from a home computer to his iPhone over the internet, so he won't even have to load them all into the phone.

 

But if he truly won't leave iTunes, he has limited options for better sound.  Those who want lossless files but are wedded to iTunes are stuck with Apple-recognized files (AIFF & ALAC). If his goal is better SQ from an iPhone with music files smaller than AIFFs (which are basically wavs in a container), he'll have to choose between iTunes / ALAC and other players / platforms.

[stefano_mbp]

28 minutes ago, pionphil said:

only show one artist when

Will show all the content as a single line, other file formats will show as many lines as the number of artists entered separated by "," or ";;;" or "/" in players other than itunes

btw .... do you need/want to use iTunes?

[pionphil]

What would be the advantages of FLAC over AIFF?

 

The reason I wanted to use iTunes was, since I use iMac and MacBook, I thought it would be more convenient to use iTunes, than going into Virtual Machine to use Windows music players to make my playlists there. 

 

But I just realized that VLC which also runs on Mac can be used to play music too, and also there's VLC app for iPhones too. I've also been using VOX player to play FLAC files on my Mac, and noticed that there was a VOX app on the iPhone, but haven't tried to see if it will sync the playlists without using their paid service. Maybe I'll try playing around with VLC and see how I like it to decide whether to rip in AIFF or FLAC. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 minutes ago, pionphil said:

What would be the advantages of FLAC over AIFF?

 

The reason I wanted to use iTunes was, since I use iMac and MacBook, I thought it would be more convenient to use iTunes, than going into Virtual Machine to use Windows music players to make my playlists there. 

 

But I just realized that VLC which also runs on Mac can be used to play music too, and also there's VLC app for iPhones too. I've also been using VOX player to play FLAC files on my Mac, and noticed that there was a VOX app on the iPhone, but haven't tried to see if it will sync the playlists without using their paid service. Maybe I'll try playing around with VLC and see how I like it to decide whether to rip in AIFF or FLAC. 

There are really good apps for Mac. iTunes/Music is probably the worst. 

[GregWormald]

51 minutes ago, pionphil said:

<snips>The reason I wanted to use iTunes was, since I use iMac and MacBook,

 Do you have a problem with ALAC? As mentioned above XLD will do a batch convert or you could rip directly to iTunes in ALAC.

[pionphil]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

There are really good apps for Mac. iTunes/Music is probably the worst. 

What apps do you recommend?

I just checked out VLC but there doesn't seem to be an option to make music playlists like you can in iTunes.

[pionphil]

43 minutes ago, GregWormald said:

 Do you have a problem with ALAC? As mentioned above XLD will do a batch convert or you could rip directly to iTunes in ALAC.

There seems to be a few people at audiocircle who said ALAC is the worst lossless format: 

 

 

Quote

 

After testing and some assistance, I found ALAC to the be the worst, followed by FLAC, and very close between AIFF and WAV...Ultimately went with WAV. It works and sounds the best across every system from any year or platform.

 

Full discussion here: http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=139572.0

 

 

[yamamoto2002]

15 hours ago, pionphil said:

Would this conversion cause a loss of quality in sound?

Most probably no, endianness conversion task needed to play AIFF is super lightweight. Today I measured computing throughput of 16bit stereo AIFF endianness conversion task on my PC and found it is 5GB/sec. This means, it can convert endianness of 7 Audio CDs equivalent duration of PCM data on 1 second.

 

15 hours ago, pionphil said:

Do you rip to FLAC?

 

Yes, all my CD music collection is now stored with FLAC format.

[Kal Rubinson]

8 hours ago, pionphil said:

There seems to be a few people at audiocircle who said ALAC is the worst lossless format: 

You can find a few people at some website somewhere to support any premise you can think of.

[GregWormald]

23 hours ago, pionphil said:

There seems to be a few people at audiocircle who said ALAC is the worst lossless format: 

 

 

 

As Kal said.

The only real test is for you to try it out yourself. Rip a few songs AIFF and ALAC and listen.

[bluesman]

On 9/23/2020 at 10:50 PM, pionphil said:

Maybe I'll try playing around with VLC and see how I like it to decide whether to rip in AIFF or FLAC. 

As I said in an earlier post, VLC is a great program.  It works well, sounds great, and will play anything you can throw at it. It even converts video sound tracks to audio files in the formats we use.  If you choose FLAC, it lets you choose the compression level (I use the default 5 anyway). 

 

The library management and display functions are no match for JRMC, Roon et al.  But you won’t be admiring album art or reading liner notes on your phone.  Overall, it’s excellent.

[Bill Brown]

Being long-term Mac only, I have always used Apple formats, ripping all of my CDs way back using ALAC.  Maybe AIFF would be an idea now with storage so inexpensive, though I think ALAC is fine and it is easily converted to AIFF.  I have never heard (or really worried about) sound differences between AIFF, ALAC, and FLAC (now that I can play the last).

 

I used iTunes to organize my library throughout until they changed to the "Music" app.  I used a software player (Audirvana) to play for everything but casual listening.  With each update there were always complaints voiced, but I found them easy to adapt to.  I could easily have multiple libraries, one with the smaller internal hard drive in my laptop and another with the full library, and sync my iPod, then iPhone.  With "Music" I finally gave up.  I had a few occasions where I felt I was at risk for serious problems with my music, especially when trying to set up multiple libraries.

 

I recently found Swinsian (and highly recommend it).  Its UI and library management is just what I was after (though users are hoping for a "dark mode").  It is able to change sample rates and put out bit-perfect data.  I use it to play when I would have previously simply used iTunes, and Audrivana (where I can upsample and use AU plugins) for more serious listening.  The only problem I haven't figured out yet is syncing to my phone.  May set up a "Music" library just for that.

 

Bill

[AudioDoctor]

Spinning storage is cheap, and some people even say it sounds better, so why not just rip to AIFF and store it on a big spinning drive on your network someplace, and stream it to your playback system? AIFF has great tagging support and I haven't found a problem playing it back on any platform I am aware of yet.

[bluesman]

On 9/24/2020 at 12:28 AM, pionphil said:

I just checked out VLC but there doesn't seem to be an option to make music playlists like you can in iTunes.

VLC does playlists just fine.  Here’s a link to the vlchelp page on it.

[lucretius]

On 9/26/2020 at 11:50 PM, AudioDoctor said:

so why not just rip to AIFF

 

One reason to rip to ALAC instead of AIFF is for transferring songs to the iPhone, iPod, or iPad.  I see no benefit to AIFF over ALAC -- a few will argue AIFF sounds better but I'm still waiting for the ABX evidence on that.

[AudioDoctor]

Just now, lucretius said:

 

One reason to rip to ALAC instead of AIFF is for transferring songs to the iPhone, iPod, or iPad.  I see no benefit to AIFF over ALAC -- a few will argue AIFF sounds better but I'm still waiting for the ABX evidence on that.

 

I believe the mac will automagically compress songs to put on the device while keeping the originals intact, and you can pick the format. Has anyone checked if you can select ALAC? as well as AAC?