foobar-flac vs iTunes-AAC, sound difference?

[gychang]

I usually enjoy flac files which are ripped from EAC and play with foobar with optical cable to my HT receiver with excellent sound.

My wife uses iTunes and mp3, and I know iTunes can not play .flac file. Anyone know if there is a "audioable" difference if I burn my CDs in AAC with iTunes and play thru iTunes? I only have few CDs so don't mind the labor that may be involved.

thanks,

gychang

 

[CKent]

AAC is lossy, FLAC is lossless. I think there's a FLAC plugin for itunes, or you could convert FLACs to ALAC, which is Apple's lossless codec. Both programs can use Kernel Streaming or ASIO to bypass Windows' kmixer, but to do it with itunes you need to have foobar installed with ks/asio and set up the proper itunes passthrough plugin. Whether you hear a difference depends on the aac bitrate, your equipment, the recording quality and your ears.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: CKent
AAC is lossy, FLAC is lossless.

IIRC, Apple supports a lossless AAC variant. The OP should investigate whether Apple will allow ripping to this format in iTunes (my guess is yes).

 

[DaveSimmons]

For my iPod I either rip a second time in lossy AAC 160 kbps, or use dbPowerAmp to transcode FLAC to 192 kbps MP3 -- the mass tagger add-on is ~$15 and you can select your entire collection of FLACs to copy/convert at once.

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: CKent
AAC is lossy, FLAC is lossless.

IIRC, Apple supports a lossless AAC variant. The OP should investigate whether Apple will allow ripping to this format in iTunes (my guess is yes).

Apple lossless = ALAC, unless they have a new lossless aac I'm not aware of. Can't imagine a reason for them to do that though.

 

[s44]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
For my iPod I either rip a second time in lossy AAC 160 kbps, or use dbPowerAmp to transcode FLAC to 192 kbps MP3 -- the mass tagger add-on is ~$15 and you can select your entire collection of FLACs to copy/convert at once.

Foobar can do this for free.

 

[CKent]

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