lossless songs galore

here's my special post on an introduction to lossless music...

what's lossless? and why loss less

basically, it's getting the original bitrate of whatever you get on your CDs and packaging it in a different file format (e.g.: Apple lossless, FLAC, Windows Media Lossless, just to name a few). As such, it does not need to compress at the processor, and the encoding is faster if lossless is used. A 3-minuts track which is 3MB at 128kbps MP3 can be 30MB at 1020kbps Apple Lossless. 10x the size, but the length f the song is still the same. Where's the difference? it's in the compression. With lossless, you get whatever garbage was made on the CD. If the recording company did a bad recording, your playback of the lossless songs will sound as bad. But if the CD had a good encoding, your lossless song will sound good. simple as that. no need to care about the bit rate or compression. lossless music has no compression.

overall, the sound will not show much difference to the average insensetive ears, especially not on the $5 earphones you bought at the Pasar Malams. You may hear a difference in the mid-range headphones/earphones/speakers, including the generic iPod and Creative earphones [from what i've tried.]. Apparently, mp3s and lossless was supposed to sound indistinguishable on the Bose or Shure in-ears or headphones...

the major points in differentiating mp3s from lossless by auditory means is to watch for the guitars, drums, piano, bass, acoustics. Esecially the piano. the sound of the piano string reverbing is quite noticeable in lossless, whereas the mp3s over-compress these frequencies. The bass is [needless to say] best in lossless, then AAC and finally mp3, reason being because mp3s work by squeezing out the extreme ends of the frequency ranges (i.e.: below 20Hz, beyond 20kHz).

Now comes the problem: which kind of stuff can play lossless?

iPods 3G, 4G, 5G, 5.5G, Photo, U2-4G, U2-5G
iPod mini 1G, 2G,
iPod nano 1G, 2G,
iPhone 1G,
Apple TV
iTunes 4.5 onwards
QuickTime 6.5.1 onwards

these support Apple Lossless.
But be warned: iPod video 5G [without the search function] will get only 4.5h of battery life on lossless music playback.

Windows Media Lossless Encoder is supported on Windows Media Player on Windows, QuickTime with Flip4Mac for Macs, Toshiba Gigebeat, Archos players. I suppose some of the Creative stuff and maybe the Zune supports this format as well...

The most popular amongst a significant number of audiophiles [well, apparently] is FLAC [Free Lossless Audio Encoder]. Not the easiest route. Firstly, you may need to get third-party apps for your stuff to support it [e.g.: iPods need to get the ROckBox firmware before it can support FLAC]. However, it is open-source, so there's a lot of forums around for assistance.

so, now the you got your reason to get on the lossless bandwagon, get the favourite CDs of yours and start re-ripping them in lossless!