Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus

sakahara, a great number of users have music stored on external drives. some have over 2000 CDs in ALC or WAV no way to fit that on a system drive in a notebook (yet). Transfer speed of USB 2 is adequate for music files. I use a FW 400 750MB drive with 600+ CDs and have another duplicate drive with backups. BTW my files are AIFF/WAV (no compression) No problem here. My system is linked below.

On the sound difference - since you are looking for opinions. Yes I can hear the difference in different formats. No I cannot hear the difference in formats. It is song dependent for me. Simpler music it is more apparent. complicated electronic music it is less apparent.

cheers, ed

Ckorody……
Big thanks. I’ve been out of the hardware loop for a while it would seem.

Sfar……..
Thanks I’ll definitely use those links.

Sakahara……...
I continue to see diffs from one media player to another… one encoder/decoder, to another, more so than from one lossless file format to another.

I’d suspect any AAC files being sold by iTunes were ripped off a very good disc or even one such as we could go get… seeing as how they are paying the artist/lable for the rights to resell their info. It wouled make good sense for them to provide as good a source disc as possible… Wouldn’t it? I know too that some of these deals are time sensitive and run for predetermined lengths… likely with extensions available or matters of course. I say this as some tracks I’ve bought years ago are now no longer available from the iTunes store.

Re remote drive speed

Both the OS and the attached drive are important… though it does depend on the actual configuration or set up being used.

Wireless 11G has enough thru put to accommodate music very well. Even with lossless files… WAV, AIF, ALAC & FLAC. Usb too has sufficient speed to prevent drop outs or delays. The Vista OS wireless adapter protocol however does have some aspects which need to be configured differently or disabled entirely to avoid problems. For more info on speeding up Vista there are numerous resources online that cover all sorts of items one can do to gain speed. The ‘auto tune’ feature is primarily the obstacle that caused me a lot of trouble. I posted a resolution I found online in another thread here and the steps to overcome it. See this thread:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1233137449&openmine&zzBlindjim&4&5#Blindjim

Ether net (wired networks) don’t suffer from the same idiosyncracies wireless ones may. My Vista laptop isn’t as ‘crisp’ feeling as are my desktops, but the result is more than acceptable. Quite good in fact and better in some respects aside from sheer speed. Albeit Vista appears to be as Windows ME (Melinium) edition … just a cash grab… as now there’s another OS just around the corner being readied for distribution.

Vista’s sonics though are superior to XP’s.

Is there an obvious audible difference between Apple Lossless, WAV and AIFF? I haven't compared. From what I read Apple Lossless seemed good enough.

There's plenty of threads on this subject if you do a search. Here's an interesting one I've been involved with lately. Check out my friend, Peter's contribution around midway through the thread.

I'm a MAC. 10+ years of Windows was torture enough. ;-)

I'll have to try moving my iTunes library to an external drive. I've been meaning too.

I would expect the iTunes Plus music to be sourced from either the original or a good 1st gen digital recording. One [audiophile] would expect that and it makes the most sense. But then again, we are talking about an industry who thinks MP3 is fine.

I now recall that I actually did import a CD as ALAC, WAV, and AIFF. It was brief, but I did not hear enough difference to justify more of my drive being consumed . I'll have to do some more comparisons sometime since my system has changed since.

I realized one important detail about storing iTunes on an external drive; it would require another external drive for backup.

As it is now, I need a minimum of two drives; one for SuperDuper! (bootable) backup, and one for Time Machine. I could get one large drive and partition for those two BU plans, and have another one dedicated for iTunes, but again, the need for an iTunes BU drive, and the possibility of losing both the other BU plans if the partitioned drive failed. Without a iTunes BU, you're toast if that drive fails. And right now I have a BU of it. Imagine having to rip 100's of CD's all over again. My 1 TB main drive is fine for now. Plenty of room to spare with Apple Lossless