Apple Lossless files changed to AAC

Question

Level 1

9 points

Apple Lossless files changed to AAC

My external hard drive with my iTunes library failed. I sent it to Western Digital for data recovery. They were able to get the data back, but my iTunes songs were changed from Apple Lossless audio files to AAC audio files. Also, information about Genre, Rating, etc. is no longer associated with the songs.

Is there a way to restore the audio files to Apple Lossless encoding? Can I recover the other song information?

The hard drive that failed was a Western Digital ShareSpace 8 TB network drive in RAID 5 mode. The replacement drive they gave me is a WD My Book Live Duo 6 TB network drive using RAID 1. This new drive supports protocols CIFS/SMB, NFS, FTP, AFP. It also says it has iTunes server support.

Thanks,

Mark

iMac (17-inch Flat Panel), Mac OS X (10.7.5), iTunes 10.7

Posted on Oct 20, 2012 5:45 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Velskud

Level 3

557 points

Oct 20, 2012 5:57 PM in response to Ricky_Bobby

Hello Ricky,

I think the reason Apple automatically converts music files ot AAC is because AIFF and Apple Lossless Encoder files won't play on iPod shuffles.

If you wanna convert them back to lossless, this article might help:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1550

🙂

Reply

Answer 2

Ricky_Bobby Author

Level 1

9 points

Oct 20, 2012 7:03 PM in response to Velskud

Thanks Velskud. The article is perfect. But is AAC a more compressed audio file than Apple Lossless? If so, can I really get the fidelity of the Apple Lossles audio file from an AAC file. From the article:

"Once a song is compressed (meaning some of its data is lost) you cannot retrieve the data by uncompressing it. If you convert a song from a "lossy" format to a uncompressed format, the quality of the song will not improve and the file will only take up more disk space. For example, if you convert a song in MP3 format (a compressed format) to AIFF (an uncompressed format) the song will take up much more space on the hard disk, but it will still sound the same as the compressed file. In order to take advantage of uncompressed formats you should only import songs using these formats.:

Is AAC a compressed format? If so, maybe I need to ask Western Digital why they converted my Apple Lossless audio files into AAC.

Thanks,

Ricky

Reply