Hi,
Could you confirm for me that ALAC doesn't play sample rate of 96 kHz? Because my codecs converter, regardless of what sampling I set up gives me 44.1 KHz in ALAC.
Thanks
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
Newme wrote:
Hi ed,
it must be that iTunes can't encode lossless files back to 24 bit. What I'm after is that the fault isn't in ALAC files but rather in iTunes not being capable to encode it back to 24 bits. If the end result with XLD is the same, then I would be worried as there would be something wrong with the ALAC conversion.
Newme,
That is a fair point, but ALAC is Apple's format and iTunes is Apple's program. The inability to do a lossless conversion is a huge red flag as for us here in the iTunes Forum.
It may well be that XLD can do better. If you get a chance to run a few experiments, we'd be interested.
Well I got interested in this so this is what I did:
I bought Band On the Run by Wings from highResAudio site few days ago.. The files are encoded to FLAC.
I converted a file to AIFF with XLD. Then in iTunes converted the AIFF file to ALAC.
I then copied the ALAC file and in XLD encoded back to AIFF. Both of the AIFF files were of same size and
both the ALAC and 2 AIFF files that I compared with, were shown as 96 000 24 bit files.
I'm apply with the result. Thanks for the info, that iTunes can't convert 24 bit files back to original.
Hopefully Apple will someday mend this,
Yes, Bitrate and Sample Rate indeed are different notions. So, what I did, was that I converted Behemoth's Sculpting the Throne of Seth (pre-converted from FLAC, completely preserving the original bitrate of 4608 Kbps, Sample Rate 96kHz, BitDepth 24) in AIFF to ALAC in iTunes 11.4. Get Info showed (watch closely!!) bitrate 3085 kbps, Sample Rate 96 kHz, BitDepth 24 while Media Inspector came up with bitrate 3085 kbps, Sample Rate 44.1 kHz, BitDepth 24! What is it? What's the system and does it exist here at all?
As for whether Media Inspector=MediaInfo supports ALAC I think the answer is quite positive. From what I read FLAC and ALAC are similar codecs, ALAC-compressed files range from 40 to 60% of the original, any ALAC file can be unpacked in .wav in the same way as APE and FLAC and burned to media for hi-fi quality playback. So, I think MediaInfo should pull off its metadata quite precisely.
Newme,
Thanks for the results. It is good to see that XLD can handle Apple Lossless correctly even though Apple's iTunes cannot. Per your hope that "Hopefully Apple will someday mend this": as you saw in the link above, the exact 24-bit problem has been there since 2009, so we better not hold our breath.
Scrutinizer,
You are correct that "FLAC and ALAC are similar codecs." Apple only invented ALAC so they would not get their hands dirty with FLAC, but ALAC has never really had proper support. It is still not clear why Media Inspector and iTunes give two different values for the sample rate.
Hi guys,
I agree with ed, it is not known why MediaInfo shows it different to iTunes or other methods. I would not worry though.
Regarding of the bitrate, that should always be less in FLAC or ALAC than the AIFF.
Maybe Apple will never fix this? I'm hoping that Apple will also sell HighResAudio files in some future time, so maybe by then that will get fixed.
Or maybe not :-) who knows.
Cheers
I'm hoping that Apple will also sell HighResAudio files in some future time, so maybe by then that will get fixed.
So do I 🙂 Already sent product feedback,but, frankly, I have big doubts about efficiency of the latter. I feel somehow that Apple at the current moment of time quite arrogantly thinks it knows more than its customers what is better for them, not paying much attention to their voice, and is preoccupied with nice strategic novelties rather than improving on little things that often matter more, it became not so pedantic, don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Often feel morally hurt by Apple decisions and it itself is quite disappointing.
Could you confirm that ALAC doesn't play sample rate of 96 kHz?
