Converting mp3 to AIFF

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Level 1

13 points

Converting mp3 to AIFF

Can anyone explain to me how it is possible to convert mp3 compressed data to aiff which is uncompressed and of a much higher quality sound.

aiff has a bit rate of 1141 kbps compared to 256 kbps for mp3 ?

Windows 7

Posted on Jan 8, 2016 8:45 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Kenichi Watanabe

Level 8

41,584 points

Jan 8, 2016 2:57 PM in response to alex8199

If you burn a disc using iTunes with the setting to burn an Audio CD, iTunes converts songs (on the iTunes playlist you are burning) to AIFF. Any songs that are stored in a lossy format like MP3 will be AIFF on the disc, but sound quality will not be any better than the source MP3 file.

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Answer 2

Jan 8, 2016 8:49 AM in response to alex8199

An MP3 file at 256 kbps is a "lossy" format. That means sound quality has already been lost, due to the compression process used to encode. You cannot get back the loss in sound quality by converting it to AIFF format.

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Answer 3

alex8199 Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 8, 2016 2:51 PM in response to Limnos

What happens if I burn a CD with content from my library, the majority of which is stored as aiff and some that has been downloaded from iTunes as mp3.

Do I have to convert the mp3 to aiff before I burn a disc or will iTunes make the compensation automatically when recording ?

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Answer 4

alex8199 Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 8, 2016 3:06 PM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

Thank you, that's what I needed to know.

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Answer 5

Limnos

Level 10

427,259 points

Jan 8, 2016 8:58 AM in response to alex8199

You can convert to AIFF using iTunes but the quality is already gone for good. Converting at this stage will only result in a larger file. You will have to re-rip from the original CD. If you do that and wish to save space select ALAC Apple Lossless format.

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