Apple Lossless decoder for Linux?

[David Ranch]

I was seriously thinking about wanting the Apple lossless format to be
supported on the Slimp3 server but then I thought of something... how am I
using my iPod?

1. I use my Ipod as a master "mobile" music repository for all my music
2. I want to be able to store almost everything at very high quality
3. I'll either use my iPod with Bose QC2 headphones or in my car (low-level RCA
inputs)

So, I encode my songs in Linux via Grip which takes the resulting WAV file and
encodes to both FLAC and MP3. The FLAC is for archive purposes (never have to
re-rip again) and the MP3 is for the iPod and my Slimp3. The MP3s are 256bit
VBR "extreme" which sound very good though one could argue they aren't
FLACs. But..

One example album in FLAC: 384MB
Same album in MP3 256b VBR extreme: 100M

What's the use of chewing up 4x the disk space on my iPOD for the same album
when it only holds 40GB? If I ONLY used my iPOD as the master audio server,
using all lossless formats would make more sense. But I don't.

So, for me (and I suspect many others on this list), this is a good
compromise. The only downside is the server disk space requirements. For
this one album, I'm now chewing up almost 500MB for one album! That's pretty
sick but until they come out with 120GB iPODs, it'll do.

--David



>Well I have an iPod and an iAudio MP3 player as well as a Squeezebox
>and I was hoping to use a lossless codec and store everything on my
>linux server, then transcode to MP3 for the iPod and iAudio, using a
>high bitrate (and probably AAC) for the iPod and MP3 and a lower bit
>rate for the iAudio.
>
>Apple lossless seemed like a good choice because I've got a PowerMac
>and have been using iTunes to manage my music library, but I'm getting
>the vibe that there isn't a decoder for linux yet so I might have to
>use FLAC and deal with the inconvenience of using the files with the
>iPod...
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| David A. Ranch - Linux/Networking/PC hardware dranch (AT) trinnet (DOT) net |
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[Mike Kozlowski]

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004, David Ranch wrote:

> So, I encode my songs in Linux via Grip which takes the resulting WAV file
> and encodes to both FLAC and MP3. The FLAC is for archive purposes (never
> have to re-rip again) and the MP3 is for the iPod and my Slimp3. The MP3s
> are 256bit VBR "extreme" which sound very good though one could argue they
> aren't FLACs. But..
>
> One example album in FLAC: 384MB
> Same album in MP3 256b VBR extreme: 100M
>
> What's the use of chewing up 4x the disk space on my iPOD for the same album
> when it only holds 40GB? If I ONLY used my iPOD as the master audio server,
> using all lossless formats would make more sense. But I don't.

FWIW, Windows Media Player automatically (I believe it's a configurable
setting) transcodes music into a lower bit-rate format when you copy WMA
Lossless to a portable device. Using that, you can story music
losslessly, and use it portable, without having to keep the low-fi version
on your server at all times.

--
Mike Kozlowski
http://www.klio.org/mlk/

[David Ranch]

>FWIW, Windows Media Player automatically (I believe it's a configurable
>setting) transcodes music into a lower bit-rate format when you copy WMA
>Lossless to a portable device. Using that, you can story music
>losslessly, and use it portable, without having to keep the low-fi version
>on your server at all times.

That's a pretty neat trick though it'd be pretty slow.

--David
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| David A. Ranch - Linux/Networking/PC hardware dranch (AT) trinnet (DOT) net |
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