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Now hear this...
Audio formats such as ALAC - or Apple Lossless Audio Codec - and FLAC - or Free Lossless Audio Codec - are set to supercede the MP3 as the weapon of choice for music conversion and compression. Whereas MP3 files do their space saving by sacrificing the quality of the recorded signal, lossless formats manage to keep the original source intact whilst still producing files that are less than half the size of the original.
The files can also be decompressed into an identical copy of the original source, making the method a logical choice for archiving CD collections.
Software such as iTunes already supports basic ALAC encoding, and all iPods will play the resulting files; other manufacturers are set to follow as the format continues to develop.
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Comments
The opening sentence of this article is completely bogus. if the claim was "archiving" then perhaps. I've used FLAC for years. ALAC is used for airtunes and other LAN based streaming.
But for portable devices it's going to be psychoacoustic compression for a long time yet.
None of these formats are new but yes they will continue to become more widespread. MP3 isn't going anywhere in a hurry. Apple AAC is superior to MP3 but only works on Apple devices (mostly).
Point taken...but bogus? surely not!
There are now a number of sites offering high-quality 24-bit FLAC downloads, and a lot more work is being done on the format. Although punters seem to be accepting the quality of MP3s, there are a lot of artist and producers who aren't too happy about having their work macerated in this way.
Time will tell, I guess!
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