Aiff Music

[Nakia Schaf]

Library is formed of AIFF files for anything PCM (red book rips and purchases), DSF (SACDs ripped and purchased files), FLAC (MQA files don't like to be transcoded to AIFF, the header info can get messed up and not recognized as MQA).

Additionally, I just did a FLAC vs AIFF comparison via Roon and frankly I cannot tell the difference. FLAC is lossless (I KNOW!!!), bits are bits, etc, except lower processing requirements sometimes result in better sound quality. Also know that there's ALAC which is essentially Mac's version of FLAC, but I don't really want to use that. Too much Mac in my life already.

I'm a Mac and iOS user. I've ripped all my CDs to AIFF and all my SACDs to DSF. As far as downloads, I try to purchase only AIFF, but that's not always possible, so I do have a couple dozen albums in FLAC. I used to convert these to AIFF, but stopped doing that once I started using Roon.

I can't see any upside in converting to FLAC other than the smaller file size. It's been too long since I tried to listen for differences between file formats. What I do hear though is that files stored on my NAS sound better than files streamed from either Qobuz or Tidal.

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I believe FLAC has the best metadata options and is now supported by everything except iTunes. iTunes file share for apps obviously supports FLAC as you know. In addition to great metadata, you get the size savings. Sure disk is cheap and data pipes are large, but it ever hurts to decrease the size of your data. You may have other uses come to mind once you have a library that's half the size. Perhaps your entire FLAC library could then fit on an external M.2 drive to attach directly to the Rossini. When huge(r) iPhones come out you may fit much more music, etc... You never know.

Smaller data storage requirements always increase one's options. I'm designing a solution for someone right now and he requires 5TB of music storage. He only has about 2TB of music (all uncompressed) but wants room to grow. If we could cut this in half, the options for SSDs would open up and make finding the right solution mush easier (given many other requirements I'm not mentioning).

In all my assessments between FLAC and WAV/AIFF I could never conclude that it was the file type that made a difference (if any was heard at all). You could convert a couple albums to FLAC and FLAC uncompressed for comparison with your AIFF files. I really doubt your Rossini will sound different with any of the three versions.

I have tested and compared AIFF to FLAC and the SQ differences are apparent especially on better recorded material. I only listen to redbook level playback. I compared them using LMS and MPD/DLNA/MiniMServer. The differences include less soundstage and instrument separation. sounds, - (especially drums) in the upper bass are less distinguishable from different drums with a similar tone. Less detail in the upper treble with FLAC, + less "richness" in upper treble......

I don't like having too much music on my iPhone, - (I have about 224 songs). I do not notice any difference between FLAC and AIFF on my iphone, - or on my bedroom system, - which has a primary IF of squeezebox touch with a LPS.

In your excellent system, - I would find it difficult to imagine that you couldn't hear a difference between AIFF and FLAC, - unless you use ROON, - (which I also do not like, and would never spend money on).

I agree WAV sounds better than FLAC on my dual PC setup. However, I store everything in FLAC and then use an ancient little Windows tool called FlacWavLoader to convert FLAC to WAV on the fly and play it from RAM. Easy and conversion (using SoX) is very fast. Best of both worlds: economic with space and good SQ.

I believe the term for recognizing the ills of being locked into a thoughtscape/ecosystem is a bunch of people smelling each other's farts. All you desire is fresh air and interactions that aren't possible without a clean break. Blow the stink off.

Phones are impossible to distance from nowadays. A good start might be parking some music on your phone for the third quarter. Then set out to sleep less and listen to live music until you feel refreshed enough to not let Apple into your life so closely.

FLAC needs to be examined, studied, as a different animal. Especially as it coexists with WAV. For experimenting metadata shouldn't be as concerning as determining how your system reacts, if at all, to using the different formats. The problem is your higher end equipment and sophisticated playback routines are going to eliminate a good deal of room for inconsistencies to get through.

More twists and turns, more boxes, more knobs to twiddle, more chances to make the small variations we as humans crave. No musician plays a song the unerringly exact same damned way a recording does. Again, take in the stale air required to breathe in live music. Don't change a thing where your music collection or system are concerned.

For one, metadata to me is absolutely essential. Choosing a format like WAV that does not officially support metadata is something I would never consider regardless of how good it sounds. This is why I went with AIFF, which I understand is a fully open standard anyway, with official support for metadata. The way I listen to files these days is via Roon, and as such over RAAT, so the uncompression is done on the Roon core server and sent as raw PCM to the DAC over the network. This is why I think I can hear no difference. If I were running the DAC off of the USB of the same machine doing the uncompression, then I would be more wary of a difference.

I don't personally believe it matters. My NAS can compress directories or not -- which means files are automagically decoded before being sent out over the network. In this setting FLAC does require a bit less storage but not drastic.

I have noticed some really strange behavior all of a sudden, and am wondering if others have experienced this. I am copying AIFF files from one location to another (i.e. from my main iTunes library onto an Aurender). The problem is that the resultant copies of the files no longer have the embedded artwork. Confused by this, I tried copying the files elsewhere via the Finder, and the same problem occurred. This is really strange. Has anyone else noticed this? I am running OS 10.6.8 and iTunes 10.4, but the copying is done via Finder.

The artwork is all embedded in the files -- we use Doug's AppleScript to be sure. We do this so that if the iTunes library file becomes corrupted, the library can be rebuilt (with artwork). If I preview a song in the Finder by hitting space bar, I can see the artwork. However, this is not the case for the copied file -- regardless of where it is copied too.

I have found that some AIFFs completely refuse to accept artwork. These tend to be AIFFs created externally to iTunes, such as from my music workstation running WinXP/CoolEdit. So what I did was, all work performed in iTunes, convert from AIFF to WAV, then convert back to AIFF. Somehow this process "blessed" the AIFF such that it now accepts artwork.

I also use carbon copy cloner to backup my AIFFs to a remote mac and every so often I look through the backup and I do see the embedded images on the backed up AIFFs residing in their respective folders in the Finder.

I wonder if the "copying with Finder" isn't the issue here? I copied my music on this iMac a year ago to a dedicated Mac mini with 2TB Iomega HD. No problems what so ever. I used iTunes on the iMac to get the artwork, but since CA learned me that this doesn't embed it properly, this was another reason to use XLD to rip from then. I set XLD to "embed metadata". If there's no artwork, I use Discogs to provide it.

The thing I do experience sometimes, is that the artwork provide by XLD doesn't appear right away in the Finder preview. But if I use "get info", I see the image appearing as expected. Just pressing "enter" for that one track does the trick, and hey presto, the artwork show in the Finder preview, for all the tracks in the album!

I thought that I would go crazy recently when I viewed copies of my AIFF music files that had been done via SuperDuper and many of the tracks did not show the artwork that had been embedded in the original files. I was looking at the track files in Finder as well. However, I was indeed able to see the artwork through "Get Info", so I know that it was there. Further experimentation showed that it often takes some time for the artwork icon to load and there are some times when the art icon will not load at all in Finder. This appeared to be the case when I was looking at a file or album more than one folder deep. So the question becomes can you see it in Get Info and can you see it on the Aurender.

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