It restores to a bit-perfect replica of the original music file for playback. This Apple file format option in iTunes can reduce the stored data by almost 50%. iTunes is also pretty good at detecting your music and automatically populating your library with metadata where supported.īelow is an overview of the various lossless formats: Apple Lossless Compression When ripping CDs to your iTunes library you can choose higher bit-rate MP3 and AAC (192kbps or 320kbps), an uncompressed audio format such as Aiff or a lossless compression format like Apple Lossless. But lossless formats often take up much more space on disk (up to about 11Mb/min), and are not supported by most online music lockers, including Google Music. Thankfully, iTunes supports some lossless (compressed and uncompressed) formats, including Aiff, Wav and Apple Lossless. Today, higher bit-rate MP3 and AACs are much better than they were. This is due to historically low bit-rates in lossy consumer music formats like MP3 or AAC (a lossy compression format is one that permanently removes some of the file's data in some cases it will remove more data than it leaves behind). To the audiophile market and to a lesser extent for some music lovers, digital music has a pretty bad name. Do you think this is practicable? Also, would Apple Lossless be the best format to choose to temporarily compress Aiff or Wav files for storage, in order to uncompress them for playback later? Also, to stream music to hi-fi etc, are these files the best formats to use, or are they problematical? Michael, via emailĪ When ripping your CD library, it's important to choose the best storage format to preserve your music collection's original quality. If I were to rip the collection as a backup to an external drive and/or place the files in the cloud, I would want to retain the quality with Aiff/Wav or compression to Apple Lossless (m4a) with the idea of being able to convert back to the uncompressed original in due course.

Q My large (1,500-strong) CD collection consists of classical music and jazz.

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