Apple Lossless and the Roku/Squeezebox

Hello

Having read the 'Lets get digital' thread with great interest, ive decided to take the plunge and go this route myself . The only problem i see is that i've ripped all my CD's with Apple Lossless and after reading various forums it seems to me that the Roku doesnt support them and the Squeezebox...hmmm... not too sure.

Does anyone have any experience using Roku or Squeezebox with Apple Lossless? and if it is not possible what would you suggest? (hoping you dont say re-rip all your CDs)

Thanks in Advance


Chris.Gally

 

The NAD Netcap supports AAC.

However, note that none of these players will play DRM enabled AACs from itunes.

 

Isaac

Being a bit simple on these matters i assume that AAC is the Apple standard and being such covers Apple Lossless?

The NAD does indeed look a good bargain. Although i'm looking for a unit with a display.

Thanks

Chris.Gally

 

Chris - I'm not certain on that and someone who knows macs would have to help you with that. In terms of audio formats I'm sure that there's nothing that the netcap does that the squeezebox doesn't.

 

The apple lossless is not AAC, AAC is a form of MP3 and the apple lossless is in essence a ZIP file.

Sorry I can't help beyond that.

The squeeze probably won't support it, as the last time I looked at it, its not actually compatible with itunes, you have to download their software for it.

Might mean re-ripping I guess.

I had to do this (Ran out of harddrive space)

Select all the tunes by size.

Group select whole swaths of tunes in size brackets and right click and convert to AAc (or what ever, set this from the import prefs)

Once they have converted (this can take time) select the tracks your converted from and delete them, move onto the next batch.

If your harddrive can take it, do all the tracks at once, then goto work or what ever. They select all the tracks by 'kind' and delete all the apple lossless ones.

 

Garyi....

I was starting to think that would be the only option . With the speed of my machine it may even be quicker to re-rip the CDs .

I think my mind is made up on the Roku as it works very well with itunes.

Thanks

Chris.Gally

 

A few sites seem to show the squeezebox supports it.

 

Isaac...

Indeed the Squeezebox supports Apple Lossless.. just found this..

http://www.slimdevices.com/marketing/resellers-guide.pdf#search='squeezebox lossless'

This also has quite a comprehensive FAQ attached.

Chris.Gally

 

Just read that in order for Apple Lossless to play over the Squeezebox, the slimserver software has to re-encode it to MP3, thus getting a drop in sound quality. AARRGGHHHH .

 

chris,
slim server does suport alc (and therefore so shoukld the roku). it does take a bit of faffing about to get them to work though unless you have the latest version of quicktime etc. then it should be ok. i would advise looking into transcoding everything into flac. that way you won;t get the shaft when apple decide to change the contents of it's license as you agreed they could when you intstalled itunes. this means that all the music you've ripped could suddenly only be played on the machine you ripped it on. of course if you have bought into the wonderful world of the i-pod then you're screwed. but keep hold of your cd's just in case you need to rip them again into a less draconian (possibly) format.

just read your last post. no it doesn;t it can also recode them to wav's (lossless) and play them losslessly too. iirc.
cheers


julian

 

just checked on my running version of slimserver and it's actually aiff it converts it to. which is still lossless.
cheers


julian

 

AFAIK AIFF is a version of WAV (ie, it's not even compressed).

Michael.

 

Excellent stuff then.

I don't really have much experience of WAV, but all CDs I have ever put into the mac show the files as AIFF.

As to if this is the mac interpretation, or actually what the cd is encoded in I don't know, but its basically the original.

It would still niggle at me as to what you may lose in all the conversion process AIFF>Apple Lossless> AIFF

I know its computer bits and therefore should be perfect, but I hear differences ripping an exact copy of a CD, so YMMV.

In short I would say if you want the best possible solution, original CDs to the harddrive.

In practice this is difficult, I have around 8000 tunes on the mac at the moment, and in the end I gave up on the whole idea and converted them down to 192 AAC, which uses around 70 gigs (around 190gigs before). Its the best solution I found, provided you don't consider the Computer your primary source.

I think the roku is the way forward if you already have a fair amount in itunes because of the compatibility, and because I like style ( a houre)

 

gary,
any losses would occur in the digital analogue conversion. the aiff -> alc -> aiff is exactly like going from an 'exe' to a 'zip' and back to an 'exe' if it wasn;t perfect it wouldn;t work.
now before you go comparing a cd transport to this remember that the cd transport is a mechanical device and therefore prone to errors etc. whereas the processor / memory are specifically engineered to remove any possibility of error (except of early pentiums) otherwise a pc would be useless.
cheers


julian

 

There's that, and also the fact that a CD transport is operating in real-time whereas computer conversion from aiff->alc->aiff can take as long as it likes. As it happens the error rate from most transports reading a clean CD is bordering on non-existent.

Michael.

 

Wow it must sound better then!

But wait....

 

The HDD itself is equivalent to the CD transport - except far far far more accurate, quicker, better, reliable, etc etc

The processor section in a CD is equivalent to the CPU in the PC - unless you have a funky soundcard which likely does the equivalent processing and the PC CPU just handles the OS organisation.

 

lamboy,
to be honest i think pc audio is a totally different paradigm to a traditional cd player - especially if you are using a network player as you get some of the benefit of ram buffers due to their use in combating network latency and packet alignment.
probably the area that could compromise quality the most for a pc audio setup is the quality of the initial rip and the codec itself. if it's lossless though the latter is taken out of the equation.
cheers


julian