# iTunes - burning lossless to audio cd



## Another_Paul (Sep 20, 2005)

I understand that lossless files are like the original "wave" files of an audio cd, compressed in a zip like container that also allows IDTags. No data loss.

My question is...

When I rip an audio cd in iTunes to lossless, at a future point in time can I burn those lossless files to an audio cd without ANY loss of quality? I notice in lossless files there is a bitrate that is sometimes higher or lower than other similar files.

And if I burn an album of lossless files, will CDDB be able to recognize the cd as an original? I am re-ripping my collection into Apple Lossless and hope this will be one of the better ways of backing up my music cds.


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## Another_Paul (Sep 20, 2005)

Nobody has an answer?


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## Macified (Sep 18, 2003)

The quality should be fine. "Lossless" means no loss in quality. The bit rates would show as different from song to song. If all songs had the same data, wouldn't they all sound the same? In the variable bit rate environment with lossless compression, all they are doing is throwing away empty bits. Some songs have more empty bits than others.

I haven't tried ripping, buring and reripping so can't confirm that all song info gets carried through from CDDB, why don't you try it?


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## vacuvox (Sep 5, 2003)

All data codecs operate in the same way... reduce the original data for storage - reconstruct the data for use. Some codecs are unable to exactly reproduce the original - these are "lossy" (MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF, MPEG). The Apple's "lossless" codec can exactly reconstruct the original. So when you burn a CD from your Apple Lossless files, the tracks that are burned to CD are exact duplicates of those ripped from the original CD.

However, the CDDB relies on a number of things to determine the identity of a CD. Variables other than the data of each track such as the length of pauses between tracks may prevent the disk from being recognized. Also, manufactured CDs are usually imprinted with an ISRC code which is used to identiify where and when the recording was made and who owns it. Radio stations use this code for constructing playlists and reporting to SOCAN. I imagine the CDDB also uses this code. When you burn a disk with iTunes this code is not included. 

Having said that... your own computer may keep track of your files and activity and be able to identify the CD and the tracks you burn onto the CD. But don't be surprised if you put the disk in another computer and it fails to identify the disk or its contents.

<p> <s>


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## Another_Paul (Sep 20, 2005)

Ahhh that makes thing more clear. 

So when I burn an audio CD from iTunes, it basically "unzips" the lossless file back to wave or whatever then burns at full quality to CD.

I imagine programs like Toast for MAC or Nero for PC can convert/burn Apple Lossless files not just iTunes.


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## nxnw (Dec 22, 2002)

vacuvox said:


> ...the CDDB relies on a number of things to determine the identity of a CD.


FYI, I have digitized more than on LP, burned it to a CD, popped it into my mac and had iTunes correctly populate the tags. This, despite the fact that song lengths are not EXACTLY identical (turntable speed is adjustable and doesn't have to be far from perfect calibration to change song length. Also, I am manually breaking the disk into tracks, so I am inevitably a bit off there too).

A CD that is reconstituted from Apple Lossless is certainly going to be more accurate.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2005)

As I've said before, and no doubt I will say again the only real way to get a _real_ lossless copy of the audio is to rip it as AIFF/WAV which IS lossless as it's the real and un-edited data. In this day and age disk space is not so much of a problem, and spending your time ripping your whole collection to this type of format that's proprietary will lead to frustrations in the future.


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## Another_Paul (Sep 20, 2005)

mguertin said:


> As I've said before, and no doubt I will say again the only real way to get a _real_ lossless copy of the audio is to rip it as AIFF/WAV which IS lossless as it's the real and un-edited data. In this day and age disk space is not so much of a problem, and spending your time ripping your whole collection to this type of format that's proprietary will lead to frustrations in the future.


The problem in my case with that is that the raw wav/aiff don't hold any idtag info.


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## a7mc (Dec 30, 2002)

My 2 cents...

Unless you are ripping from CD, burning a backup, then plan on re-ripping from the backup, maybe lossless is overkill. Lossless is really only important if you're going back and forth (so you don't compress, decode, recompress, etc...)

There is no way in hell your ears can hear the difference between a 320k encoded mp3 or aac file, and a lossless audio file. I know actual film score composers that encode their music at 192k because they can't tell the difference above that. I do 256k because I can't hear a difference above that 256k. So 320k is well beyond what any normal human could possibly be hearing anyway.

Why bog down the system with huge files for nothing?

A7


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

Apple lossless is just that. Audio can be converted from Lossless to the original format, and if you compare them you find bit-for-bit identical files; checksums match, etc. They are absolutely identical, you cannot tell which is the original from looking at the data at any level.

If you want a X-platform solution, use Shorten (MacOS7~9x; Mac OSX, Windows; UNIX, Linux). It too creates compressed archives that can be reconstructed to bit-for-bit accurate copies. There is no voodoo or magic involved and this is not new technology by any means. The methods are as old as desktop computers themselves. FLAC is another common open-standard lossless audio format.

There are many free applications for every OS you might want to use that will create and decompress Shorten files; Google for it and download one if you want. The Internet Archive offers free downloads of quite a bit of music (and movies) that is either in the public domain or the artist has released with liberal rights, and they are all in Shorten format to save server disk space and download times.

What Apple Lossless brings to the table that Shorten doesn't offer on any platform is the ability of iTunes (Mac and Windows) and all iPods (with up-to-date software and/or firmware) to play Apple Lossless directly; they decompress and play in real time. This saves you the time and disk space you need after decompressing them first before you can play them.

.wav is Windows Audio File; it's a proprietary format of Microsoft's. The files on CDs are .aiff (Audio Interchange File Format). AIFF is an open standard supported by every platform, although Windows supports it reluctantly (if people didn't want to play CDs on their computers, MS wouldn't support it). AIFF is NOT an Apple format, as some people believe, although Apple and SGI were the first to officially support it on computers. (it was part of the CD specification, finalized in 1980).

The difference between .wav and .aiff are minor; they are not bit-for-bit accurate copies of each other but the audio data itself is identical. MS made it just different enough to be different, because that's the kind of company they are.

If you've never checked it out, the Internet Archive is a great place to lose a few hours. Although best known for it's Wayback Machine, it has many thousands of movies, photos and music files you can download for free. MPEG movies are best viewed with either QuickTime Pro or one of the many free apps that will play MPEG full screen, including VLC.


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## Another_Paul (Sep 20, 2005)

gordguide said:


> Apple lossless is just that. Audio can be converted from Lossless to the original format, and if you compare them you find bit-for-bit identical files; checksums match, etc. They are absolutely identical, you cannot tell which is the original from looking at the data at any level.
> 
> If you want a X-platform solution, use Shorten (MacOS7~9x; Mac OSX, Windows; UNIX, Linux). It too creates compressed archives that can be reconstructed to bit-for-bit accurate copies. There is no voodoo or magic involved and this is not new technology by any means. The methods are as old as desktop computers themselves. FLAC is another common open-standard lossless audio format.
> 
> ...



Many thanks for this information. I really appriciate everybody's help.


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