cepheid wrote: > pfarrell Wrote: >>Any lossless format had better sound identical, or it isn't lossless. > > Quite true! But then, that's sort of my point. =) There might be a > bug in the ALAC encoder, or perhaps just false marketing. I was just > trying to be sure nobody knew of any such issues that would make ALAC a > bad choice.
There is a very easy way to verify that it is working properly. Take the claimed lossless file and decompress it back to PCM audio. Then run a binary diff program on both the original and reconstituted one. If there are differences, then something may be up. When I did this, the output FLAC file was longer, and had some blank/zero blocks, something like 4096 and the PCM specs says that null/empty blocks are safely ignored. But if there are differences in any of the blocks that have something other than zeros in them, Something is wrong. > That being said, I'm not actually getting *rid* of my CDs, just putting > them into storage, so on the off-chance that this does happen, it would > probably just cost me a lot of wasted time in re-encoding the CDs... Of course, are 20 year old CDs going to stay readible? I think so, I have a few that are already 20+ years old. And I have lots that are 15+ years old. I would not trust home burned media, but the stamped commercial stuff is likely to be readable for a while. I haven't heard much about bit rot on CDs, that was a real problem on LaserVideo disks. Whether any devices will read CDs and still be connectable to a computer in ten years is a more realistic concern. So far, all the DVD readers have kept backward compatibility. Which is not what you could say about floppy disk readers. My guess is that as long as the record companies are selling a few million CDs a year, that backward compatibility will continue. But CD sales are dropping, down something close to 10% last year (just reported on the Business pages in the last weeks). Once CDs are replaced, the readers will go away. So keep that 2005 Mac around for ancient recovery duties. I don't think that the National Archives and Records Administration http://www.archives.gov/ is accepting CDs for archival storage. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
