Why You Should Purchase Lossless Audio

About a month ago, it was found out about that Apple has been working with music companies in order to deliver higher-quality audio on iTunes, but as far as I’m concerned, the direction both Apple and company seem to be going is the wrong one. While they consider 24-bit audio to be a good goal, most people who have at least a basic understanding of bitrates are going to realize that a lossless format would be the first and obvious move to make.

It’s for this reason that a post at the blog “Music Made Better” comes at the right time. It tackles both the what of FLAC, and also the why. The biggest argument made here is one I couldn’t agree more with. If in years past we were happy with purchasing CD audio quality albums (~1,000Kbit/s), then why on earth are we putting up with the 320Kbit/s or lower digital downloads of today?

Even if someone “doesn’t care” about MP3 quality, the simple fact is that when we’re purchasing audio from services like iTunes, we’re literally stepping back in terms of quality. You could go to the store and pick up a CD to rip yourself, and it would deliver you the best possible listening experience. Plus, if it’s encoded into a lossless format, it means that you’ll be able to encode it into a multitude of other formats down the road. You can’t do that with an MP3 or AAC file, as quality will become even more degraded.

In today’s day and age, hard drive sizes are almost a non-issue, especially where FLAC music is concerned. While a good rip of an album into FLAC might weigh in at around 300MB, that’s nothing when taking a look at a 1080p 10GB movie sitting on the same hard drive. The problem of course is with music players. Apple sure isn’t going to support an open format like FLAC, but even if it supports its own lossless format on iTunes, it’d at least allow people to convert that into whatever they want (lossless > lossless doesn’t lose quality).

Hmph. If you want to know why FLAC and lossless audio in general is a good thing, I’d recommend reading through the blog post. And of course, if you want a lesson on how to properly rip your audio to such a format, I’d recommend checking out one of our articles from a couple of years ago here.

With lossless compression (like FLAC) you take the original audio and you use _all_ of the musical data, without throwing anything away. WAV files are also lossless, with the difference being that FLAC uses non-destructive compression (like ZIP) and has better tagging options (showing artist, title and other information for songs). So the end result is that the FLAC files will sound exactly and precisely as good as the source, while being smaller in size compared to WAV files and better suited for music distribution.