Watching the musical tastes of their friends, I am increasingly note the increased popularity lossless-format. Five years ago, such a thing was difficult, because the amount of disk space has been quite expensive, and the data transfer rate - low.
The situation in that time has changed a lot. iPod Classic is available now with a drive 160 GB, and broadband has penetrated into the province. However, if you want to listen to music in lossless format on a Mac, you should know about some of the features that the subject of this article.
What kind of Lossless?
There are two types of audio compression: Lossy and Lossless.
- Lossy-compression - it is a lossy compression quality. Files compressed with one of the Lossy-format take up less disk space and quickly transferred.
- Lossless - this compression method, in which quality does not suffer practically imperceptible or reduced. Music in the format of the Lossless-usually listen to good equipment.
Lossless formats
There are more than a dozen compression formats of audio files without quality loss, but should stay at 4:
— FLAC - Audio Codec, which is distributed under the GNU GPL license free. This is one of the most popular lossless-format. On my iPod without dancing with tambourines flac files do not play. You must either convert music to other formats (more on this later), or third-party firmware reflash iPod (for example, Rockbox).
— Monkey's Audio - pretty popular encoding format, which among other things is remarkable, and the fact that is free, open source, but under a proprietary license. The file in the Monkey's Audio and expansion .ape .apl format.
— WavPack - another encoding format, which is distributed with open source. Feature, according to Wikipedia, is the following:
WavPack also incorporates a unique "hybrid" mode, which provides all the advantages of lossless compression with an additional bonus: instead create a single file, this mode creates relatively small file high (more precisely specified in the encoding) quality loss (.WV), which can be played on its own, as well as the file "correction» (.WVC), which (in combination with the previous .WV) allows you to fully restore original. For some users, this means that they will never have to choose between lossless and lossy.
- Apple Lossless (ALAC) - lossless-format Apple.
What to listen to?
Player that allows you to play files of all lossless-format for Mac OS X is not a lot (one Cog). It remains a lossless-convert files of its formats to Apple Lossless format and listen to in iTunes, or put additional players.
VLC - needs no introduction, many users love him for the opportunity to view almost all video files. However, the program is able to play and lossless-music. FlAC supported formats, Apple Lossless, Money Audio and others. VLC though you can listen to lossless-music without any problems, but in terms of convenience inferior music players.
To help the two come iTunes alternative: Cog and Vox (features overview). Both players are able to play music in lossless-FLAC formats, Apple Lossless, Monkeys Audio, and WavPack. There are other nice features: applications integrate with the service Last.fm, which allows you to collect statistics about the song you listened to. "Kogu" for this, however, requires the presence of an already established client Last.fm, and "Vox" such requirement is not imposed.
In addition Vox shows album, loading them from the Net.
Conversion
In VLC, Cog and Vox certainly have a lot of fans among music fans, but these programs do not satisfy everyone. Many will miss the smart folders, ratings, lyrics, artwork, etc. After becoming acquainted with iTunes competitors, I came to the conclusion that really epplovskomu player is not threatened. It is more convenient for the player no poppy. And if so, then you have to convert the files in lossless-readable format iTunes: ALAC. Help in this case program MAX.
MAX supports more than 20 lossless- and lossy-format. If you have a source of FlAC or, for example, WavPack, it can convert into Apple Lossless. Even if you are indifferent to the lossless-format, the app worth the download. Useful when you want to overtake FLAC to MP3 with the desired bit rate.
MAX advantages are the ability to automatically export files from the iTunes library, search Amazon covers and gratuity. The only serious drawback - it is the interface. To be continued…
Updated. Valuable comments from readers ignat Gorazd:
Forgot your specific player for DJs. I've recently became convinced that the third tractor great plays and flac, and EPL luzles. and the interface is not bad. I was told that many DJs even homemade prefer listening to him, supposedly, there algorithms play even better. Well, there are other, such as the same tractor, but on one channel, for free, from https://www.beatport.com/ too much that is playing. Now, well, there is still a lot, FutureDecks, for example, e more, most of whom work only with native Hardwar and there is not considered