Sorry if this a girly technospazz Q. I have a bunch of opera .flac files which sound yummyyummy, so I’m loath to squish em to MP3 so I can bop to Verdi, on the train. Aural pontillism is not good when the journey is just tree cow tree cow tree cow and tossers talking on the phone for three earth hours.
ALAC and FLAC are lossless codecs, thus there is no any loss of quality during the transcoding process. The majors differences between the two formats is that FLAC is open source (ALAC is not, it’s an Apple Lossless Audio Coding addition to the MP4 standard) and FLAC gives a better compression ratio (ALAC is deliberately less “complex” to be easily played in an iPod without reducing the battery life).
The ALACs sound nicer on my pod than mp3s, but not as nice as the .flacs through my speakers. Oof. Realised I don’t really care and was just over-focusing my nerd centres of my brain.
They might be, but I’m also worried about the device itself. My iPod produces (pretty quiet, but still audible) some static even when not playing any music. I’m afraid that background device noise might be comparable to mp3 sound degradation, especially at higher bitrates…