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Comment by periferral | Hacker News Reader

Let me correct the title for you ' One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will DOWNGRADE Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year'. There much better.

I have my music ripped if VBR at low compression and FLAC. Clearly, itunes isn't dishing out nearly the same quality Music in return

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Arguably 256 AAC is better than 320 MP3. I doubt FLAC files will even upload to iCloud so you probably have to convert them to something like MP3 or AAC first. That is if you are even seriously considering it.

You do realize you're the exception, right?

Please provide double-blind test results showing you can distinguish between FLAC and an iTunes Store copy.

There are other reasons for using lossless audio files, such as archiving, and avoiding degradation through re-encoding.

also disks are cheap, and flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD. You could decode it to the original WAV files from the CD if you wanted to

  > flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD

So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden.

> So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Are you referring to certain patterns that fall within standard Redbook audio parameters that FLAC then fails to encode properly? Or perhaps to characteristics of CDs or CD playback equipment that are difficult to duplicate on modern-day computers? I can imagine something like preëmphasis being problematic sometimes, but that seems to have little to do with square waves.

I mentioned square waves specifically because I remember reading an article a couple of years ago about how going WAV -> FLAC -> WAV on 'unnatural' waves like sawtooth or square waves failed to come back out exactly alike. It was just a little sarcasm on my part. IIRC the article was on HN so I expected people to pick up on that.

That would be an encoder bug. I seriously doubt it still exists.

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