Apple Lossless is MAGIC!
Here’s another from Bobmac:
I was talking with a friend about downloading music. He asked me at what bit rate I “stored” my music. I said I “rip” my CDs using Apple’s Lossless Encoder (yes, I am a proud Mac guy.) He said — get this — he converts the sound files he downloads from the iTunes Music Store to Apple Lossless, because he wants to store them at the best possible quality. He will burn a CD from the downloaded files then reimport the songs as lossless. At first I thought, OK maybe he wants to strip the DRM from the tracks. When I asked him that, he looked at me like was speaking Chinese. He thinks that a digital file will deteriorate over time and that a compressed file can be converted to a CD-quality track…just like an upconverting DVD player magically transforms a standard def signal to HD!
You can’t buy entertainment like that, folks! 🙂
I call that bait and drool…. It’s like bait and switch but the intentions aren’t bad and the end result is the person ends up pouring out, unbeknownst to him, all of the many things he didn’t know regarding the initial topic.
That is funny and possibly the most enthusiastic waste of time scenario I’ve heard in a while (though wrapping your equipment in “noise dampening” paper is pretty close).
Was he teachable, or did he insist that he was right after telling him how all that works?
I explained to him that you can’t improve the quality of a sound file just by converting it to a higher bit rate. It’s hard for people to understand that concept, because they know a higher bit rate is better and upconverting DVD players “play back your DVDs at HD quality.” I also explained that digital files don’t lose quality over time…I don’t know where he got that idea. Perhaps he was thinking about vinyl albums losing quality each time a needle touched the groove.
I think I got through to him eventually.