WAV <-> FLAC <-> AIFF all of the same quality?

teenious

Member
Joined
Sep 5, 2013
Hi everyone,

the question I have been asking myself is not technically related to music production or drum & bass, but since we have lots of sound engineers and probably a few real audiophiles here, I'm gonna ask anyway:

Are WAV, FLAC and AIFF files all of the same sound quality? I have recently decided to download lossless music whenever possible, but iTunes (I know, the program sucks anyway) doesn't play FLAC files, and WAV files can't save metadata like artist info and cover image, so I thought about converting all the songs to AIFF, which is supposed to be lossless too? Personally I don't hear a difference, but why are WAV and FLAC so much more popular in download stores then?

Greetings

teenious :)
 
WAV, FLAC and AIFF are all lossless audio formats. They will be exactly the same quality, albeit dependant on their sample rate. FLAC is exactly half the file size of WAV and AIFF. This is due to inaudible frequency data higher than 22Khz being stripped away from the file.

WAV and FLAC are more popular simply because more people use Windows based hardware.
 
FLAC is exactly half the file size of WAV and AIFF. This is due to inaudible frequency data higher than 22Khz being stripped away from the file.

Anything with a samplerate of 44.1Khz isn't going to have frequencies higher than 22.05Khz, it has nothing to do with FLAC and certainly has nothing to do with FLAC's compression. It's also approximately half the size of WAV and AIFF, not exactly.
 
Back
Top Bottom