Some very misleading stuff here.
Lossless WMA, Apple lossless, FLAC or whatever is only as good as what you put in. They offer some compression (Apple Lossless and FLAC about 50 to 60%) and give full reconstruction of the input bits - nothing gets lost in the compression.
Having a file that is seven times as large does not mean you have seven times the audio quality!
If you have space lossless is good, but not always detectable. Some very serious double blind tests suggest 128kbps AAC is probably good enough for any ears over 40 years old and many younger ears. 160kbps AAC fools serious ears very well.
It is a different matter if you are using something recorded at better than CD rate. We did some work with AAC compression on very high bit rate input audio and had much better than CD sound with files much smaller than CD files. A problem is very little is prepared for sale at high quality. A larger problem is most people just don't care. Regular mp3s seem good enough for most people and few people have the $300 headphones or $3000 speakers you really need if you want to focus on the differences.
(I'd rather put that sort of money into live music...)
_____
By the way ... if you want to use a lossless encoder on your iPod you can rip CDs with Apple Lossless ... the files will be about four times as large as 128 kbps files and you might hear the difference if you have reasonable ears and have popped for better headphones. I'm guessing you can do the same with Windows Media ripping CDs...
Comments