Is there any difference between WAV and Atrac Advanced Lossless as a source?

[culp4684]

I have been importing CD's using Sonicstage since 2005. As a rule, I have saved just about everything in 256kbps. This kind of limits me to use Hi-SP if I want to avoid any type of artifacts (if any) when converting to LP2 or any other codec.

I was wondering, if one could do it all over again, if it would make any difference importing CD's as WAV or Advanced Atrac Lossless? Also, as far as the AAL does it matter what size you save the files in? In other words, if you import a CD in 256 kbps AAL and then decide to transfer it to MD in 352 kbps at some point, will it make a difference?

[sfbp]

I played with AAL-256 vs AAL-132, and decided that it didn't make any difference. However as 256 is what you get from uploading from SP minidiscs, I decided that this was the "gold standard" (after all it is a 24-bit format).

I tested extrusion (the right word?) of LP2 (132) from this AAL-256 and it sounds just the same as if I had converted direct to 132.

I also gradually came to the conclusion that most of the artifacts are just that. If you can find a way to convert, most of these ATRAC formats provided pretty uniform results. My suggestion would be - try doing it using Sound Forge 9 or 10. You may be surprised (since I have noticed that SF always "gets it right") how good this is. This would be your benchmark for judging some other means of conversion.

To answer your second question: I have taken to importing everything from CD to AAL. The bad news - ffmpeg and VLC don't have that support yet. However it's not that hard to get the 256kbps (or any other version) that ffmpeg and VLC **can** play, provided you use Sonic Stage to spit out the files you need. Again, SF will do the trick but to do batches you might have to spend the big money for SF Pro.

One final thought... if you can be bothered to set up DLNA in your house, then the server is the only thing that has to convert. All of a sudden you can enjoy your files on whatever portable device takes your fancy.