Hello Paul,
I have long been a fan of FLAC files due to their obvious superior audio quality over the more popular and ubiquitous MP3 format. For me personally, given the size of modern hard drives, the additional space that FLAC files require, compared to MP3 files, is a more than fair trade-off in order to obtain nicer sounding music.
However, I was just reading your comments regarding the differences between FLAC and ALAC, and AIFF and WAV files.
So my questions are these: Being as my FLAC and ALAC files are ALREADY compressed . . .
a. would running them through a program such as XLD, Fission or iFFmpeg uncompress them and improve the audio quality even more?
b. or is the fact that my FLAC and ALAC files have already been compressed mean that the extra quality has ALREADY been lost, and cannot be re-obtained through decompression?
c. in other words, would it be similar to converting an MP3 file to a FLAC file, where you can indeed to do the conversion, but there won’t be any quality gain, because that quality was already lost when the file was first converted to MP3?
d. if the answer to question “a” above is “yes”, in your opinion, which of the three aforementioned programs would do the best job? I have/own all three.
e. or even if the answer to question “a” is “yes”, would the quality improvement be so negligible, that it wouldn’t really be worth taking up additional hard drive space for my song collection? You seem to stress that uncompressed audio files play smoother, but don’t necessarily state that their sound quality would be better than FLAC or ALAC.
Thanks in advance for your responses.