WAV or Apple Lossless Encoder?

Usarmyvet91 - I think what Brian may have been pointing out was that it saves a significant amount of space (correct me if I'm wrong Brian). You had stated that it "does not compress audio much" which also puzzled me since saving almost half the space is significant.

Jax2 (apple lossess does compress audio) I was trying to explain that to Brianmgrarcom who thinks that i don't know what i am talking about. Apple lossless file is half the size of the same information in wav format. That mean wav is copying 99.99% of the information on the cd disk and apple lossless doesn't because the file size is less than half of wav. So apple lossless is not really lossless because it is cmpressed. Thanks, Jax2

My mistake instead of using the word much for my adjective i should have used significantly more.

The process that Apple lossless uses to "compress" the file reduces the file size but not not delete any data. Think of it like a ZIP file, which reduces the size of a file but when upzipped the data is exactly the same as you started. Apples lossless and flac do a similar process. There are well known algorithms for doing this type of "compression". They look for patterns that they can store in less space. So the "compression" uses less space but maintains all the original data. When the file is played back, the file is "de-compressed" to its orignal form. The earlier discussion in this thread is about possible subtle differences in Apple lossless encoding, but that is a different issue that the 50% difference in file size.

My copy of Pop Pop arrives today and I will doing some listening this weekend.

WAV and AIFF are uncompressed. Yes wav is pc based and aiff is mac based both are perfect pitch. I would go with aiff because its mac based, their for the art work is easy to get.