What does lossless format mean and whats the difference between lossless and lossy formats?
When you use lossless formats like WMA Lossless, Monkey’s Audio (APE) or FLAC, there’s no quality loss during conversion. If you compress WAV file with lossless codec and then decompress it, you will get WAV file completely identical to primary one. And if you compress WAV file with lossy codec (WMA, MP3, OGG etc.), compression rate will be greater, but audio content after compression will differ from original. The greater compression rate you choose the worse compressed audio sounds. But this loss of quality is almost not audible when you use high conversion bitrates with lossy codecs.
: When you use lossless formats like WMA Lossless, Monkey’s Audio (APE) or FLAC, there’s no quality loss during conversion. If you compress WAV file with lossless codec and then decompress it, you will get WAV file completely identical to primary one. And if you compress WAV file with lossy codec (WMA, MP3, OGG etc.), compression rate will be greater, but audio content after compression will differ from original. The greater compression rate you choose the worse compressed audio sounds. But this loss of quality is almost not audible when you use high conversion bitrates with lossy codecs.
