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What exactly is the difference between Lossles and lossy audio format?

Question by fdhzgm: What exactly is the difference between Lossles and lossy audio format?
Is lossless when sound quality is not lost when a song is ripped or is it when information from an audio file is not lost when an audio file is moved transferred and saved.

And is lossy when sound quality is lost when a song is ripped or is it when information from an audio file is lost when an audio file is moved transferred and saved.

I have heard both stories for each format but i dont think losing information from an audio file happens everytime it is moved transferred or saved regardless of the format, lossless or lossy.

Best answer:

Answer by DivideByZero
Transferring, copying, pasting etc. has no affect on sound quality unless there’s something wrong with your hard drive.

Lossy is when audio information is sacrificed (usually intentionally) for the sake of saving space. When you buy a CD, the music on it is good quality, it has a high amount of audio information. When you rip the CD you can rip it to a lossless format which means no information is lost in the process of ripping the CD. If you rip to a lossy format like mp3, the encoder can’t fit all the information into the selected bitrate so it shaves bits until each second of the song fits into the allowed bits-per-second. The encoder tries to save the most important bits so that the difference is less noticeable.

The ripping process itself isn’t what changes the quality, just the conversion process from one cd-quality format (uncompressed pcm wav) to a lossy format. Likewise if you have lossless files on your computer (e.g. wav or flac) and then convert them to mp3, quality will be lost.

There’s also a way quality is accidentally lost by people who don’t understand audio conversion. If you convert a song from one lossy format to another, quality will be lost regardless of the bitrates involved. So if you have an mp3 at 128 and convert to 320 AAC quality will be lost and the true bitrate will be LESS than 128. Same applies if you convert from 128aac to 320mp3, it applies to any combination of lossy formats and any combo of bitrates. The only lossy conversion that involves no loss is that from lossy to lossless. (But all that would do is make a bigger file, you can’t gain quality by converting up because the info is already lost.)

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