Kirk McElhearn:
Just as when you compress a text file using zip compression, decompressing returns all the original letters and characters, lossless music compression provides the full fidelity of the original audio you compressed.
Nice compression overview.
We need more people that can explain technical things as simple as they are and not as complex as they look like.
Look up the words you don’t understand, and the apparent complexity will diminish and/or vanish.
This is one of the reasons why iTunes Match will be less useful to me than the average consumer:
iTunes is certainly going to find lots of matches in the iTunes Store database, but “swapping” ALAC compressed files for 256 kbit/s AAC files simply doesn’t cut it.
I’m going to end up having to upload large parts of my library anyways —thank Q for 6 Mbit/s upstream.
Fun sidenote: I once used a special type of metal for this kind of compression comparison (speed metal accompanied by an entire classical orchestra). Most songs clocked in at an average of 900 kbit/s O_O