Converting APE to FLAC: no loss of quality?

[emanresu]

Hi everybody, I have recently installed on my 30 Gigs Ipod Video your wonderful Rockbox software, and I feel like I'm in heaven, since it has given me the double pleasure to escape from the fascist domaination of the Apple Empire and to finally be able to play directly on my Ipod other formats like mpc, flac and so on. Only exception is APE, which gives me the same problem as other Ipod users I have surveyed on this forum, i.e. a playback with hiccups. Therefore, since I happen to have several dozens of .APE files in my list, I am beginning to consider whether I should perform a mass-conversion of all my .APE files into .FLAC files (I already have the suitable converter for that, which is Foobar), but before taking this step, I would like to ask for an expert's opinion. I know that both .APE and .FLAC are considered lossless formats, but does converting from one to another imply a loss of quality or not? Is it safe for me to convert all my APE's into FLAC's and then keep the latters and delete the formers? Thanx everybody for your kind opinion

Eman

[linuxstb]

Yes, assuming no bugs in the conversion software, it's safe, and the files will sound identical.

FLAC and APE are not "considered lossless", they are lossless.  The definition of lossless is that if you go from WAV -> lossless format -> WAV, then the audio data in those two WAV files will be identical.

So it follows from that that WAV -> APE -> WAV -> FLAC -> WAV will also give identical audio for all three WAV files in that process.

(conversion may or may not create that intermediate WAV file, it may just store the decompressed audio temporarily in memory, but the principle is the same).

[emanresu]

LinuxSTB, I dare say your explanation is as clear as spring water. I assume then that no program converts directly from APE to FLAC or from FLAC to APE, but there is always a WAV middle passage, which guarantees the losslessness of it all. Thank you!

[AlexP]

No, it could go direct by keeping the data in memory, as linuxstb said.

(conversion may or may not create that intermediate WAV file, it may just store the decompressed audio temporarily in memory, but the principle is the same).

Lossless formats are essentially like zip or rar but optimised for music files.  To go from one to the other you need to decompress the first then recompress into the second.  However, the intermediate stage can be held in memory or written to disk depending on various factors (size, how the conversion program is written etc.).  Going explicitly via wav or not doesn't guarantee or not the losslessness - both FLAC and APE ARE lossless.

[emanresu]

Crystal clear again, Bigbambi, thank you. The comparison with Zip and Rar is enlightening. Going from APE to FLAC then would be like going from Zip to RAR. Totally riskless. Kudos to the creators of FLAC then, because it takes so much less memory to decompress it!