A Beginners Guide to Lossless Audio

This guide will explain what lossless audio is, how to convert lossless audio files (flac, shn) to mp3, how to burn lossless audio to CD etc. Windows and macOS are both covered.

  1. What is lossless audio?
  2. Where to download lossless music
  3. How to play lossless audio files (Windows and OS X)
  4. How to Tag audio files (OS X)
  5. How to convert lossless audio to mp3 (Windows, OS X and Linux)
  6. How to burn lossless files as audio cds (Windows and OS X)
  7. Related Tutorials/Help (how to download w/ bittorrent etc)

1. What is lossless audio?

Lossless audio (.flac, .shn, etc) allows the exact original audio to be reconstructed from the compressed audio. This can be contrasted to lossy audio (.mp3, .aac), which does not allow the exact original audio to be reconstructed from the compressed. What does this really mean? If you encode a CD/audio file to mp3, you lose quality. If you encode a CD/audio file to .flac or .shn, you do not.

2. Where to download lossless music

 – archive.org (web or ftp)
 – bt.etree.org (bittorrent)
 – dimeadozen.org (bittorrent, registration required)
 – The Traders Den (bittorrent, registation required)
 – your favourite bands home page or online store (Gov’t Mule, Umphrey’s McGee, etc)

3. How to play lossless audio files

  1. How to play flac in Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android

4. How to Tag audio files

  1. How to Tag FLAC files in OS X

5. How to convert lossless audio to mp3

  1. How to convert flac files to mp3 in Windows
  2. How to convert shn files to mp3 in Windows
  3. How to convert ape files to mp3 in Windows
  4. How to convert flac files to mp3 in OS X
  5. How to convert shn files to mp3 in OS X
  6. How to convert ape files to mp3 in OS X
  7. How to convert flac files to mp3 using Ubuntu Linux
  8. How to use Foobar2000 to convert audio files

6. How to burn lossless files as audio cds

  1. How to burn audio cds from flac files in Windows
  2. How to burn audio cds from shn files in Windows
  3. How to burn audio cds from flac files in OS X
  4. How to burn audio cds from shn files in OS X

7. Related Tutorials/Help

How to download files using Bittorrent in OS X
How to join (combine) multiple MP3 files in OS X
How to join (combine) multiple MP3 files in Windows


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