"is Lossless?"

[Salem874]

In setting up my File Oganisation rules, I see there are some bollean (yes/no, true/false) type "properties" which can be used (say "has PDF"  - not quite sure what/how this is used/works, but that's for another thread).

I would really find it useful if there was a similarly equivalent "Lossless?" property that can be used to help organise my music files based on whether or not it is a lossless encode.

[boroda]

no, but there is <.Ext> (file extension) pseudo-tag. you could construct a virtual tag (or use the following expression in file organization rules), which is based on file extension, e.g. <IsLoseless>: $If(<.Ext>=flac,Loseless,Lossy).

[hiccup]

no, but there is…

What boroda says.

To add some additional thoughts on this:

You would need to add all lossless audio formats that you are using to such a virtual tag.
So you will then probably end up with something like:
$If($Or(<.Ext>=flac,<.Ext>=ape,<.Ext>=wav,<.Ext>=aiff,<.Ext>=alac,<.Ext>=tta),Lossless,Lossy)

But that still will not be a catch-all for lossless audio.
There are extensions such as .m4a and .wv that can contain both lossy or lossless audio.

So there is no perfect solution for this.
Except perhaps for adding bitrate to the equation.
Anything with a bitrate above 400k is likely to be lossless.
(but even that won't be true in 100% of all cases)

[Salem874]

no, but there is <.Ext> (file extension) pseudo-tag. you could construct a virtual tag (or use the following expression in file organization rules), which is based on file extension, e.g. <IsLoseless>: $If(<.Ext>=flac,Loseless,Lossy).

...There are extensions such as .m4a and .wv that can contain both lossy or lossless audio.

So there is no perfect solution for this.
Except perhaps for adding bitrate to the equation.
Anything with a bitrate above 400k is likely to be lossless.
(but even that won't be true in 100% of all cases)

AS @hiccup says, there are file extensions that can contain either lossy or lossless audio.

Extentions could work, however come file formats (ie containers) are just that container, so could include audio in lossy or lossless codecs. Take M4A for example, which is the extension for an MP4 container containing only audio. Such a file often contains AAC audio, but COULD actually be ALAC (Apple Lossless).

Which is why i put something in the wishlist section, as i was thinking it may be possible to have something built in to MusicBee where the audio is analysed and when adding to library it is identified as Lossless/Lossy.

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

Which is why i put something in the wishlist section, as i was thinking it may be possible to have something built in to MusicBee where the audio is analysed and when adding to library it is identified as Lossless/Lossy.

There is no surefire way to determine whether an audio file was encoded lossless or not.

The <Kind> tag contains a value for ALAC, FLAC, WavPack and Wave audio files. You can use that to distinguish lossy files from lossless ones.