I'd like to ask for your help, because I'm out of ideas right now. I've been building my music library for a lot of years, always aiming for good quality rips. 320kbps mp3 and 256kbps VBR AAC are good enough for me, so I'm usually not looking for lossless. However, there are some albums that can't be find in good quality mp3 or AAC - it's either FLAC or a bad transcode. In these cases, I usually download the FLAC files, convert them to ALAC (because FLAC is not supported by iTunes) with a tool called "Bigasoft Audio Converter", put the ALAC files in iTunes, then convert them to AAC. I thought this method was safe to use, because I've been told there's no quality loss when converting from lossless to lossless.
Today I've been listening to a 12012 album ("mar maroon") I previously converted from FLAC to ALAC then AAC, and suddenly realised there was some kind of noise at the beginning of track 2 ("DNA") that shouldn't have been there. At first, I thought the original FLAC file was corrupted, but when I opened it, I couldn't hear any noise. Made another ALAC file, and it was there again. Then I downloaded another tool ("Mediahuman Audio Converter") hoping for a different result, but it gave me the same noisy ALAC file. Even made a WAC conversion, and that couldn't help either.
My question is: do you think there's some kind of problem with this specific FLAC file, or it's something else? I'm worried that the method I've been using for years isn't as safe as I thought. The noise itself isn't that bad, but I really don't want to look through my whole library just to realize other files have the same (or worse) problem. If it helps, the FLAC file I'm talking about was previously uploaded here at MH by mucc6 (who was generous enough to share almost the whole 12012 discography in lossless - thanks a lot for that!), and I believe the same rip can be find at JPopsuki. Anyway, I've uploaded this specific track in FLAC and ALAC for those who are willing to check it:
