Lossless Audio

Nick · Post by **Nick** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:46 am

I'm thinking of re-ripping all of my music when I reformat my computer. Currently, the majority of them are ripped at 320kbps (MP3s) by Windows Media Player. All real CDs, by the way. What's my best option for going lossless? I'm thinking about getting a Zune or some form of Creative player (not an iPod, although I *may* snag one if the price is right). I need the files to be playable by Windows Media Player 11, as well.

Post by **Quzar** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:50 am

I use FLAC when I do lossless, the downside is that it's usually pretty big (usually something between 200 and 300mb for a full CD). I don't think that any of those portable players support it though.

I've also had people tell me about ape, but that also isn't supported by anything that I know of.

Truthfully, unless you're using really good quality playback equipment (when I listen to music I use giant headphones, even for walking around music =P) you won't notice a difference between high quality mp3/ogg/lossyformatX and a lossless format.

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:15 am

I also use FLAC for my lossless. The thing i like about FLAC is the cue sheets when ripped with EAC, so oyu can have a perfect carbon copy with gaps and all. I think other lossless formats support cue sheets as well, but flac is the most popular. Flac probably produces the biggest file size for lossless rips. I think if you want the best lossless file size, wavpack is your best bet.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:16 am

Doesn't matter. You can transcode from any lossless format to any other without quality loss, and to any lossy format you want.

If you actually care about performance, Monkey's Audio (APE) tends to provide the best compression ratio, and highest compression speed. Compression speed might be an issue (FLAC is pretty slow), but the difference it compressed filesize is typically only a few megabytes for an entire album that ends up around 300MB. Hardly worth mentioning really.

In terms of portable MP3 players, you can pretty much forget it. The only two lossless formats playable on any player are FLAC, and Apple Lossless. Apple Lossless is only playable on iPods. FLAC is only playable on a few players nobody has ever heard of, and iRiver and iPods when using the Rockbox firmware. In both cases, you'll drain the battery like crazy because the hard drive will be constantly running. Just use a lossy format at a decent bitrate.

I can't imagine why you'd actually want to use Windows Media Player 11, but you can use this to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC and native FLAC. I don't think you can use it to encode FLAC from Windows Media Player though, so you'll have to use a decent CD ripper. EAC or CDex are both good.

For the few CDs I have, I ripped to FLAC, burned the FLAC files to a DVD-R (you can usually fit something like 14 CDs per DVD), and have Ogg Vorbis versions on my hard drive. Originally, they were encoded with the standard Vorbis encoder, but I re-encoded everything using the aoTuV encoder last time I wiped my hard drive, and I also made lower bitrate versions for a portable MP3 player. Works well if you can be bothered with it.

Luriden · Post by **Luriden** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:18 am

FLAC all the way.

Nick · Post by **Nick** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:26 am

Thanks everyone. Looks like it's rather pointless for me to re-rip 150+ CDs, in that case.

Oh, and as to why I use WMP11, I like the interface. Although it is a bit buggy occasionally.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 3:46 am

Looks like it's rather pointless for me to re-rip 150+ CDs, in that case.

Yeah, that would really be a pain. I don't have anywhere near that many CDs, so it only took a day to rip all of mine. Ripping 150 of them would take a long time.

Oh, and as to why I use WMP11, I like the interface. Although it is a bit buggy occasionally.

Really? I think it's absolutely hedeous.

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 10:31 am

I use FLAC for archiving purposes. I too have 150 plus CDs, and only have a few of my CDs ripped into flac now. I need to grab another HDD, or some DVD-Rs to hold the rips on soon.

Smurph · Post by **Smurph** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:09 pm

FLAC.

APE · Post by **APE** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:39 pm

BlackAura wrote: If you actually care about performance, Monkey's Audio (APE) tends to provide the best compression ratio, and highest compression speed. Compression speed might be an issue (FLAC is pretty slow), but the difference it compressed filesize is typically only a few megabytes for an entire album that ends up around 300MB. Hardly worth mentioning really.

My audio > your audio.

404NotFound · Post by **404NotFound** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:17 pm

I think from what i've read that "LA" gives the best compression. But La is closed source, slow, etc. And the gains it gives over FLAC (even at medium compression) are fairly minimal. Probably a few percent, at the most.

I personally like Flac. It seems to have the biggest corporate following (though that's not saying much) and can be quite fast to encode with medium settings. The difference between medium and super-duper high with all the bells and whistles turned on is only a few MB per song. If that. I think one test I did was FLAC q-8 vs. flac q8 with every expensive setting i could find turned on. The compress time was probably 10x longer, but resulted in only about 100k difference.

Most of the lossless codecs (except some fringe ones, or in development ones) are fairly similar in size and quality (duh, lossless.) I'd say just go with the one that has the most features for you. You can always change later with a massive transcode. (whoo, lossless)

Just make sure your source WAV extractions are 100% perfect. That's probably the hardest part.

Disheveled DrFreeze · Post by **Disheveled DrFreeze** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 3:15 pm

whats wrong with 320kbps mp3?

not flaming or anything, but with the quality of most portable audio players (and more importantly, headphones) in mind, why bother going lossless? it just doubles your file sizes up

MulletMan13 · Post by **MulletMan13** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 4:05 pm

Disheveled DrFreeze wrote:whats wrong with 320kbps mp3?

not flaming or anything, but with the quality of most portable audio players (and more importantly, headphones) in mind, why bother going lossless? it just doubles your file sizes up

Archival purposes -- and if you do have a set of headphones where you can tell the difference (mostly clearest in the highs), than you should experience your equipment to its' fullest potential.

Disheveled DrFreeze · Post by **Disheveled DrFreeze** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 4:16 pm

MulletMan13 wrote:
Disheveled DrFreeze wrote:whats wrong with 320kbps mp3?

not flaming or anything, but with the quality of most portable audio players (and more importantly, headphones) in mind, why bother going lossless? it just doubles your file sizes up
Archival purposes -- and if you do have a set of headphones where you can tell the difference (mostly clearest in the highs), than you should experience your equipment to its' fullest potential.

this might be a stupid idea, but for the archival purpose, how about straight wav (or even a .iso or .bin/cue) and winrarren the stuff with the highest compression?

as for the high quality stuff, that i can understand, but how many people here actually use such a high qual set of earphones (or even a protable player with an apropriate S/N ratio?)

and afaik there is little support for lossless in portables... (my creative only does wav for lossless i think.... doesnt even support ogg)

MulletMan13 · Post by **MulletMan13** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 4:24 pm

Disheveled DrFreeze wrote:
this might be a stupid idea, but for the archival purpose, how about straight wav (or even a .iso or .bin/cue) and winrarren the stuff with the highest compression?

as for the high quality stuff, that i can understand, but how many people here actually use such a high qual set of earphones (or even a protable player with an apropriate S/N ratio?)

and afaik there is little support for lossless in portables... (my creative only does wav for lossless i think.... doesnt even support ogg)

That is a good idea for archival purposes -- but if you have enough space on your HDDs to keep compressed lossless files, then you might as well make them useful and play them.

About the people with high qual equipment... probably a very small portion. Some people are spec whores and just do it because they want 'the best' even though they can't hear a difference.

There is little support on personal audio players for lossless, but it works for me. I only have my favorite or most dynamic albums ripped in Apple Lossless (songs are about 30mb apiece), and those play fine on my iPod. Granted the battery life is reduced by playing these high bitrate files, but I don't go 10+ hours a day listening to straight lossless files, so it's fine.

I'll probably stick to 192+kbps mp3 for most purposes, but I tend to rerip my favorite albums in apple lossless... I couldn't see myself ripping all my music in that at this point though.

Post by **Quzar** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 5:09 pm

Disheveled DrFreeze wrote:
MulletMan13 wrote:
Disheveled DrFreeze wrote:whats wrong with 320kbps mp3?

not flaming or anything, but with the quality of most portable audio players (and more importantly, headphones) in mind, why bother going lossless? it just doubles your file sizes up
Archival purposes -- and if you do have a set of headphones where you can tell the difference (mostly clearest in the highs), than you should experience your equipment to its' fullest potential.
this might be a stupid idea, but for the archival purpose, how about straight wav (or even a .iso or .bin/cue) and winrarren the stuff with the highest compression?

as for the high quality stuff, that i can understand, but how many people here actually use such a high qual set of earphones (or even a protable player with an apropriate S/N ratio?)

and afaik there is little support for lossless in portables... (my creative only does wav for lossless i think.... doesnt even support ogg)

The point of the audio compression schemes is that they can give higher compression than generic ones. Try raring a wav vs encoding it as flac and you'll see.

djray · Post by **djray** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 8:08 am

when i need to do lossless, i use wavpack (.WV)...
otherwise i stick to LAME encoded MP3

SuperMegatron · Post by **SuperMegatron** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 9:48 am

AIFF-C 1411.2 bitrate 6:1 encoding.

az_bont · Post by **az_bont** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:52 pm

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php ... comparison

The above is a nice little comparison of all of the mainstream lossless audio codecs, plus a few of the more unpopular ones.

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 4:20 pm

Looking over at list az_bont posted, I was thinking, why would you want a hybrid lossly file?