Best Codec

[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheSloth Using IEM's? I find it very audible. Also don't forget that a portable is often a way of taking all your music from one place to another, where you may be able to output either throught the line out, or even better digitally through a computer. It's great to keep lossless for those reasons as well... Though, my lossless library has just gone over the magic 60gb capacity of the iPod, so I'm waiting for an 80g player before I upgrade my ageing 3G.

Maybe it might be noticeable on occasion, but really is Lossless X times better than high VBR mp3s?

 

[madman2003]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chri5peed Maybe it might be noticeable on occasion, but really is Lossless X times better than high VBR mp3s?

Lossless is never X times better then good mp3's, but it is better, some want the knowledge of an exact duplicate, not something that is close.

 

[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by madman2003 Lossless is never X times better then good mp3's, but it is better, some want the knowledge of an exact duplicate, not something that is close.

I am someone who wants the knowledge of an exact duplicate, but I have 250GBs to fulfill my need.

 

[TheSloth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chri5peed Maybe it might be noticeable on occasion, but really is Lossless X times better than high VBR mp3s?

High bit rate AAC: 320k. Average bitrate of lossless files in my collection: 600k. That's just under 2x the bitrate, so for me it really is a 'no-brainer'. I hear that how much compression you get depends heavily on the music involved?

 

[stryker]

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but why these lossless formats if you have the space? Why not just save it all in .wav? Forgive my newness to computer-as-source. I download stuff in FLAC then convert to .wav and burn cds. Is lossless simply to save space? For an audiophile my guess is that completely uncompressed .wav files are still the standard.

 

[Febs]

.Wav has no tag support, for one.

 

[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by stryker I don't mean to hijack this thread, but why these lossless formats if you have the space? Why not just save it all in .wav? Forgive my newness to computer-as-source. I download stuff in FLAC then convert to .wav and burn cds. Is lossless simply to save space? For an audiophile my guess is that completely uncompressed .wav files are still the standard.

I'll forgive your newness. Like Febs says WAV files are untagged, but also they are much bigger than their equivalent Lossless counterparts.

It is technically a fact and has been blind tested many times, Lossless are an exact bit-perfect copy of WAVs and therefore sound identical.

 

[Sycraft]

Because no matter how much space you have, there's still a limit. Well, since the lossless formats are just that: lossless, there's no reason not to use them. A FLAC file is the same as using a WAV file.

If any audiophile tells you that there's a difference in sound between FLAC they are either fooling themselves, or doing the test wrong. Lossless formats are mathematicly lossless, as in they are just a number reduction trick. They are provably lossless both in the sense you can write a mathematical proof showing they are reversable, and in that you can empricaly test that they are lossless.

I did a brief test here that you can look at.

Storing files using FLAC is just like storing log files using ZIP or RAR. You save space, and don't lose any data.

 

[stryker]

Thanks and I look forward to more discussion pursuant to the lossless question. I now have to learn about tagging and I will do so. I remember Shorten as a popular way to trade Phish, DMB, Dead and other shows over FTP a few years back. Same concept, but I guess Shorten was exceeded by more efficient lossless formats. They were still pretty big files and used MD5 and checksum to verify.