[Erukian]

I'd guess about 25% flac, 40% musepack, %10 OGG and %25 MP3/M4A/WMA

-Joe

 

[jiiteepee]

Found some articles 'bout audio encoding

Mp3 compression
By Andrei Gule
Introduction The article is devoted to some fine features which appear when using audio data compression standard MPEG I/II Layer 3 (mp3). There is no any complete work like testing of coders or mp3 players; I just trie...
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mp3comp/index.html

MP3Pro vs. MP3
By Evgeny Ignatiev
MP3... this format is now discussed a lot on the net, as well as others; ways of sound compression are also much spoken about: which coder is better - LAME or Fraunhofer and whether there is a noticeable difference be...
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mp3pro/index.html

OGG vs. LAME
By Andrei Aspidov Preface
Today everybody knows quite well what sound possibilities a modern computer has. A record library on a computer, together with audio cassettes and CDs is no wonder for many. We all know that a CD is simple and ea...
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/oggvslame/index.html

Research quality of coding sound by different mp3 encoders
By Aleksey Lukyanov
The format MP3 for high-quality encoding of sound becomes more and more popular. Initially developed for usage within the standards of video compression MPEG1 and MPEG2 it v...
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/m...ity/index.html

jiitee

 

[fogia.4]

id say around 30% is flac/cd, the rest is mp3s... cant be very accurate though

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by smittysan89 If I have apple lossless from itunes do I still need FLAC since they are both lossless? Or is itunes not as good or something... and is there a way to make current songs that i have in bad quality better? like 128 to 192, or to lossless etc

Part one: If you use iTunes and an iPod, and not another kind of player or software, then you should use Apple Lossless. It is bit-perfect lossless coding (I have proven this by successfully encoding and decoding HDCDs with it), and iTunes does not support FLAC, unfortunately.

FLAC is more flexible, but it does no better (or worse) a job encoding CDs or WAV files -- lossless is lossless.

Part two: You CANNOT improve the songs that are already lossy-coded at 128 or 192 or whatever. You'd have to re-import them using a better (like lossless) codec.

 

[smittysan89]

yeah, but like i mean if I put all my songs from my ipod onto my hard drive, then can i convert all of those files to a apple lossless with a program like dB amp, then put them all back on my ipod?

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by smittysan89 yeah, but like i mean if I put all my songs from my ipod onto my hard drive, then can i convert all of those files to a apple lossless with a program like dB amp, then put them all back on my ipod?

This does you no good. Once you have used a lossy perceptual-coder like MP3 or AAC, you have changed the original data forever, and you cannot get the lost information back by taking the MP3 file and encoding it to a lossless format. This would only serve to make a copy of the MP3 file that took up more space, but sounded no better than the MP3 file itself. Once you have thrown the bits away with MP3 or AAC, you cannot get them back.

If you have the CDs, you can re-rip them using Apple Lossless, but if you downloaded them as MP3 or AAC, you should just leave them that way -- there is no way to improve them.

 

[smittysan89]

really? man...even with a music converter program? unfortunately when i got my ipod i took my friends whole music collection that he had on his ipod and then went from there...hmm ok thanks

 

[Patu]

Most of my collection is 192kbps-320kbps/MP3 and maybe 5% is FLAC.

Now when I have a system which makes differences between MP3 and FLAC audible I've started to build my FLAC collection. Though I don't have such a "golden hearing" that I always even hear the differencies if I listen same track in MP3/FLAC.

 

[Skylab]

While audible, the differences between well-coded MP3/320 or AAC/320 are subtle. But I can hear them. And I can easily hear the artifacts of MP3 or AAC at 192 or (gasp) below. Some people are more sensitive to this than others.

 

[Bill Ward]

Everything in Flac.

Probably a little over 100 GB on a dedicated drive with a full back up via usb. I don't go mobile, and I never want to rip this stuff again.

BW

 

[Oink1]

320k Lame - alt.preset.insane setting

 

[grawk]

I used to have a lot of live recordings stored in SHN format. Like 100+gb. Well, I still have it, but it's on a couple of drives I can't mount because I don't have an openbsd box at hte moment. All my current music is either AAC 128 (being reripped), AAC 192 (not being reripped, but not my preference now), AAC 224 (current preference), or ALAC with AAC224 copies. The better the sound on the original cd, the more likely I am to rip to lossless. Also, if it's a recording I made myself, I rip to ALAC.

I have a few MP3s in various bitrates, but those tend to be songs I've downloaded, and the vast majority of my collection is just online copies of cds I own.

 

[gorman]

My advice to you is. . . ABX

Seriously, without a double blind test, you might be wasting a lot of space. Especially for portable use.

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gorman My advice to you is. . . ABX Seriously, without a double blind test, you might be wasting a lot of space. Especially for portable use.

Well, without opening up THAT can of worms, I think that even with ABX testing it's easy to hear the artifacts of low bit rate lossy coding. I use AAC/320 sometimes for very lengthy Grateful Dead live tracks, and find it pretty benign there. But for really well recorded stuff, it's not a waste of space IMO.

 

[Talonz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gorman My advice to you is. . . ABX Seriously, without a double blind test, you might be wasting a lot of space. Especially for portable use.

I believe most people can tell the difference between a 192bit MP3 and a FLAC file. At least, I can, so I would rather not leave anything to chance by encoding to 320bit. However, I do use LAME to encode 320bit for my portable player. When you're on the go, the sound quality can't really be appreciated. Why lose any quality while at home at the cost of disk space? Disk space is so cheap, consider going lossless a free equipment upgrade.