What's the best quality audio file?
Apr 25, 2011 at 9:12 AM Post #2 of 89
Um.  Pretty hard to answer that.  As far as audio quality goes, pretty much anything that's lossless is equal.  Some, like ALAC, don't support higher frequencies or bit-depth (as far as I know), but others, like FLAC, do.  If it's lossless it will sound the same as any other lossless file.  
 
As far as lossy formats go, AAC apparently has better transparency than MP3 at lower bitrates, but at higher bitrates they're nearly indistinguishable - though only if you use a good encoder for the MP3 (like LAME).
 
Apr 25, 2011 at 9:20 AM Post #3 of 89
96kBps FLV rips from Youtube are the real standouts for me. The lossy compression just brings out a harmony and tone in the music that you don't get with these fancy-schamncy 'lossless' formats. Of course, I always upscale the MP3s to AIFF, because bigger filesize is better and who needs tags anyway?
 
Apr 27, 2011 at 11:12 PM Post #6 of 89
Loseless is basically music tracks that did not lose any data during compression; FLAC and ALAC formatted music files are the most common loseless format.
 
In case there is any misunderstandings, formatting your low bitrate mp3 files into higher bitrates or into loseless format does not increase the quality of a music track -- in fact it might do the opposite.
wink.gif

 
Apr 27, 2011 at 11:58 PM Post #9 of 89
^Buy something called a CD.  
 
 
But seriously, whether or not if you have golden ears is subjective, we can do studies on how much detail our ears can pick up, but we cannot be totally sure.  So, try out different bit rates on a respectable setup, preferably a monitor(analytical) setup, and you decide if you hear a difference.
 
Apr 28, 2011 at 12:01 AM Post #10 of 89
The music files on CD disks that you buy from the store are usually all extremely high quality or uncompressed.  When you rip the music yourself you can choose the format and quality.  That's where most people buy their high quality/lossless music.  The itunes store unfortunately only sells low bitrate stuff even though it's very convenient.  If you download your music or do shady stuff to get it, you just have to look extra hard or look for specific formats.  Just be aware, a lot of downloads are bad quality even though they're in a "good" format.  I've heard a lot of 320kbps mp3 files that sounded horrible, they must have been radio rips or something, I don't even know.
 
You can't convert low quality audio files to a higher quality format.  That would be like having a video that plays at 10 frames per second and you increase it to 20 frames per second but also double the frames so that there are two of each frames.  It will just make the file size larger and there won't be any difference in quality.
 
Generally, for the majority of people, 320kbps mp3 files are more than good enough.  If you want that extra quality with lossless, FLAC is probably one of the most common formats.  If you use Apple products, you probably need to use AAC and ALAC files though.  Lossless doesn't necessarily benefit all music, in fact in my opinion it's a bit overkill for some that may be poorly recorded.  Lossless files also take up a lot of space, it's like half a GB per album which sucks for some of the lower capacity flash memory players.
 
Apr 28, 2011 at 12:08 AM Post #12 of 89
WAV is the best. It has to be... the files are the biggest :wink:

But I prefer FLAC. ALAC is Apple proprietary so I am against it and WAV is huge.

There is also AAL... which I can apparently play, but didn't know about it until now so I can't say anything about other than it's Sony proprietary.
 
Apr 28, 2011 at 12:47 AM Post #14 of 89
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