[socrates63]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nicknameless Go ahead and insult me but I use wave. Not wavepack just wav uncompressed audio.

which is what I'm considering doing

 

[imported_dom_]

eac to make wavs is the only way to go!

windows lossless isnt lossless so not worth using.

 

[Nospam]

Quote:

Originally Posted by J-Pak Apple lossless is useless since it's a closed format and has quite poor compression. And can't be converted to anything other than one of their other closed formats ...

Umm... if you want to disparage something, it really helps to have the facts straight

iTunes supports the following audio formats (and makes it extremley easy to convert from one to another):
MP3 - I don't think anyone here considers this a "closed" format.
AAC - Yes, despite much uninformed "fact" to the contrary, this is an open format.
AIFF - Used by Apple, SGI, and several high-end audio packages. Also supported by various free players for both Mac and Windows (as well as UNIX and Linux, I suppose).
WAV - This is as "closed" a format as AIFF.
Apple Lossless - This is a "closed" format, except someone has already decoded it, so open source players should be available for any platform.

So, I guess 1 out of 5 come close to being a "closed" format.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duckspeak Vote for Apple Lossless for above-mentioned reasons: it's easy and it's fast and it's supposedly optimized for iPod playback. Conversion is almost as easy as it gets, although it kind of annoys me how it interlaces the converted files with the originals--good solution to that is to make a smart playlist that orders all of your songs by when they were added to your library. Then just do a conversion and all the new files are lined up nicely in that playlist. (of course, to delete again, you need to do something clever--I change the Artist field for all those files to "BALEETED!" and then go back to the library view for the kill) ...the best solution, of course, is to bend iTunes to your will using Python scripts...

Since I have both ALAC and AAC versions of each song in my Library, I made Smart Playlists that sort by file type. That way, it's easy to look at only AAC or only ALAC files.

What they really need, is a filter option. Kinda like an on-the-fly-Smart-Playlist.

 

[Nospam]

[Please delete]

 

[Oliver :)]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nicknameless Go ahead and insult me but I use wave. Not wavepack just wav uncompressed audio.

Oh, no worries, you may waste as much of your HD space as you wish

Do you use strict folder structures & filenames? I mean, if I were to use uncompressed, I would choose AIFF over WAV due to the tags...?

 

[trains are bad]

All mine is Wav too because I have plenty of space, and am lazy. I'm going to get around to transcoding it all to FLAC, mostly so I have better tags.

 

[Twombly]

You guys using plain ol' PCM WAV are freakin' masochists, man.

I use FLAC.

 

[donunus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kidkoala The title almost seems like an oxymoron, since it seems like there should be one lossless format...But anyways I just got my hands on a 250gig external hard drive, and am taking the opportunity to re-rip all my CD's lossless. It seems that the main lossless formats are flac, wav, aiff, and apple lossless. Which format is the best, and what program should I use to rip with? If possible I'd like to avoid EAC, as it does not seem to want to work with my computer and network here at school. Apple lossless seems like it would be the easiest to do since iTunes is an intuitive, simple program that I already use with my iPod, but it does not seem like it would lend itself well to re-encoding with a different lossy format. Any kind of help would be really appreciated!!

All lossless formats should sound the same so go with apple lossless since you have an ipod

 

[GotNoRice]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dom_ windows lossless isnt lossless so not worth using.

Care to elaborate?

 

[davidd]

I use Wavpack myself, mostly because of encode speeds be a little faster and file sizes alittle smaller compared to FLAC for me.

 

[TooNice]

I've used Monkey Audio in the past, but I've switched to FLAC. The nice thing about FLAC is that it is less processor intensive for decoding. This is good if you play games on the PC but still want to listen to your music in the background, and more importantly, and also one of the reasons it supported by some MP3 players. Okay, granted, I only know the Karma and the iAudio that support FLAC, but I was thinking of getting the iAudio in the first place.

Still, I am considering the iPod Video now, so maybe I'll have to transcode to ALAC.

 

[fewtch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nicknameless Go ahead and insult me but I use wave. Not wavepack just wav uncompressed audio.

Insult you? Hey, it's your wasted hard drive space (50% more).

 

[Naris]

I think that they're doing it all in uncompressed WAV just in case one day someone discovers that, after all this time, there really are some artifacts in lossless that while so minute as to be indescernable to the human ear, are still there. I believe these people need the perfect copies for that reason.

*By the way, I am being slightly sarcastic and in good humor. I'd record to WAV myself personally if I had the space*

 

[JahJahBinks]

You can restore music encoded with lossless back to wave and compare the two bit-to-bit. I think this has done a long time ago when lossess codec was not even released and many many times too as one of the ways for programmers to debug their code. So I am just saying that there is little to worry about it.

 

[Jon L]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad All mine is Wav too because I have plenty of space, and am lazy. I'm going to get around to transcoding it all to FLAC, mostly so I have better tags.

Have you tried this?? Wav doesn't preserve tags, so if you turn Wav into Flac later, your file would look something like nice_to_see_you.flac with no tag info...

Anyway, if you use a PC, my vote is strongly for Flac, not b/c Flac is better than apple lossless, but b/c Foobar with ASIO dll sounds more transparent than iTunes (on PC).

If you are a Mac guy, I understand iTunes sounds better than on PC, so by all means..