[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!!

 

[incognitoedleon]

I never really did any lossless encoding, but you might want to look around www.hydrogenaudio.org for more info.

 

[Nospam]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kidkoala ... 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!!

Umm... Have you taken a close look at converting between encoding formats in iTunes? It's really quite a simple process. I rip all my CDs into Apple Lossless, then convert them to 320AAC for use on my iPod. It doesn't get much simpler.

You just go to "Preferences" and select the encoding format, then select the songs you want to convert, go to the "Advanced" menu, and select "Convert to xxx" (where xxx is whatever you selected in "Preferences").

Granted, you're limited to whatever encoding formats iTunes supports (no Ogg, for instance), but if you use an iPod, that's not an issue.

Now, if you want to use Foobar, then FLAC would seem to be the obvious choice.

 

[Helter Skelter]

I find that Monkey's Audio (.ape) gets the best compression levels (meaning lower filesizes), but it's fairly resource intensive to encode and decode in comparison to other formats.

I prefer FLAC (.flac), as it still gets pretty good compression rates and is easy to decode no matter what compression level you use, and this along with the fact that it's a totally open source format has led to a fair amount of portable player support (Rio Karma, iRiver H-series, several iAudio players).

Your iPod doesn't support either, though, and if you already use iTunes as your main music player, then I guess there's not a whole lot of reason not to use Apple Lossless.

 

[Oliver :)]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kidkoala 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,

- you already use iTunes
- you use an iPod
- you are still thinking about whether you might want to use a lossless encoder *other* than ALAC?

Quote:

Originally Posted by kidkoala but it does not seem like it would lend itself well to re-encoding with a different lossy format.

What do you mean by that? I am not quite sure I understand correctly, but with iTunes, should you want to re-encode to another format,
you go to the import settings,
change the settings to what you want to encode to,
go back to find the tracks you want to re-encode,
right-click/control-click,
select "re-encode to XXX" and iTunes will create duplicates of said tracks in the selected format.
It is a wee bit messy though since you can only have one format in the contextual menu so it takes a bit of going back & forth should you be experimenting with formats or bitrates.

 

[james__bean]

In my personal experience, I actually like wavpack. It compresses relatively quickly and it has smaller file sizes than FLAC. It also compresses a wide variety of sample rates like 88.2 kHz and 192 kHz with ease. I do like flac though for the simple fact that its supported by a lot of mp3 players.

 

[ken36]

I have two libraries. ALAC and 224AAC.

 

[keiron99]

Apple lossless for me. If I was more technically competent at my PC, I'd go for FLAC and use Foobar, but I've spent dozens of hours with foobar and always struggle. It just looks so damned ugly unless you put huge amounts of effort into it, but I do like some of the plug ins. But hell, I can't even find the volume control on it. Itunes is a ready made solution, Foobar requires some knowledge and dedication - I have the latter, but not the former, so it ends up being ultimately frustrating.

For the non-techies, Itunes does a wonderful job. It's just so easy to use and on the eye. Not for nothing is Apple so succesful with the Ipod and Itunes.

As for sound quality - through my Stax phones or Dynaudio speakers I can't detect any difference whatsoever between any of the lossless formats or players. It staggers me that people claim they can, I'd love to be preent when a blind test is conducted.

 

[stefan]

I use Monkey's Audio (APE): the user interface is simple, and it works so seamlessly with my favorite player, J River Media Center.
For portable use, all my rips are simply transcoded to MP3, because file sizes are more critical and I cannot hear a difference between lossless and MP3 on a portable with the crappy stock earbuds.

The advantage with lossless is that you'll never be stuck with one format. APE files work for me at the moment, but I can see myself switching to FLAC or anything else sometime in the future.

 

[GotNoRice]

Any windows system that has Windows Media Player 9 or above will have the ability to rip a CD to WMA lossless.

I personally use EAC+FLAC but i've setup WMP to rip to WMA lossless on many people's computers with great results.

 

[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...

 

[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

That said I strongly recommend FLAC or wavpack. I used to rip all my albums at Q5 in FLAC, more recently with the latest release of wavpack (4.3) it's gained quite an edge over FLAC as far as compression goes. And it has a very fast developer, the developer who posts on HA seems to be a really nice, down to earth guy as well and is always listening to feedback

 

[Duckspeak]

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

This is totally misinformed. While I agree that ALE is not competitive on pure compression ratio, it's certainly competitive as far as speed of compression and decompression. Furthermore, it is quite easy to convert between ALE and WAV, so I really don't know what you mean by a "closed" format.

 

[fewtch]

Flac here. Used to use LPAC, but flac simply has more support on Usenet, portable players, etc. Got Monkey's Audio installed also, but I don't use it for personal archiving.

 

[nicknameless]

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