[gswpete]

Now that I have the emu, I can start ripping my cd collection to my hard drive again. Which format should I go with? Ape, flac, 320kbps mp3's...etc? I suppose mp3's will have the best compatibility, but I think it's kind of a waste for the emu to play mp3's. Which one are you guys using and why?

 

[GokieKS]

Between the lossless formats, I'd go with APE (Monkey's Audio). I simply like the tagging system better, and I've not been able to discern a difference between it and FLAC in terms of quality. Apple Lossless is kind of pointless unless you have an iPod and really like iTunes... and even then, I'm not so sure, as using lossless on a portable player just doesn't strike me as very sensible (yet).

I personally use 320kbps MP3s for compatibility's sake - I really don't want to keep seperate libraries for home and portable use.

~KS

 

[remilard]

FLAC has good hardware support and their are tools available to transcode from it, which I don't think is the case for apple lossless atm.

 

[aug1516]

I use APE just because it was easier for me to get working with Plextools when ripping cd's.

 

[Skarecrow]

I use FLAC because of more widespread compatibility. Mostly because that's the format my portable supports, even though I never use it on the portable. Plus it's sorta related to Ogg Vorbis, which is the format I do use on the portable. I dunno, "keeping it in the family" so to speak.

320kbps mp3 is not lossless and never will be. There are artifacts of MP3 encoding that will never be completely eliminated. If you're going to bother going that big, go FLAC or APE and be done with it.

Oggdropxpd accepts FLACs as input, it even transfers all the tag information automattically. What I do is use FLAC on my home system for listening, and oggify anything I want on my portable. That way I don't have to compromise on sound quality for my home listening, nor do I need to carry around excessivly huge (320kbps) files on my portable. I'm not sure that you can set up razorLAME or annother LAME front end to do the same thing with mp3 that oggdropxpd does with vorbis, but I would be suprised if nobody has gotten around to doing so yet.

 

[gswpete]

Hmmm thanks for the replies so far. I guess it rules out 320kbps mp3's. I'm going to read up some more on flac.

 

[Puddleglum]

Yeah I rip to FLAC for my hard drive, and Ogg for my rio karma. works great so far, unless you've got an Ipod I think FLAC or APE would work great.

 

[MikoLayer]

another FLAC user here. i dont really have a particular reason other than what i heard about FLAC vs APE in terms of encoding speed/cpu usage for decoding. APE is supposedely slightly better in terms of compresison ratio but with storage going so cheap thats pretty much a non-issue i suppose.

 

[breez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GokieKS I've not been able to discern a difference between it and FLAC in terms of quality.

Well, that's quite obvious since both are lossless formats

 

[davvy]

Another vote for FLAC here.

One thing that I really like about it that hasn't been mentioned yet is that there is a great Winamp plugin "reference FLAC decoder" that supports replaygain tags. You can add replaygain info to the tags of your FLAC collection using Foobar and then when you play them back in Winamp the volume of each album is normallised to the same level. Using replaygain also prevents clipping (and removes the need to reduce the output volume of my EMU1212m).

 

[ted_b]

I use FLAC but no real reason over APE, just that I found the FLAC front-end first. Never heard or used APE, but I know plenty of people use it. I rip wav/cue files ("copy image and create cue sheet") using EAC then do two things: I encode to 224 AAC for my iPod, and I also encode the wavs to FLAC (and copy the cue files as well) for archiving and listening through foobar. The AAC files sit in iTunes but now that I have a tweaked out foobar setup I never really use iTunes except to manage my iPod. HD storage is cheap, so I wouldn't worry about storing both a compressed format for portability and a lossless for archiving and using at home. Just my $.02

Ted_B

P.S. If you're goona use MP3's somewhere in this mix I'd recommend a vbr encode. Search on "Chris Myden". His site is invaluable for making good vbr MP3's (no, that's not an oxymoron).

 

[Asmo]

I use ape, but no reason over flac, I have lots of flac files also, either downloaded, or ripped just to compare, and no real difference, I use ape beacuse its what I discovered first.

 

[Ph34rful]

I use FLAC for my lossless.
Here are a few reasons:
FLAC is open source. Where as Monkey's Audio is not.
Also FLAC is compatible with some portable players... Monkey's Audio is not.
FLAC also works on non-windows systems. Monkey's Audio does not.

 

[kyrie]

Quote:

FLAC is open source. Where as Monkey's Audio is not.

Monkey's Audio became open-source quite a while ago.

 

[Ph34rful]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyrie Monkey's Audio became open-source quite a while ago.

Oh well I haven't really been keeping up. I still stand by my other reasons.