Different lossless codecs, general concensus?

stephentw

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I've been reading up on lossless codecs and I'm curious about which are the most preferred by most people and which people think are the best in their opinion.

It appears most are favouring FLAC but I've also heard support for Monkeys Audio (APE) and also WavPack and read enough things to make my eyes bleed on Hydrogen Audio forums.

Is FLAC really best? And if so whats people opinions on Encoders? Again I hear lots of support for EAC but I tend to use CDex at the moment.
 
FLAC for the native support by Squeezebox
 
Is FLAC generally the most widespread/implemented support wise? I get the impression it is.

Just weighing up what to use really.
 
Go with which ever suits the devices you want to play it back with. I also have a Squeezebox, so i use FLAC as it's natively supported. Native means the player inself has in build FLAC playing capabilities - if i use other non-native formats the server will need to convert before sending to the SB.

If you spend much time on the Hydrogen Audio forums, you are quite right - you will end up with your eye's bleeding. There is no better place for info on digital audio, but they are hardcore enthusiasts and developers who often muddy the waters with their obsessive nitpicking over formats.

Basically there is no difference in terms of sound quality between the lossless formats and the difference in compression level is nominal. At the end of the day, just pick what your player supports or stick to FLAC because its the most widely supported - you can always convert to another lossless format without losing an sound quality - thats the beauty of lossless.
 
Go with which ever suits the devices you want to play it back with. I also have a Squeezebox, so i use FLAC as it's natively supported. Native means the player inself has in build FLAC playing capabilities - if i use other non-native formats the server will need to convert before sending to the SB.
As per above, go with whatever format your device(s) natively support

That is the trouble with the new digital world. Flac is completely open, but some choose to go with their own, for example such as Apple and their own apple lossless for the iPod. iPods do not support Flac (well not natively - and only last gen!)

But don't worry too much about it... just choose the format your device supports and go with that
 
Flac probably suits best then, portable supports that. I'm curious as to whether it'll work on xbox 360, that would be pretty handy, saves me turning the computer on to play music. I don't think it does though so I'd have to transcode to mp3 for that.

Here's a question, I've already got my collection in mp3 (which I now realise isn't good) and the time consuming thing for me was typing out the tracklists for CD's which couldn't be found on CDDB. So since I already have them in my mp3's tags is there anything I can do to transfer tags to say FLAC if whatever ripper I use doesn't find them on it's database?
 
Also bear in mind that if you are using lossless, it doesn't really matter which one you choose, as by definition you can convert lossless files between formats with no loss of quality. I ripped my entire collection in Windows Media Lossless when I had a Roku SoundBridge. When I bought a Sonos system, I just left my PC converting the library from WMAL to Apple Lossless for a few days - it took around 3 days to convert around 800 albums from WMAL to ALAC on a 1.2GHz Celeron.
 
Here's a question, I've already got my collection in mp3 (which I now realise isn't good) and the time consuming thing for me was typing out the tracklists for CD's which couldn't be found on CDDB. So since I already have them in my mp3's tags is there anything I can do to transfer tags to say FLAC if whatever ripper I use doesn't find them on it's database?

I believe that the program Tag & Rename will allow you to export tags to a file and then import them again to a different format - not tried it myself though. Tag & Rename is very good for tagging pretty much any format - it's payware, but it's a pretty powerful piece of software that will do just about anything with tags.

Edit: Ignore the above! Yes, you can export tag data to numerous different file formats with T&R, but you can't then import it again. Not that useful a feature, really! That said, you can copy a tag from a file in one format and paste it into a file of another format - but you have to do it one file at a time, rather than all of an album at once. Still quicker than typing it all in again though.
 
It must be VERY obscure music, i have some really rare off the wall stuff that was all on FreeDB and CDDB.
 
Yeah a lot of it is just bands who play locally, totally unknown.

What's a good tagging program thats free? Not keen on paying for something to be honest, not being cheap just think for this purpose freeware is better suited.
 

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