Best lossless audio format

[at_sym]

I have no idea which forum is the "correct" place for idle questions, so I'll head to the Coat Room. :)

I was thinking of winnowing out some of my old music CDs. Most of them are ones where one song is great and the rest are less so. I'd like to save a high-quality version of the great songs, but I'm a little leery of saving them as MP3 or other lossless formats. Is AIFF the way to go? FLAC? Some other lossless encoder?

[yellow]

I believe the format on the CD is AIFF, at least that's what I would get if I drag & dropped the song from the CD. But AIFF is a large (size) format with little or no compression, so each song would probably average ~50 mb. I'm sure you can see how this could end up being a problem.

I'm curious why you don't want to use MP3 as the encoding method of choice. If you encoded it at a rediculously high rate, you'd get pretty close to the original CD quality and a smaller size than AIFF. Some folks say that they can hear the quality difference, but for me, too many years of headphones, firearms, and loud concerts has reduced everything to a dull ring.

[at_sym]

Thanks yellow. My main reason for thinking of going lossless is that I have a bunch of storage right now. (Long story. Basically, a dot-com failed on me, and the owner offered to let us have equipment instead of the last month's pay.) I guess I was a little hesitant about MP3s because I did a cull like this years ago, and I ended up with a bunch of 128 MP3s that sounded pretty crappy. I was kicking myself afterwards.

What's the highest rate you can encode MP3s at? I've seen 320. Is that state-of-the-art?

[yellow]

I agree with you. My default encoding is set at 192 kbps which might still be crap according to some, but like I said, I'm deaf. I'm not 100% sure if 320 kbps is the ceiling or not, but encoded at that rate, I'm sure it would sound pretty good.

[aubreyapple]

Do you need to be able to play the songs at a whim? If not, then why not bzip2 the aiff files. Bzip2 is pretty high compression, better than gzip but pretty slow. If you need to be able to just click and play, then ignore this. And, it is completely lossless.

[djn1]

I have all my mp3s encoded at 256k using the lame engine and, to be honest, I really can't tell the difference. Having said that, I have done a side-by-side comparison, through better audio equipment than my own, and I can tell the difference; i.e. they don't sound quite the same, but I'd be loathe to say that the original was better.

My advice would be to pick some of your favourite tracks, encode them using different engines and different bit-rates, and see which you like and which you don't.

[Gimpy00Wang]

Using iTunes, I encode everything to 320 in stereo (not joint stereo). Before I got my PB I was using FreeBSD as my primary machine and I encoded evertything to 320 oggs. To my ears and my equiptment, 320 oggs and mp3's are pretty similar as far as quality. Comparing a 128 ogg and mp3, the ogg is the clear winner...once avain, according to my ears and equipt.

- G!mpy

[Jacques]

ACC at 320 is acceptible, use that instead of AIFF - all that extra space you have can get munched pretty quick!

--

Ogg doesn't seem to be a popular option for Macintosh, so I've gathered. Does anyone here use the available (I've seen it somewhere..) Ogg plug-in for iTunes?

[Mikey-San]

Audio data on an Red-Book-compliant audio CD is in CDDA format, which is a two-channel, 16-bit PCM format with a maximum sampling rate of 44.1KHz.

AIFF is just a wrapper created by Apple for raw PCM audio.

[Outofmymindyo]

if you had crappy 128 bit mp3's (unless you have the hearing of a deer or something) were probably variable bit rate files, with the mean setting at 128. Variable bit rate works on the principle that when there isnt as much music (data) there, the encoding goes down, but when there is more and more data being run through the compiler, the bit rate increases. Eitherway, if you want the upmost quality of sound 320 is the way to go, though if you plan on enjoying it, you would have to stay away from most CD players, as their SINAD is not good enough to enjoy the full benefits of 320k compression (hook your computer right into your surround sound with optical links) :) just my $.02