On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 12:15 -0700, bobreb wrote: > I'm looking for the highest quality option. Everything is currently in > WAV format -- that was the best quality option available for the > Audiotron device I'm switching from. Will probably re-rip to WMA > lossless. Before I do, I thought I'd ask some experts what they'd do to > save a little space while preserving audio quality. For instance, why > Flac over WMA lossless?
If you've ripped it to WAV format, you don't need to rerip it to make it be FLAC, all you have to do is compress it. Which eliminates the need to touch all the CDs. Depending on your file structure, there are tools that can guess the proper tags from the file names, and most folks have something like music/genre/artist/album/.... so it is easy. As others have said, lossless is lossless. AAC lossless, MLP, WMA lossless, FLAC all should be the same. The quality should be identical because the uncompressed bits are identical. (sometimes padding gets added when you uncompress, but all players, DACs, etc. ignore the padding. And right now, the SqueezeBox 2 only handles FLAC over the network, which is a really good thing. That along would be justification enough for me. The biggest difference is licensing terms. AAC, MLP, and WMA are proprietary systems. The license holders can set the terms and can change the terms as they see fit. I expect that WMA will include ever stronger DRM (digital rights management) systems in Vista and subsequent releases of Windows. If you like or are willing to live with the terms of the closed formats, use them. If you think that once you paid for your music that you should be able to enjoy it without Apple's or Microsoft's or Meridian's permission, then FLAC will look better to you. Its important to me, but YMMV -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
