gutted Wrote: > Recenlty been looking at re-ripping into a lossless format - initially > thinking about FLAC, but only because that's the only one I really > know. Through a bit of research though, I find that there are several > different options for lossless. > > What are the pros/cons of each? Does it just come down to personal > pref, or will I get better compression, or faster encode, or various > other differences between the formats? > > Which format have you decided to go for, and was there any specific > reason behind your choice?
I recently (like, this month) decided to go to flac. I didn't think it mattered much--lossless is lossless--but if the collection gets large then it's a good idea to streamline the archiving process and for that a single format is a good idea. THAT, and the fact that flac is the freest amongst alac, ape, and flac. The other losslesses do not compress so well (if at all). And flac is popular. So, free and popular. And not likely to get a nasty copy-protection virus from the likes of Sony or Microsoft or Apple. So ten years from now (might as well plan ahead) the music should be just as accessible as it will be today. THAT, and the existence of command-line tools that should in the future make it easy to manipulate the 1000s of files with a single linestroke. So transitioning my current apple lossless files (which was roped in by the friendly ergonomic iTunes interface) to flac will, on the day I do it, consist of typing in a single line and letting it munch away overnight. Oh yeah, and then there's this cute "audiophile" gadget that plays music from your hard drive ( https://secure.slimdevices.com/order/ ). It works best with flac; otherwise you either eat extra cpu cycles, network bandwidth, or both. Here's a post that states things pretty clearly, http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=62961&postcount=57 If slimserver was as pretty and fun and ergonomic as iTunes, the superiority of flac would be more obvious. At the moment, since iTunes does not handle flac, you have to accept that you will not play your Tunes that way; if you can handle slimserver then it's not a big deal, but if your technophile rating is not high enough to make that transition (and if lack the patience to wait for that day when your music collection reaches a stable equilibrium), flac is borderline pointless. Yet even in the iTunes vs. slimserver comparison there is a silver lining in the cloud over slimserver: since it's free, it does indeed support flac and can be adapted to handle any other file format that is useful. iTunes, unfortunately, only does so at the whim of Steve Jobs and his minions. iTunes is like a Stepford wife: pretty and docile, but there is a price to be paid. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18581 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
