I've just started using FLAC as my compression format, b/c I don't really want to use lossy compression for archiving... it's acutally kindof stupid to do that IMHO, but if you don't know or don't think about it...

Anyway, just wondering if anyone here uses any lossless compression formats, and what their experiences are.

FLAC seems pretty middle of the road. I'm not worried about decoding time or anything, as I have MP3 for listening to, but it's reasonable, and seems reliable enough.


And for those of you who don't know WTF I'm talking about, it would be a good idea to look into it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_...ess_compression

http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html

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When doing anything lossless, I almost ALWAYS run for FLAC - even though Monkey's Audio sometimes gets better compression for me, FLAC has the best support (both hardware and software) and it's open source to boot (I always make an effort to use open source software when I can). Whenever I get a vinyl, I immediately rip it, encode to FLAC, then archive it on CD - there's nothing worse than finding out the track you've been building up for for hours has a big 'ol scratch in it Whenever I'm done with a track, I encode the 24-bit/96khz wave track pre and post master to a FLAC file and archive it too. Just in case

Other than FLAC and Monkey's Audio, there is also Apple Lossless - which is being made more popular by iTunes and the iPod, but it doesn't really offer much in terms of usability - and Shorten, which you'll see often used for encoding concert performances over at the Live Music Archive at Archive.org (free Dave Matthews concerts? yes please).

In my personal use though, FLAC is my lossless codec of choice. Multiple OS/software/hardware support, streamability, good compression ratios, and open source do it for me.

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Awesome man.

Looks like I'll be sticking with FLAC. I've looked at those others, and it just looked to me like there's a bigger community surrounding FLAC, so more of a chance that it will be developed. Plus, it's open source, like you said.

As for hardware support...? What brands?

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APE (monkey audio) is probably best when it comes to lossless compression. However it isn't open source (I think) and less widely supported as well

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quote:

If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier

Yep, I'll second what retrobyte said. Personally I use APE for archiving CD's and transferring masters (though mostly I just end up using RAR as it has better support). The only thing not so good about APE is that it doesn't support bit depths > 24 bit, in which case I use FLAC (although I have encountered problems with that before too).

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why compress? Storage is cheap..

quote:

Originally posted by djglacial As for hardware support...? What brands?

You usually have to do a particular firmware replacement, as very few actually support it right out of the box, so it's kind of cheating You can get the iRiver to play them with very little trouble - same thing with a lot of digital music recievers. There's a full list here:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

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quote:

Originally posted by Diginerd why compress? Storage is cheap..

I've produced over 120 songs. At 16*48000 that's about 100*70MB = 7000MB

Now, if I chose to leave my wavs 24x48000... 10GB of hard drive space needed.

And retrobyte says he uses 96khz. 20GB.



You're probably right that it should be easy enough just to buy extra space, but I'd rather be backing up 5GB over 10GB.

Could fit all of it on one DVD. Plus, the chances of losing a large file to bad harddrive sectors is cut in half. It seems I get more bad sectors every time I reboot (I'm exaggerating a bit of obviously), so it is a bit of an issue when you have so many files 100MB or more.

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