So, what is the BEST digital music format?

[bogie]

Say I'm gonna take my 400 or so CDs, and put 'em all on a hard drive or three... Assuming I'm not concerned with space. What format should I use?

[thomasw]

[irishrugby]

I would choose Monkey Audio (APE) in a heartbeat. Its a lossless format, but it will also compress the files to some degree (say 700 MB WAV files to about 600 MB). APE also supports tagging, which WAV does not. I would never rip that much music into something without info tags, especially with the fact that FreeDB is built into just about every audio ripper.

Finally APE will play in just about any media player I have seen (save itunes). If you really want to use itunes as a library, then iTunes lossless is another good choice.

[Pete Schumacher ®]

> Say I'm gonna take my 400 or so CDs, and put
> 'em all on a hard drive or three... Assuming
> I'm not concerned with space. What format
> should I use?

wav files are one-to-one duplicates of the cd audio format. No compression, perfect copies.

[irishrugby]

Provided Link: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_


While I like APE, FLAC is also very popular. And furthermore, these lossless codecs do not represent any quality loss from the original WAVs. They are just more efficient at encoding the information.

Regardless of what you choose, I would recommend Exact Audio Copy for your ripping. Not only is it free, but it supports conversion to various lossless codecs, and is widely regarded as the best ripping program (to get a perfect rip of your album). Check hydrogen audio for more info on all of this stuff.

Also see the link for an explanation of EAC+Monkey Audio.

[unknownuser]

> Say I'm gonna take my 400 or so CDs, and put
> 'em all on a hard drive or three... Assuming
> I'm not concerned with space. What format
> should I use?

If you're not concerned about space, use APE or FLAC. Those are the two most popoular and widely supported lossless formats, I give FLAC the slight advantage because it is open source.


(Originally posted by: morbo)

[skebenin]

> Say I'm gonna take my 400 or so CDs, and put
> 'em all on a hard drive or three... Assuming
> I'm not concerned with space. What format
> should I use?

That's 200 GB or so worth of CDs. You could store them as WAV, but I'd choose a lossless codec or a high bitrate lossy codec - or both (redundancy is good).

With a lossless codec, you can reproduce the WAV bitstream *exactly*. That's what lossless means. You also get tagging so you can store information about the track, artist and album right with the music, and you save anywhere from 10%-50% of the space needed for WAV. There really isn't any reason to choose WAV over a lossless codec.

A high bitrate, open codec like MP3 gives more playback flexibility for portable players or media players like Slim Devices Squeezebox.

[bryanjackson]

The Squeezebox does APE and FLAC

[cole]

buy a sony 400&1 cd changer that plays SACD and DVD audio. I t costs about 300 dollaes and no compresion. Plays everything how it is recorded. Above 400 cd you may look in to compressed audio files, but I wouldnt go there untill I had to. In fact, I wouldnt go there at all.

[oldmongrel]

> wav files are one-to-one duplicates of the
> cd audio format. No compression, perfect
> copies.

I concur. You could get it all on a 300gb drive and go bigger later, or add another HD as needed. The first thing I do with a new CD is put it on the HD as a WAV, and burn a copy disk. The HD or the copy is for everyday use. The original is solely an archive, goes in the "vault" and is never touched unless there's a problem with one of the copies (which could involve my deciding that I could have used a better ripping process).

You can also do some MP3/WMA/etc stuff too if you need it for a portable or whatever. I like MP3 using VBR (set to "3") @ 320k/160k min with "very high quality" (q=0) using CDex. Processing does take quite a while on my older PC. BTW, having all the WAVs on the HD first greatly simplifies later conversion to lossy formats like MP3.

John

[kene]