Lossless format & ripper?

[rick57]

Is there anything with higher compression, but equal quality to FLAC?

and to rip to HD, use EAC or something else?

thanks

[ruerose]

I'm no expert, but here is a couple links

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm

dbpoweramp recommends Musepack for lossy
http://www.musepack.net/

[rick57]

That the "Swiss army knife" of digital Audio looks interesting

Is that shareware?
Anyone tried dbpoweramp?

Cheers

[rjm]

Flac is lossless, so the "quality" of the compression is a poor choice of words. It gives back what went in. Its the "quantity" or compression level that differentiates the different settings in the flac encoder, and the many alternatives.

Generally more compression takes more CPU horsepower to encode and decode. Its an intrinsic property of lossless compression that the file size only changes slightly no matter how fancy or how poor the algorithm, however. The spead of compression ratios was found to vary from 0.55 to 0.48 regardless of codec or computing time.

In other words no matter what you do the compressed files will be about half the size of the original. Thus is makes sense to keep the CPU requirements modest and choose a widely compatible, easy to use codec. If you need smaller files you will have to switch to using lossy compression.

I use flac at the default setting - 6 - found on the front end. I used to use wma lossless but gave that up after I noticed the sound was noticeably worse than the wav original. I have no idea what was up with that, as after I converted the file back to wav it was fine. I can only assume it was something in the way Windows media player played back wma vs wav data. I have since sworn off both wma and media player.

[rbroer]

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/

This format with .APE extension consistently beats .FLAC in compression quantity, but don't expect great savings though !

But, I remember reading an important thing about .FLAC is that decoding is quite easy on the CPU compared to other lossless formats, making it ideal for lossless playback on portable media player equipment, or underclocked, low power, silent media pc's

[rick57]

Rudolf

> FLAC is that decoding is quite easy on the CPU compared to other lossless formats, making it ideal for lossless playback on portable media player equipment, or underclocked, low power, silent media pc's

Ah, maybe that's why it's popular!

Cheers