Well, I'm not going to touch the "mp3's sound perfect vs mp3's sound awful" debate, as nothing useful will come out of arguing over individual preferences.
I would, however, like to tell everyone about a very interesting alternative codec. It's called FLAC, for Fully Lossless Audio Codec. And it is exactly that - completely lossless, meaning that there is NO lost information - nothing whatever is thrown away from the original .wav file, but through the magic of compression algorithms, compression is still possible. This is similar to the way you can zip a text file, compressing its size, but without losing a single character contained in the file when you finally unzip it.
FLAC does not produce the huge compression ratios that mp3 does - in my experience, the output .flac file is about one-third the size of the input .wav file. That means you can compress the average CD to about 200 MB instead of the original 600 MB. That still means
you can put about 5 CD's of material on one gig of hard drive space, or about one thousand CD's on a single 200 Gigabyte drive.
With the rate at which hard-drive and flash-memory capacity is increasing, in a very few years many of us will be deciding that it wasn't worth throwing away some audible quality for the sake of compressing our CD-quality audio files into mp3's. When that happens, most people will have to re-rip their entire collection. If you use FLAC, there won't be a need to do that: you can convert FLAC back into .wav without any missing bits, and re-convert it into any future codec standard that may come.
I'm one of the people who think I hear degradation when going from CD to mp3. So I now only use FLAC.
FLAC is easy to use with Linux - plug it into Grip or your other favourite ripper in place of Lame or Bladeenc or Oggenc. I haven't used it with other OS'es, but I think it can be used with Windows and Mac's too.
You can read about FLAC and download it at
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
-flieslikeabeagle
26th April 2004, 10:01 PM
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