Which lossy format are you using? Options

[rc55]

A classic question with varied answers, I'm sure. Be as elaborate about your choice, settings and setup as possible.

Do you find that the universal mp3 format is good enough for you?

Perhaps you like the free ride of ogg vorbis?

Is AAC your future format of choice?

Is MPC meeting your demands precisely?

Or perhaps you've decided to stick with a previous tool and use the DRM plagued formats, RM or WMA.

Ruairi



(edit)

Explanations:

CODE

MP3  Mpeg-1 Audio Layer 3

OGG  Ogg Vorbis

AAC  MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding

MPC  MusePack

WMA  Windows Media Audio

RM      RealMedia

VQF    Vector Quantisation Format

MP3Pro    MP3+SBR



Lossless

    APE/FLAC/OptimFrog/LPAC...

    

Other

    LQT/AupecG2/QDX/MP2/WAV/...

[rc55]

I'm using MPC for the time being, because its super fast at encoding, and the standard profile meets all my needs.

I use EAC for ripping, using CiTay's recommended settings.

Ruairi

[Pri3st]

Mp3.
It's just enough good for my ears:)
And it's fully supported by every audio software.

[rjamorim]

Blah. Does anybody here still doesn't know which format I'm using?

[rc55]

For those who havent been Roberto'd, he's using AAC, for Ivan IST God, the power and the glory.

Ruairi

[HotshotGG]

Ogg Vorbis, it's free, it's open, it's smooth, and it's stupendous. Thank god for Monty and anyone who helps out and works on the project. Blessed their little hearts.

[Phobos]

Maybe AAC is the only format right now that has true transparent quality at high bitrates and still has hardware support. Its possible that vorbis will in a near future, but since i wan backups now, ill stick to AAC ATM

[westgroveg]

Only on this forum will you see MPC the most used format, most people here are a bit obsessed with perfect quality I think. I choose Mp3, L.A.M.E --alt-preset extreme for just that bit extra, you have the highest compatibility & I would predict it will continue growing the only thing that can knock out Mp3 is OGG because its free & looks like it can grow but not for a while, I think. the big companies & consumers don’t like change they want stability not pay big bucks for something that will be replaced/obsolete in a couple of years.

[macdaddy]

I used to use MusePack. I was very happy with the results, and am grateful for the learning experience. But the more I get into building a digital audio library, the more I realize that lossless encoding is the obvious choice...

I am one of the two (at present count) who chose lossless audio compression")...

[smg]

It's MPC for me and of course everyone should know by now I use
--braindead --minSMR 3
Still catching alot of greive over this but I can spare the harddrive space

[DigitalMan]

:naughty:
Well, liking the Monkey and transcode off to MP3 for portability needs. Takes a lot of storage space though....

Like MP3 for portable applications - the ambient noise levels in airplanes and cars makes a LAME MP3 file sound fine, but I need the lossless on the big rig at home.

Cheers.

[andy2kxp]

MPC in general and Monkey's for archiving

[shday]

ogg seems to be catching up in the poll.

Maybe it is because less frequent visitors/posters are more likely to be ogg users.

... or it's just fluke... we will see

[dev0]

I'm playing around with Ogg and MPC at the moment. Both are great, but completely different formats and I like them both. Ogg sounds fine at -q 5 for me, MPC does at --standard.
What I like especially about Ogg is the simple, but powerful tagging (I do a lot of bootlegging, so LOCATION=Düsseldorf is just great) and exactly this is UMO the weak site of MPC (no standard tagging). I will probably switch completely to Ogg, when Frank officially starts working on it or the first Oggable portable players are out.
dev0

[Volcano]

MPC --xtreme for me at the moment (and sometimes, if I want a lossless copy, FLAC). Since I have no intentions of buying a portable player (CD walkman is all right for me)...

Once all the tuning is done on Vorbis and RC4 is out, I'll see about switching to Vorbis, though. It's such a damn difficult decision, has been bugging me for weeks now

[rocketsauce]

Started out with MP3 (LAME insane), but then read about HA and Musepack on r3mix Forum, so then I decided it was crazy to use all that harddrive space encoding at 320, and since I'm still using dial-up, P2P sharing wasn't really an issue, so started using MPC (extreme). I still have a lot of MP3s (of varying quality) that friends give me every now and then (I have hours of stuff from NPG Music Club that I still have never listened to).

The last couple of weeks I've been playing around with OGG and FLAC. Now my dilema is whether or not I'm just going to commit and go lossless since I've decided in a year or two the harddrive space issue will mostly be nonexistent . Portability and P2P really isn't an issue for me at this point, but FLAC does have the Phatbox/Music Keg support which is kinda cool and most likely there will be some kind of hardware support for OGG soon. But then there is also the whole problem of deciding between Monkey and FLAC. Aaahhh!

Basically, now I'm just kinda confused about what I want to do, so I've stopped doing anything.

Rob

[Frank Klemm]

The kind of the question and the possible answers are looking like taken
from the book "How to lie with statistics" (ISBN: 0393310728)



1st big error: You can only give one answer, even when you have all sort of files
2nd big error: You ask whta the people thing, not what they really have (So I was astonished about the amount of MP3s I have):

CODE

Computer at home:



       duration        bitrate         source          note:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

LPAC    10338 min       806 kbps        CDs             ca. 50 CD-ROM's with LPAC are not taken into

OFR       527 min       577 kbps        FM radio/textbook CDs

FLAC      119 min      1171 kbps        FM radio

MAC         2 min       721 kbps        Internet download

SZIP        2 min       103 kbps        Synthetic test files

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

MP3     16294 min           kbps        Internet download

MPC       477 min       188 kbps        test files, generated on the fly when needed

MP2        35 min       150 kbps        test files

OGG         8 min       121 kbps        test files

AAC         4 min       113 kbps        test files

MP3Pro      1 min        64 kbps        test files

WMA         ?                           test files

RM          ?                           test files

VQF         ?                           test files





Computer at work:



       duration        bitrate         source

----------------------------------------------------------------

MPC     ca. 15000 min   ca. 180 kbps    LPACs at home on HD+CD-R

I should answer with MP3, although these amount of files is the result of a robot I
used in 2000.

BTW:
Resizing of the Netscape window now works without erasing contents

[Corsair]

Started with LAME, but it turned out that MP3 just isn't enough quality for me. I also don't like MP3 because it isn't truly gapless. MPC is great, but it isn't completely free and open. Lossless was an option, but the compression just isn't efficient enough (heavy metal has bad compression ratio) so I ended up with Ogg Vorbis, using RC2 Garf Tuned 2 (no pre-echo as far as I can tell), acceptable file size (~300-320kbps), fully gapless (yes!) and great tagging system.

[fewtch]

Originally posted by rocketsauce
The last couple of weeks I've been playing around with OGG and FLAC.  Now my dilema is whether or not I'm just going to commit and go lossless since I've decided in a year or two the harddrive space issue will mostly be nonexistent .

Why, will they be making hard drives that don't have a MTBF rating and won't occasionally die or get corrupted for some reason (resulting in loss of hundreds of "lossless" files)?

I use lossless for archiving to some extent (mainly vinyl recordings), but even there it won't be too convenient until some writable DVD format drops in price (you can't fit too much lossless stuff onto a CD-R).

As far as lossy, I see no reason to abandon MP3 at the moment... my portable player supports it, and with the --alt-presets it's transparent for the most part.

[shday]

hmm, I voted for ogg because it was my "favorite"... :eek:

But my hard drive has roughly 100 times more megs of MP3 than ogg...

And I definitely do more casual listening to MP3 than ogg.

Time for a new poll!

[Phobos]

But wtf, lets hope that vorbis gets real good quality at high bitrates, i only backup my own cds in AAC, as i said because i want transparent backing up now. The ones i rip other ppl's cds are in monkey. I would surely switch to ogg since my cd-rw has precise DAE but probably wavelets wont get truly good till vorbis 1.3 or stuff, and thats too much to wait...

Corsair: Yeah, mp3 has not enough quality for me anymore too,

[lucpes]

56 GB in MPC and only 1GB of mp3s (rare stuff but Xing I used before...) - rest deleted of I gave away the mp3 CD's I burnt

30GB - my encodes, the rest downloaded from AquA...

[smok3]

different formats, but my choice for future will be ogg-vorbis (maybe).

-mp3 (abr 128 preset) for movies i make from captured mjpeg avis (+divx)
-ogg for music at 48 khz and home music at 44.1.
-mpc for home music and music that is decoded back to wavs for editing.

'home music' = not so important stuff i listen in background.

smok3

p.s. yeah, decoded

[lucpes]

Originally posted by smok3
-mpc for home music and music that is transcoded back to wavs for editing.

more like decoded back to wav

edit: typo

[silver_cpu]

I use MPC myself, and have found it more than adequate in quality and speed, in most situations. I'm still waiting for SV8 to come out, which should fix the one gripe that I have with MPC (it's infamous "internal clipping errors" message). I use --xtreme --xlevel, and 99.99% of the time enjoy hassle free, high quality music. I do, however, keep all of my CDs around, just in case the format undergoes some serious changes in the future

I too am amazed at just how competitive MPC is with the other formats, coming out on top over even OGG, which seems to really be picking up some steam of it's own.