2012 ripping/encoding general poll Options

[rudefyet]

Lossy: LAME -V 0 or iTunes VBR 256kbps AAC

That is about all I use anymore, everything is uploaded to Google Music or another similar service.

If I were to stumble across a new laptop and a large usb drive I believe I would probably be using WavPack to archive my collection.

This post has been edited by rudefyet: Jan 3 2012, 18:22

[GeSomeone]

As usual my poll answers reflect the past year or so. For lossless I totally moved away from WavPack and TAK, in favour of Flac. There is no quality difference between lossless codecs so it's only practical usability that lead me to that.

For lossy it's LAME -V 1 or lossyWav with Flac.

[user]

I moved away from monkey's audio ape, to FLAC, tried a little bit wavpack, decided for FLAC forever, all years, hmmm, decades ago


FLAC is the only thing, because it's the real thing


In the meantime over the years I met lots of people, audiofools, audiophiles.
the fools can have crap "HiFi", or can have High-End systems,
but the audiophiles can also have crap-systems or High-End-systems.

It is interesting.
There are simply different ways of "listening" music. And there are things, not everybody has knowledge of. And not everybody will hear or understand or enjoy or want to enjoy.
People are different.
And music is different, and even the same song can be experienced in various ways, simply said: by brain or by stomach.


oki, bit OT, but at change of year, let's have had a bit of rethinking.

btw., for car or outdoor sports, still mp3 Lame V5 user.
And as small sized compromised backup for the FLAC: mpc quality 8 --ms 15 --xlevel

and yeah, 1 thing changes at the moment, quicker, if Thailand/Bangkok would not have had the flood incident.

changing from DVD+R to HD as storage medium for FLAC.
Just now HD is still more expensive than DVD+R, but only a bit...

[Yaztromo]

Archiving: Wavpack -hx - Better compression than FLAC, better platform support than APE.

Hi-Fi: Vorbis at Q5 - Smaller file-sizes than MP3 at V2.

Portable: Undecided as yet. Currently I stick the Vorbis files on my Sansa Clip but they are too large for the long run. Lame -V6 looks a likely candidate.

[String Theory]

2012 is the year I'm completely deleting my lossy library. From now on I will go lossless all the way, the future is now .

FLAC is the codec of choice at the moment... I like WavPack better, but no app to play it on iOS-devices.

This post has been edited by String Theory: Jan 4 2012, 23:20

[DonP]

Flac and Vorbis, some mpc and speex.

mp3 for things that only come that way, podcasts and tracks from emusic.

[db1989]

Disclaimer: Here comes a boring story that offers no definable answers to the poll! Hey, it was a lot longer before I pruned it. Posting in case someone might be vaguely entertained by it.

Way back when, I ripped to WavPack images with embedded cue sheets, transcoded (after tinkering with a few other formats) to LAME -V2 (what else? ), and eventually abandoned lossless. Then I got an iPod and ended up using AAC at 256 kbps (iTunes Plus) for new/other CDs. Concluding that CDs are mostly pointless in being ripped once then shelved forevermore (tenuous legality notwithstanding!), I moved to digital downloads: mostly on iTunes and thus AAC (256 or 128 kbps) again, eventually migrating towards Amazon MP3 once it finally reached the UK, and mixing in a few other MP3-based services (Play.com, some good small one whose name I can’t recall, etc.).

In retrospect, I don’t know why I moved to AAC there. Once I actually thought about it, I became concerned about compatibility with future DAPs. I’m not worried much nowadays, as it seems to be supported as standard by any decent device, but it would have made more sense to stick with MP3. If nothing else, I kinda liked the more DIY experience of ripping and encoding with LAME, y’know?

I very rarely buy music now. I’d like change that, but I don’t know in which form. Part of me might like to start picking up CDs again—albeit more discerningly!—but I have the same concerns. Standard inclusion of digital booklets with downloads would largely remove the question, but only a shrinking minority provide this. Still, a move back to physical media is unlikely. I’ll probably stick to buying MP3, at least until the advent of a store offering a large catalogue in lossless. As for lossless formats, I’m unconcerned about every last bit of compression, so I’d probably chooe FLAC due to its relative dominance in terms of hardware support (not that I’d rule out trying Rockbox). I might one day sort my library out and go back to a proper player like foobar2000 (after going back to Windows, for the software library / convenience).

[bred]

Lossy:
My favourites formats are OGG and MP4, but for necessity I'm using also the mp3.

Lossless:
flac!
and if I find an ape I'll immediately convert it to flac.

One file per track! That's more comfortable.

[db1989]

Split: USAC vs. HE- and LC-AAC

[djchristian]

Why woudn't you use cuesheets when ripping one file per disc?

edit: damn voted wrong on the last question. one file per track it should be.

This post has been edited by djchristian: Jan 6 2012, 01:48

[bred]

Why woudn't you use cuesheets when ripping one file per disc?

edit: damn voted wrong on the last question. one file per track it should be.

CUE are not completely recognized by all audio players, and, if we navigate in the directory we immediately see and select the desired track.
And for the audio editing is more practical to manipulate one track per time.

Maybe the cue sheet is a good idea but for me is very uncomfortable.

[String Theory]

A little change to the subject. I found out that my Boxee Box plays Apple Lossless out of the box... so using FLAC in my Apple-minded environment is a bit dull. So the one and only codec I'm using at the moment is ALAC.

[C.R.Helmrich]

2009 poll: Total votes: 923
2011 poll: Total votes: 458
2012 poll: Total votes so far: 247

Come on, people! Spread the word

Chris

[IgorC]

Chris,

Thank You for bump.
As for me >200 votes are enough to draw decent conclusion.
The first day there were 100 votes. It took like 3 days to arrive to 200 results. And it will take like 9 days to get 300.

[user]

probably ripping & encoding questions are a kind of dull these days, as the trend shows also,
storage isn't a problem anymore, even portable.
Quality ?
For portable in cars, sports, outdoors, even mp3 by lame in V5 is sufficient since years and universal usable.
For home HiFi/High-End:
No question, Lossless.
And here it is dull to discuss format, because of the abilities of Loslsess, transcoding there and back no problems, no quality question.
Quantity question ?
No, few percent, don't matter, storage space is big and priceworthy.
So it comes down to universal compatibility, and obviously people decided since long time, FLAC.
Even other formats no problem, Lossless is Lossless is Lossless.

Probably not much interest anymore, who cares, which codec outperformes by few kbit/s in <100 kbit/s lossy area, if many people are satisfied by mp3 lame 128 k, so maybe this forum is mostly interesting for developers, not so much anymore for normal music listeners, consumers.

Maybe reason for decreasing voters in these polls ?

Maybe most music people have more interest, which master/remaster, CD/Vinyl/SACD/DVD-A/medium of a specific album sounds better.
Here people get the technical answer, CD well mastered should be great enough, problem is real world behaviour, lots of CDs have "varying" mastering...

This post has been edited by user: Jan 8 2012, 20:21

[IgorC]

if many people are satisfied by mp3 lame 128 k

Actually the average preferable setting is ~192 kbps (-V2). Poll results http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=86819

This post has been edited by IgorC: Jan 9 2012, 16:28

[JJZolx]

It would be interesting to learn what the split between lossless and lossy is, if you have 90% in lossless and 10% in lossy then there is no way to ascertain as both would be checked on the poll.

That might be interesting to know, but only in respect to one's 'main' library for home listening, where disk space considerations are much less of a factor. I think a good many people these days keep lossy files only for portable players. If I had portable players that offered, say, 1TB of storage I'd do away with lossless encoding entirely.

[JJZolx]

As for lossless formats, I’m unconcerned about every last bit of compression, so I’d probably chooe FLAC due to its relative dominance in terms of hardware support (not that I’d rule out trying Rockbox).

Maybe I misunderstood the last part, but Rockbox supports FLAC on all of the platforms that I've run it on. Of course Rockbox is primarily intended for use on portable devices, so you're back to the storage space challenge, which tends to favor the use of lossy formats.

[db1989]

I meant the opposite: FLAC is much more widely supported than others amongst factory-set DAPs, although RockBox could enable other formats on a certain subset thereof.

[db1989]

Split: Why the apparent low popularity/usage of WMA Lossless?

[Destroid]

The title of this poll made it seem like the ripper of choice would be voted too. I just had a great success story using Cuetools with a particular optical drive where I successful read-through a CD that took damage over 16 years ago and never played correct since. Over the years I attempted to rip this CD without errors. Of course, this CD is rather unknown and out of print (despite the producer was Jack Endino) and there was no known Accur-rip data was submitted until recently (by myself) but it's fair to say I think I finally got it right. Not sure why EAC gave-up easily but usually my CD's are not subjected to accidental falls onto rough surfaces.

Gotta love TAK -p4m for CD archival and Wavpack for studio tracks (for the float aspect) and I'm pretty happy about not sticking to one-format-for-all. Makes me a better nerd to have a bunch of formats kicking around my listening areas

[Agent69]

I started out using WAV+cue but I ended up using FLAC+single file per track as my scheme (it just worked out better for me that way). I listen using Foobar2000 on Windows or MPD on Arch Linux. I use shell scripts to convert tracks to MP3 when needed (a PowerShell script when using Windows 7 or a Bash script when using Arch Linux).

[C.R.Helmrich]

The first day there were 100 votes. It took like 3 days to arrive to 200 results. And it will take like 9 days to get 300.

Well, it seems to take longer than that... which is no wonder if one cannot see the poll on HA's home page... so I'm bumping again

By the way, are we allowed to discuss trends while the poll is still running?

Chris

[IgorC]

The first day there were 100 votes. It took like 3 days to arrive to 200 results. And it will take like 9 days to get 300.

Well, it seems to take longer than that...

What I mean was:
from 1 Jan to 2 Jan ( during first 24 Hs) - there are totally 100 results
from 2 Jan to 4 Jan (3 days) - total 200 results
5-13 Jan (9 days) - total 300 results.

So now it will take one month or so to get total 400 results.

By the way, are we allowed to discuss trends while the poll is still running?

I don't think people will change their mind after reading this topic. So if You have some statistics go ahead

This post has been edited by IgorC: Jan 14 2012, 17:02

[m45t3r]

Lossy: mainly OGG Vorbis -5 because both my Samsung Galaxy S II and Sansa Clip+ supports this format and it's a nice format since it's opensource and have very high quality. My second choice is LAME -V2 or -V0, but I recently bought an iPad 2 16GB and for him I use qaac -80, that sounds great anyway.

Lossless: FLAC. My library use very different combinations, but mostly FLAC -8 or FLAKE -8. I want to reconvert everything to FLAKE ou FLACCL -8, but need some HDD space for that.

This post has been edited by m45t3r: Jan 14 2012, 18:26