2008 ripping/encoding general poll Options

[The Sheep of DEA...]

The lossy graph is quite interesting. It shows MPC (with nearly 50% userbase) getting replaced by MP3 (now it has the 50% userbase), with everything else more or less flat, staying the same over the years.

[Lyx]

A general trend appears to be, that there are roughly two kinds of groups on ha.org. Those who go for the most practical and sophisticated solution (MP3, FLAC) and geeks/early adopters. For the first group, maturity, support and compatibility are most important. The second group instead is interested about technical advantages - no matter how minor or if they are practically relevant - and simply playing with the bleeding edge.... they will without hesistation jump ship if a codec starts to stagnate or mature (no visible active development and new toys to play with). For example, the usage-share of vorbis is equivalent to the activity in vorbis development. WavPack users jump ship to TAK, because TAK is "newer", has more rapid development and (practically minor) technical advantages.

As so often, even though there are "middleground codecs", there do not seem to be many "middleground users". Both WavPack and Vorbis could be considered to be a compromise between the two mentalities - yet, their userbase is mostly geeks/early adopters which now jump ship.

[Scott (scott_dft...]

AAC as m4a all the way, entirely due to Sony and Coca-Cola.

Why Coca-Cola? Well from various promotions, was able to amass a load of free i-tunes credit. At the same time, about a year ago, got the Sony Ericsson W810i. Excellent music phone, with AAC/m4a support (can't remember off the top of my head if it has support for HE-AAC). From then on was hooked on i-tunes, especially as a little sprinkling of magic dust turns m4p to m4a for the phone.

Found AAC @ 192 pretty much transparent to my ears, even through a fair quality hi-fi system. So all the CDs get ripped at this. I now have a 2Gb card for the w810i and usually just hold a collection of favourites on it, rotated about every couple of months, so the large file sizes are not an issue.

While all these other codecs have merits, I have to agree with several earlier posters and say that if you find a practical solution why not stick with it (even if your interest it the codec was borne out of brain-washing marketing by capitalist american companies ). Even managed to (pretty-much) shoe-horn AAC into Windows Media Player / Media Centre!

Just one last point: if I was being honest, I could class myself as an Apple-hater, so my options are not due to any allegiance to Apple. Indeed I am pleased at the continued development to take AAC beyond Apple and the i-pod.

This post has been edited by Scott (scott_dft): Feb 29 2008, 20:21

[MetalheadGautham]

I prefer ogg vorbis and musepack for lossy ripping, but due to the abundant bitrate choice in vorbis, its my winner

flac and wavpack again have a tie in lossless, but as flac is more supported, it wins

I don't like cue sheet + single file ripping. Instead, I prefer indivudual files, playlist files and gapless playback amarok

[birdie]

Lately I primarily do not encode at all since I mostly download from the Internet where two most popular formats are MP3 and FLAC.

If I happen to rip audio CDs then I prefer FLAC or WMA if I decide to go lossless and Ogg Vorbis @q9 if I want to conserve the HDD free space.

[poppy10]

No point ripping to obscure formats. I need to be able to play my music on the maximum possible variety of devices, hence mp3 (lame 3.98b6 V 4) and FLAC all the way.

It's a bit sad to see MPC and Monkey's Uudio drop all the way from 50% down to 4-5% over the years. Guess they have just withered away and died

[weirving]

Found AAC @ 192 pretty much transparent to my ears, even through a fair quality hi-fi system.

While all these other codecs have merits, I have to agree with several earlier posters and say that if you find a practical solution why not stick with it (even if your interest it the codec was borne out of brain-washing marketing by capitalist american companies ). Even managed to (pretty-much) shoe-horn AAC into Windows Media Player / Media Centre!

Just one last point: if I was being honest, I could class myself as an Apple-hater, so my options are not due to any allegiance to Apple. Indeed I am pleased at the continued development to take AAC beyond Apple and the i-pod.

I also resist drinking Steve Jobs' koolaid. But given a preference, I would use AAC instead of MP3 too. I also have experimented with the directshow AAC plugins for Windows Media Player. But my primary media player is still Foobar2000.

So why do I stick with MP3, though I think it is old-tech, outmoded, and at least slightly inferior to AAC or OGG? My car, damn it! And my portable. Both support MP3. NEITHER supports AAC or OGG. MP3 might be old and refined to the end of its potential, but it is a standard that everybody supports. Until that starts to change in a significant way, I have to stay with MP3. For archiving, it's FLAC images and cue sheets for me!

[houyhnhnm]

The 2007 general poll was created exactly one year ago and got 921 voters ; I hope this one will last one full year as well and will reach the 1000!

1100 voters now!

[Synthetic Soul]

Thanks for the graphs.

It's interesting to plot the resurgence of MP3 - mainly to the detriment of Musepack - although all codec's user bases are obviously suffering from MP3's dominance in the marketplace.

I suppose the same could be said for FLAC.

[houyhnhnm]

I suppose the same could be said for FLAC.

So do I. As a matter of course, which song to listen is important to most people and they don't want to be worried about which codec to use.

I don't know what should determine the popularity, but I hope some people think "Popularity is not necessarily a reason for choosing a codec." Shares are just results of choices.

[The_Cisco_Kid]

After going through ape and flac, I am now using wavpack in the hybrid mode for all archives.
My audio website uses just the lossy hybrid files for shorter files, and Ogg-Vorbis for longer (5-10+ minutes) bits encoded at ''-q -0.21'' . Works quite well when encoding mono recordings frequently more than 60 years old, and gives a comparable size with much better audio quality to my ears when compared to the hundreds of 32 kbps OTR MP3s that I have collected over the years.

This post has been edited by The_Cisco_Kid: Jun 22 2008, 06:43

[Kitsuned]

I use FLAC -5 for my cds. I put them on an external drive which I sometimes will turn off, depending on how hot it is. For my portable, I use Lame's mp3 encoder at -V3 for a nice balance between quality and size.

[waltereegho]

Ogg Vorbis, FLAC lvl8 and multiple file ripping for me. I'm not a fanboy though, as long as lossless remains lossless and lossy has a good compression . I despise Itunes formats like m4p and m4a.

[DonP]

Thanks for the graphs.

It's interesting to plot the resurgence of MP3 - mainly to the detriment of Musepack - although all codec's user bases are obviously suffering from MP3's dominance in the marketplace.

Now that I have a portable that plays Musepack I'm using it more, but most of my stuff is in vorbis.

For podcasts and audiobooks I've been using speex. Can't beat ~5 MB/hour.

[Synthetic Soul]

Happy New Year everyone!

This poll is now closed; please vote in the 2009 poll.