What's your lossless codec of choice? Options

[Polar]

It's been a busy year in lossless audio codec land

So I thought it might be the right time to throw in another favourite codec poll, now that the lossy counterpart is into v2 and the last multi lossless codec poll is just a few days short of one year old. The latter included neither Apple Lossless, which has rapidly gained quite some popularity due to its support in iTunes, nor TTA.

My superficial impression tells me that OptimFROG, TTA, WavPack and WMA Lossless have also been gaining momentum ever since, perhaps at the expense of Bonk, LPAC, RK Audio, and others, which seem to have become obsolete and have therefore been omitted from the poll choices (although the board's 10 answers max has something to do with that as well). Feel free to mention LPAC or whatever you might still be using in a separate post below. Needless to say any other comments are most welcome.

Curious to know what the current balance of power between FLAC and Monkey's might be. Would Shorten still be able to keep a grip on a loyal share of users? How widely are OptimFROG and WavPack's hybrid modes being used? And what about rather obscure RealAudio Lossless?

In short: looking forward to your replies

Edit: grammar.

This post has been edited by Polar: Aug 3 2004, 16:27

[Polar]

BTW, I'm using primarily FLAC for playback and occasional transcoding to lossy, because of its wide support and compatibility, cross-platformness, and fast decoding. Its open source character is a plus too. What I don't care about is fast encoding, since that's only done once, so I encode my FLACs @ -8.

I have previously been using Monkey's Audio, but a couple of personal negative experiences with file corruption, along with reports acknowledging this, have led me to lose faith in Monkey's Audio as a format.

I have recently taken up the rather big task of making an extra La (-high -noseek for maximum compression) back-up of all of my FLACs on an external hard disk, which I also apply PAR2 to. The Las are just for archiving - i.e. not for playback or any other use, just for disaster recovery - and for occasional internet transfer (if the receiver is on MS Windows).

Edit: italics.

This post has been edited by Polar: Aug 3 2004, 16:23

[Slo Mo Snail]

I voted the same as last year: FLAC
mainly because of the wide software support, the good compression ratios and the wide range of systems it is supported on

[krmathis]

I prefer Apple Lossless!
Because its supported in iTunes on my Powerbook, as well as my iPod mini and AirPort Express.

[guruboolez]

Monkey's Audio "normal": more efficient than Flac, and with correct decoding speed; conveniant tagging system for my usage (I can add as much information as I want, without juggling with padding values); MD5 for very fast verification (useful on disk transfer).

[Sebastian Mares]

Monkey's Audio Extra High

[xmixahlx]

i vote for flac simply because it has greater usability support on linux then the other codecs.

i do use monkey's audio, shorten, optimfrog and recently wavpack for testing.


later

[jth]

FLAC for me ... although Wavpack 4 is also quite nice.

Right now I'm waiting to see if the Squeezebox gets some sort of lossless support in hardware. If so, I'll invariably go with whatever they choose.

[karmakillernz]

WavPack for me. I've used it for a while, and now that 4 is released it's even better.

[Emanuel]

Flac for its so easy to use, tag and transcode. I have never experienced any corruptions or crc errors.

Although, I miss good compression ratio on flacs using 24 bit 96 khz. I get far better compression in theese rates uing winzip or winrar. Anyone know more about this?

[evereux]

Everything I rip gets backed up to Monkeys Audio - Extra High. My main reason's for using Monkeys is the compression ratio's (and the irresistible Monkey).

[R2D2]

FLAC and LPAC.....and when I have bought a 250gb+ harddrive, I will use Monkeys Audio Extra High just as evereux

[Derge]

Same as evereaux for ripping, but I'm pretty sure Extra High is a virus eating away at what makes Monkey's Audio any good. The monkey really is irresistable, though. 3.97 High for me, until dBpowerAMP gets support and people stop being angry with me for sending files encoded with 3.99.

[Polar]

I'd just like to add (although I should maybe have done this in my opening post in this thread) that, should you choose to post a reply, it'd be nice if you could be as elaborate and specific as possible as to why you prefer whichever codec.

A mere I like this or that because it's the coolest! can hardly be called informative. If there's nothing else you'd specifically like to say beside indicating your preference, well, you can express that sufficiently just by picking one of the options in the poll itself. Apart from an overview of the current balance of power between codecs, to get to know people's specific motivation is what makes this poll and its comments interesting and instructive.

To sum it all up: thanks for taking the time and effort to write more than the proverbial word or two.

[rutra80]

OptimFROG of course. It can be most efficient in terms of compression or transparently fast, it has a dual stream feature, and is under serious development (further nice features incoming). The only bad thing that comes to my mind is that AFAIK it is available only for Windows and Linux at the moment, and isn't supported on portables, but personally I don't care about that at all.

This post has been edited by rutra80: Aug 3 2004, 20:21

[bugmenot]

Monkey's Audio is going cross platform though: there are already plugins for XMMS and GStreamer (the future multimedia platform for GNOME). However, I haven't seen any initiative for MacOSX.

[Krug_Stillo]

I use Monkey's Audio and FLAC for specific albums. Sadly, for some unknown reason ASIO and APE don't agree in terms of gaplessness so when going from one track to another there's an almost stuttering effect. If I switch to wave out or ds the gaplessness remains with no stuttering, however, if I use FLAC and ASIO it's completely gapless so that's what I use FLAC for, albums in which gaplessness is imperative. FLAC is a lil faster on the decode time and seeking, but I simply adore the embedded cuesheet feature in Monkey's Audio. It's so clean and simple to have a single file album and if you want an individual track or two real fast out of the image all you need is foo_monkey and a couple seconds. If FLAC had that feature I would use it exlusively and if Monkey's Audio was gapless with ASIO I would use that exclusively. Oh, well you can't win them all I guess.

BTW, I voted for Monkey simply because I've encoded so many more albums to it, but I still use FLAC a lot.

[jcoalson]

but I simply adore the embedded cuesheet feature in Monkey's Audio. It's so clean and simple to have a single file album and if you want an individual track or two real fast out of the image all you need is foo_monkey and a couple seconds. If FLAC had that feature I would use it exlusively

I thought foo_flac does now; check with case.

Josh

[Krug_Stillo]

I thought foo_flac does now; check with case.

Josh

Thanks for the fast reply. Well, I'm still on foobar 0.8.1 for some reason, mostly due to things being so hectic (and a lil procrastination thrown in for good measure of course) I haven't had a chance to switch so I'm still using foo_flac 1.0.7 and I'm not sure if there's a new one in the latest versions of foobar. Also, I'm not sure if you were referring to the embedded cuesheet feature or quickly encoding a track from within a cuesheet. foo_flac is a decoder whereas foo_monkey is an encoder (foo_ape being the decoder) and I apologize in advance as I'm sure you already knew this I'm just a bit confused as to which problem could potentially be solved with foo_flac and it's also very early for me so I will go wake up before I post anymore.

Thanks again for the reply and thank you very, very much for your work on FLAC, it's appreciated more than you know.

[jcoalson]

ah, I see. I was referring to the decoding/playing of indivdual tracks from a FLAC + cuesheet... sorry for the mixup.

Josh

[DreamTactix291]

FLAC for several reasons

Open source, which was always one reason I liked Vorbis
Fast decode and low CPU on playback
Extremely easy to mass encode FLAC to Vorbis with oggdropXPd and keep my tags for use on my iRiver.

[picmixer]

Momentarily I am using Monkey's Audio standard.

Good file size and perfect internal cuesheet support with foobar2000 are what won me over.

Although I am currently thinking about switching to wavpack. It seems a very nice compromise between compression ratio and decoding speed for me. Also internal cue sheet support works just as well with foobar2000 thanks to Case. Furthermore I just somehow apperciate all the work Briant has put into this and was very impressed by the new 4.0 release.

[R2D2]

Ok...why FLAC and LPAC....good decoding time, good encoding time, and good compression ratio. FLAC is good because of the open source too.

[kjoonlee]

foo_flac is a decoder whereas foo_monkey is an encoder (foo_ape being the decoder)

And while foo_flac is the counterpart of foo_ape the decoder, foo_flaccer is the counterpart of foo_monkey the encoder.

[kjoonlee]

I use FLAC too, for its cross-platform support and Freeness (as in freedom.)