2008 ripping/encoding general poll Options

[guruboolez]

Happy new year to everyone.
New year, new poll.
Lossy/lossless polls are a tradition here in HA.org. The first one started few weeks after the site was founded by Dibrom. As explained in last year's poll I think that polls should be rationalized in order to compare more easily the choices of HA members. The 2007 general poll was created exactly one year ago and got 921 voters ; I hope this one will last one full year¹ as well and will reach the 1000!

I made small changes in the poll structure:
• WMA and WMA Pro are now one unique poll choice (they got less than 1% of total votes last year and I needed a free row to make the other changes possible)
• WavPack lossy was added
• LossyWAV + lossless whcih appeared this year was also added
• other lossy format and I don't use lossless AT ALL! are split
• I reordered the list according to the 2007 popularity (TAK before OptimFROG)
• Apple Lossless was accidentally removed

9000 new persons are registered on hydrogenaudio's forums since last poll. I hope that many of them will answer to this new poll. In advance, thank you for your vote.


To finish, a very big thank you to houyhnhnm who offered us a pretty complete synthesis of HA Polls since the beginning, here:






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¹ or maybe less if a moderator/admin wants to act differently

This post has been edited by guruboolez: Jan 2 2008, 04:26

[Christian Schind...]

Hi,

one question: Is HE-AAC also part of the AAC category? If yes, it is not obvious. If yes, shouldn't it be mentioned somewhere in the description?

Regards,

Christian

[user]

How is user's preferred way ?

Let's start with the beginning:

ripper: EAC 0.9b4 , it simply rips anything , so no needs to update, alternatively EAC 0.95pb3 might work also.
EAC secure mode, accurate stream, no c2 usage, Test & Copy , to single tracks, EAC's non-compliant cue sheet.

ripping to 3 formats in different target bitrates & purposes at 1 time during EAC's ripping&tagging&encoding step:

by mareo.exe:

1. Lossless: FLAC (v1.2.1 at the moment) -8 -V , best compression & quick enough for P3 @ 800 MHz, Win XP.
Purpose is listening at home in HiFi, which means High Fidelity, listening music as natural as possible like played live without amplifiers, speakers.
And yes, iirc, my 1st and only Lossless encoding to Monkey's audio was a long time back,
then switched to FLAC, then had a time, when I used WavPack,
and now since some longer time already again, back to FLAC,
which I will keep as Lossless format, because it has the broadest hardware/industry device/playback devices support.
So: No propietrary formats like SoNever, VerySmallSmooth or Oranges,
because their devices are and have been too expensive, and even too low quality, bugs and even less playback features than no-name Al-Cheapo Asian devices for USB & MP3

2. Lossy as small sized (ca. 265 kbit/s vbr bitrates averaged) and cheap backup for the Lossless, as transparent as possible, even after transcoding to mp3 or playing by Logic7/DPL2 DSPs, as Lossless replacement, in case the Lossless data is lost. Additional small = reasonable sized on laptop HD for having perfect music on the run.
My favourite is here MPC (v.1.16 atm) --quality 8 --ms 15--xlevel

3. Lossy MP3 for daily usage in noisy environments, fast food music, ie. listening in car or during running/sports outdoors.
This means MP3 Lame 3.97 (only stable versions, previously 3.90 Dibrom compile)
-V5 --vbr-new , ca. 125 - 150 k VBR.
This due to simple usage and widely support by cheap but good players like USB sticks, think of running through the woods and hills outdoors with earphones and USB-stick or connecting the USB-MP3-stick to your Kenwood car-radio system, maybe via Cassette-adapter or via FM-radio frequency, or directly via Aux connector, or directly the USB connection to modern car-radios.

Sizes are MP3 V5 ca. 130 - 135 k vbr, to MPC quality 8 ca. 265 k , to Flac Lossless 700 - 1000 k, maybe 800-900 k average, but very dependent on the albums/music collections.
This translates to sizes of MP3 Lame V5 / MPC quality 8 == 1 / 2
and
MPC quality 8 / Lossless FLAC == 1 / 3 --- 1 / 3.3

This post has been edited by user: Jan 8 2008, 13:56