2009 ripping/encoding general poll Options

[guruboolez]

Happy new year to everyone

As last year and the year before, I invite every HA.org members to answer a few questions. 920 persons take part to the same poll in 2007. And in 2008, a new record was broken with more than 1200 participants. I would thank the HA.org team who makes this score possible by giving to this poll a lot of visibility (it was pinned and appeared on HA portal during several weeks). I invite of course everyone to break it in the next months.

With all datas we gathered in the last year we now have nice and interesting curves:


(click to enlarge)

I let you comment this

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NB: To keep this first post short, I will post the links to previous polls and all exact datas a bit later.

This post has been edited by guruboolez: Jan 1 2009, 17:07

[hödyr]

I'm using lossless FLAC for rare CDs and audiophile stuff, though I'm really liking TAK and might use it once it's open source.

LAME -V3 for everything else. I don't like the bitrate bloat due to sfb21 issue when using -V2 (especially on rock/metal), plus as listening tests showed -V5 is transparent on most material so -V3 should give a nice safety margin.

I really would like to use AAC, but since there is no good open source implementation there's no way in hell I'm using it, what if Nero some day decides they're stopping the work on their free encoder?
Same goes for Vorbis, although it's open source, if it wasn't for ayoumi we would be stuck with the same encoder for years.

I would probably still be using MPC if there was any significant progress, but ever since Frank Klemm stopped development I had a short time of using Vorbis and then went back to MP3, as the format has just gotten "good enough".
I feel there are a lot of people still caring for MP3 quality and developing LAME, and I don't think this is going to change too soon. With disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper I can't see widespread success of any other lossy format, expect perhaps for AAC.