Recommend me a lossless codec—looking for a nice compression–to–speed Options

[Dario]

Howdy, people from Hydrogenaudio

As per the topic's title, I am looking for a lossless codec that offers a nice compression (something around Monkey's Audio's High) along with a nice encoding/decoding speed (I am more concerned about the decoding). I initially stumbled upon TAK, which had everything I could ask for, but much to my demise, I found out that the playback of TAK is rather buggy—the official Winamp plug-in does not work well with 24/96 files (even though the TAK format supports high resolutions). Furthermore, I would ideally want the codec to be stable.

I would be very grateful to anyone who helps.

PS: Before mentioning FLAC, I have to say that I am dissatisfied with the compression it offers, as my storage space is pretty limited (and won't be improving until this summer at earliest).

[n0v!ze]

For years, I've been using FLAC and only recently switched to True Audio. Two to five out of hundred rips didn't play properly in Winamp with cue_in, some songs stopped right in the middle. Time display is always a few seconds behind. Well, this may all be related to cue_in or other things related to my machine and not to FLAC. Don't want to blame FLAC here, it's a great tool.

The True Audio Encoder ttaenc has two perceived disadvantages: Nearly no compression options and inability to redirect output to a pipe. For the type of music I listen to, which is mostly Heavy Metal, I found that the generated files sizes of .flac and .tta are nearly identical when compression to FLAC is done with second best ratio (Q 7 out of 8). Both encoding and decoding speed are at least on the same level, my (unverified) impression is that True Audio is often faster. Should I ever need the pipe output, I will apply the patch provided by the sox developer.

An advantage of True Audio is that it supports ID3 Tags. I create both lossless and lossy files when I rip. Having the very same id3 tags in both formats makes file management easier (for example file and folder name generation from tags). True Audio lacks a metatta utility but I didn't use metaflac anyway so I'm not missing it. True Audio is Open Source Software like FLAC is. Like FLAC, it lacks active development for a couple of years. Perhaps WavPack is the better, actively developed alternative? I don't know.

[db1989]

For years, I've been using FLAC and only recently switched to True Audio. Two to five out of hundred rips didn't play properly in Winamp with cue_in, some songs stopped right in the middle. Time display is always a few seconds behind. Well, this may all be related to cue_in or other things related to my machine and not to FLAC. Don't want to blame FLAC here, it's a great tool.

This is probably due to TTA. Another reason to ask why you bothered to switch?

The True Audio Encoder ttaenc has two perceived disadvantages: Nearly no compression options and inability to redirect output to a pipe. For the type of music I listen to, which is mostly Heavy Metal, I found that the generated files sizes of .flac and .tta are nearly identical when compression to FLAC is done with second best ratio (Q 7 out of 8). Both encoding and decoding speed are at least on the same level

Again, why?

Both encoding and decoding speed are at least on the same level, my (unverified) impression is that True Audio is often faster.

This is a contradiction in terms. Are they the same, or is TTA better?

An advantage of True Audio is that it supports ID3 Tags. I create both lossless and lossy files when I rip. Having the very same id3 tags in both formats makes file management easier (for example file and folder name generation from tags).

What is the benefit of having ID3 rather than Vorbis Comments? There are applications that can use the latter to name files/folders, too.