Hi. I've been doing all my ripping to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis up to now, but I read about Garf's (not yet completed) GT3, and now about MPC maybe being an even better compression format, so I've decided, as I can't predict the future, that I would like to rip all of my CDs to a lossless format.

For this reason, I am looking for which one is the "best". I have seen a whole bunch of very useful information on which formats can provide how much compression:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ST&f=19&t=9710&

plus some sites that discuss the same issue:
http://audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?page...d+Audio+Formats
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossles...ss/lossless.htm


And I have seen one thread discussing the "stability" of different formats:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ST&f=19&t=9161&

And there are, of course, several other pertinent discussions on this board, but the one I have not (yet) found, is how much player support there is for each of those formats, support of comments, and any other intangible dis/advantages of any of the formats. Oh, and I'm also looking for multiple platform support (at a minimum Windows and Linux).
If there are threads either here or at another site that already discuss these issues, please point me to them, otherwise I think it would be interesting to have everyone's input on the matter.

FYI, I rip using EAC, and I have a little DOS batch script that allows me to encode to multiple formats at once (currently MP3 using LAME 3.93.1 and Ogg Vorbis). And I have harddrive space to burn (currently about 200GB free).

Thank you for your help,
~mysh

If you want the widest OS support and completely open source, FLAC is probably your best choice.

Well, this is discussed in almost every thread in this forum

In short, if you want the widest support and compatibility, use FLAC. If compression has more priority for you, there are other choices like APE, OptimFROG and LA. But things get more complicated when you try to figure out what's "the best" codec out there

Also, WavPack, while having good compression/speed tradeoff as lossless codec, has an interesting hybrid mode.

-Eugene

Thanks for your help - you're right that a slightly more diligent search of the Lossless discussion area turned up most of the answers I was looking for. Sorry for bothering you. I think I'll be going with Flac, and ripping each CD to a single file with CUE sheet. This doesn't answer all of my questions, but I will ask those in a seperate thread with the right title.

Thanks again!

~mysh

the best.. I don't know

They all sound the same to me....

Hmmm - good point. I guess I'll just have to rip to all the formats then. As each one gives me a 40%-50% savings in space, I should end up with something real small, right?