Babble mode (very general, hardly technical, my point? I am afraid of ogg!)

Dr. Strangecodec or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Lossyness...

... sort of.

I am new to this whole "what's the best thingy" debate. Not quite so new when it comes to ripping my CDs and making CDr mp3s. So far I've been using lame at 192/vbr even lame 3.93.1 huzzah. I was happy until I came here! Argl!

Having about 500 audio CDs and having archived about 20GB in vbrs quite some time ago (2 years) I naturally was curious what's hip/fresh/etc atm.
I knew of ogg and aac. wma never appealed to me but it seems it does have its merits, still having read to a number of threads on this forum I came to the conclusion - after growing some grey hair - that I must learn more about the different codecs. Esp. musepac. - more grey hairs -
So I did. Musepac really seems to hit the nail when I listen to it.
So what! Who knows, maybe my hearing sucks? "Anyway", thought I and found that hearing sample "sweep.wav". I must confess that listening to that sweep sample lead to a surprising result. I could hear the sample up to 18.5hz which isn't bad for my age (34) I figure.

Soooo, with my near exquisite lauschers and my HiFi Sherwood Newcastle I sat down and listend to my test song:
lame --alt-preset extreme %s %d (biggest file)
ogg -q 6
musepac --quality 6 --xlevel (smallest file)

The only "clear" difference was that the ogg encode had slightly more high freq. range than the others.
I could not hear any discernible difference between the lame and the musepac encode

Now given the fact that one might want to use portable devices it is my understanding that musepac is no option. Pity.
I also read that lame encoded files at high vbr bitrates (i.e. extreme setting) also cause problems with portable devices. Is this still true? If so, I'll just refuse to buy any portable mp3 devices until they support higher bitrates! that'll teach em! umm. ok. next.

Having spent only a few days on this subject I am far from knowing all facts and methods to encode music but it became clear to me that there's a LOT of possibilities and a LOT of things to do wrong and I won't even start on Tags!

If I really want to stop worrying about encoding I guess the only option atm is
a) not to archive my 500 CDs - what a time saver!
B) archive them using FLAC (which in a way is pointless if you have enough diskspace to store them as wav anyway) - ugh
c) ?! the holy grail ?!

For the majority out there it (grail) seems to be mp3 at 128kbps+
The majority on this board is a minority in this scenario, I guess.

One thing that suprised me is that there's no poll anywhere on these forums.
Something like:

Choose your favorite lossy codec setting:
1) lame --alt preset standard
2) lame --alt preset extreme
3) ogg -q 5
4) ogg -q 6
5) musepac --quality 5 --xlevel
6) musepac --quality 5 --xlevel

or whatever options are most viable to choose from.

For now I'll just keep toying around and wait for lame4 or musepac8 or (eggn)ogg
before I go and archive my CD collection.
Filesize will matter less in the future. Quality will always matter.
And compatibility? That's an eke one.
NU!

Eke.

By claiming this without providing evidence you've violated forum rule #8:
This means if you think you hear a difference, you should do an ABX test (details: see FAQ) to verify this and post the result with a detailed description where you hear a difference and what it sounds like, as well as a 20-30 sec. lossless compressed audio sample.

One goal of Hydrogenaudio is to provide proven facts and knowledge and not rumors or opinions. That's the reason for rule # 8. Please help to achieve this by respecting it.

oioi violation on post #2. well done huh?
please don't read too much into my personal opinion, as I said my hearing might just as well suck but I can well see how opinions about codec quality/difference are detrimental without "objective evidence".

I do have winabx but what will it proove? Maybe I have to try and see if it prooves anything... hmm.

Eke.

Lossless formats as flac can always be transcoded to any other format without loss compared to direct encoding from CD, additionally tags can be stored. So if you're undecided and tired of changing CDs, this is probably the best option.


As you've described, there are many things to consider, e.g. portable support, quality, cross-platform compatibility. Because of this a poll wouldn't help a person reading it much to decide, what codec/settings to use. So the only reason for a poll would be curiosity.