I've serached around on the forums, but nobody seems to be doing what I am, and so I've decided to post another topic here in search of answers.

First, let me explain what I want to do. I run a weekly radio show, which takes requests from listeners. I need to have all of my music on the HDD(s), which I will take to the studio and run off of the Wavecart computer. I need to be able to run a program that will allow for crossfading between individual tracks. I.E., if I were to bring two USB HDDs to the studio with all of my albums on them, I want to be able to plug them up, start WinAMP 5 (once again just for an example) twice, and crossfade between the two WinAMP instances so that I can mix songs together smoothly. I would normally do this with the studio's mixing board, but I don't think that's going to be an option (unless someone knows of a good way to do this with software).

Speed is my most major concern. I will be archiving the audio yes, but any lossless codec will archive just fine, if it doesn't corrupt the data. I will most likely have a Windows machine to work on at all times, but I'd like the option to use Linux, and possibly even a Mac (for at least decoding/transcoding). WMA lossless seems to only be available on Windows, even though it seems to be a very fast, friendly codec. Should I wait for Wavpack 4? or is FLAC a better choice? Is there a WMA Pro 9 decoder for Linux? Remember, I need to be able to comfortably, predictably and smoothly crossfade between two songs. Replaygain support is a plus, but hardly a necessary feature. Encoding speed is a big issue, decoding speed not so much.

FWIW: Wavpack interests me quite a bit, since it's supported in WinAMP now, which will also support the crossfading I'm talking about. It also allows me to create two files, one lossey and a correction file, which I could keep on a separate HDD if I wanted. However, Wavpack seems to be working towards release 4, and I wonder if it's worth the wait.

Any ideas?

IIRC there are ape & flac plugins for winamp, also once you are in one lossless format it is not a great deal to switch to another lossless format (ie wavepak 4)

Not sure what you are saying about speed, to play or to record? if you are talking about recording you would have to save to wave & then convert to lossless after - I don't think you can convert on-the-fly

Well, after some testing I have rested upon Wavpack. As upgrades in the future are not a concern, Wavpack by far outstrips the competition in speed and cross-platform compatability. It's fast, too!

That, and the option to use a hybrid lossey mode makes it versatile enough to work with even my demanding usage. Why didn't I find this codec earlier??

Just wondering, is it fast?

Damn fast.

It's encoding speed on high ( -h ) beats FLAC on normal ( -5 ), and it beats it in size by a few mb per file (for me, anyway). FLAC still seems to have it beat on decoding speed, but not by much.

Try doing some testing of your own on your own equipment... I'm sure you'll be quite surprised...

FLAC is the only lossless codec that is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but it doesn't sound like being cross-platform is that important for what you want. WavPack is the most efficient (meaning size for the speed) for encoding, followed by Monkey's Audio, then FLAC, but I think WavPack w/ hybrid encoding will take extra time.

Josh

There is no significant speed penalty with hybrid Wavpack in my own experience, only a slight gain in the overall file size.