mpc 1.14, --quality 6 --xlevel. ideal for me :-D

i picked mp3.

looking at the current results, i'm suprised that mpc still holds the top spot. i guess most HA members would sacrifice hardware compatibility for quality. also suprising is vorbis still trailing behind mp3 and mpc despite recent availability of hardware players.

it might be too early to tell though.

I still prefer the stable quality of MPC at moderate bitrates, but with latest development Vorbis really get's my interrest again. Lossless is not quite right for me, yet. I'd prefer FLAC or Wavpack though.

Regards; ilikedirt

I voted lossless, because that's what I use most of the times. After several years of ripping and encoding I got tired of grabbing the same cd again from one of my shelfs to encode in some (exotic) format for whatever reason. I bought a big hd, and a second one is on his way and the plan is to rip my collection one final time. Transcoding then is clean and easy.

I do use lossy though. I weekly record two shows from fm radio that I encode to mp3, so I can make my friends happy who still use mp3 only.

My favorit lossy codec is mpc though, great quality, fast encoding, etc etc.

Lossless is the best solution for me, but lossy is more fun.

Primary use : listening to music from my computer exclusively, I'm no fan of portable devices, not enough room to keep my CD collection at home, not enough GB of hard disk to go lossless.

Xing Mp3 long ago (), then Lame -aps, then a few tries with Ahead AAC...
now MusePack q6 and I'm quite satisfied with it.

Hardware support is very essential to me. MP3 therefore is still my choice. Anyway, I use MP4-AAC in my computer.

Last time, I chose Ogg Vorbis. And again, in this poll, I'm choosing Ogg Vorbis again, though I am using iTunes AAC for my brand new iPod now. So Ogg Vorbis is mainly for computer listening as well my expermental tunings.

Ogg Vorbis is free, is open source, and has a lot of potential for further improvement, as aoTuV recently demonstrated. Now if only someone managed to optimise Tremor for the ARM7, then Ogg Vorbis support on the iPod is within reach (currently it runs at 80% realtime)

I use Wavpack lossy, 450 kbps (wavpack -b 450 -h -x). Because I often need to transcode and I can't afford lossless archival.

Ogg Vorbis

to me the most complete encoder that has good overall quality.
i tried aac when vorbis development was almost dead but i have to say that was very dificult to do simple things like tagging or replaygain. not to mention that there are several formats or containers that can only be played with certain players. i can't remember exactly what it was and if it still is a problem but to me it seems just more easy to drop a wave file into oggdrop and that's it. i can play those files on any platform and my ihp140 hardware player plays them also.

other codecs like aac may have better quality but i just like vorbis for it's completeness. it's just working. (not to mention what the 128kb test showed)

but this are just my personal preferences

i don't want to sound offending against other codecs.

I voted Ogg Vorbis. I was impressed by the aotuv improvements at low bitrates, making it really good to my ears at around 128kbps, it is my format of choice at this average bitrate. I don´t have a portable myself, but it´s a good reason to choose Vorbis if I ever get one.

For music I feel is really important to me (less than 1% of the albums I have access to), I still use lossless archiving (usually Monkey´s Audio CD Image, but also started to experiment with FLAC).

Anyway since portability is not an issue for me, I like to experiment with different formats, using Musepack and MP4-AAC whenever I feel the urge to do it .

I´d say since the aotuv tunings, for general music Vorbis -q4 sounds really good to me.

MP3 all the way (at least until 2006). I like AAC and Vorbis, they have GREAT potetial but I still choose to rip in MP3, and preset -extreme sounds BEAUTIFUL in my krappy ears .

Appreciated the new Poll.

Windows Media Audio 9 Professional
VBR Quality 75, 44 kHz, 2 channel 24 bit 1-pass VBR

Cheers,
McoreD

I hate mp3 format,but it is seen everywhere.

I can't say I hate the mp3 format since LAME has brought it up to be quite transparent with aps. I can say I hate most of the 128kbit mp3s on the internet. I'm more than happy to teach people how to encode with LAME and actually taught someone yesterday.

voted for vorbis since i have a iriver that i fill with vorbis and also use vorbis for video encodings.
I also keep a backup archive of my CDs where newer rips are mpc and older ones mp3. This is just for in case i damage a CD or lose one which unfortunately happens or at least happened a lot in the past.

But i listen almost exclusively from the iriver nowadays (and therefore mostly vorbis) because i dont need to run a software player like this and can leave it running all day without having to change disks all the time.

still Ogg Vorbis and I don't think I'll change!

I rip to FLAC for PC use, and to MP3 alt preset extreme for my portable (although standard would probably be sufficient)

I voted for mp3 as its still the main codec I use. However the real picture is like this:

Archiving, Home listening - Flac
Portable mp3, but it would be aac/mp4 if I had a portable player which played aac files

I have noticed someone voted for "other", whats "other"?

Anything that doesn't fit the others. WAV, ADPCM, WavPack and OptimFrog lossy, some of the bizarre stuff you can find at ReallyRareWares...

Maybe somebody encodes their music with MS ADPCM 4:1 or mu-law

I use Musepack Xlevel Quality 6
Earlier - Musepack Quality 5
Much earlier: MP3

I would love to shift to Musepack, but it currently has no hardware support AFAIK. That's why I am sticking with MP3. Besides, for me, LAME 3.90.3 APS MP3s are transparent enough.

Same for me.

In the beginning i made a lot of mistakes and ended up ripping multiple times. I still haven't finished. Now everything is ripped to Flac, transcoded to mpc q5 for listening then the flacs are archived to dvd. I could have even stored them on cd-r a year ago.

I may even use hybrid lossy for listening and transcoding but its hard to give up the quality / size bargain of mpc.

No matter which route you choose - rip it once.

Forgot: I still use mp3 for discman portable. Settings are lame 3.96.1 apfm / apfs -Y / apfs, transcoded from mpc or lossless.

Most of my stuff's in MPC, but I got tired of worrying about quality, so I'm re-ripping it all to FLAC -7. It's mostly classical, so I'm getting an average bitrate of 583kbps. (409 for one CD ) Still voted for MPC, because it is the lossy format I am using; I'll just be using it much less in the future.

MP3. almost my entire collection is that. i really liked the idea behind OGG and i even was ripping exclusively to it at one time, but everything i own that i listen to music on that plays something other than CDDA only plays MP3.

i'd use MPC since it's pretty much become the same as OGG in the way of "mostly patentless" (or expired at least) from what i've gathered from many, many bickering threads (please don't start any more in this one) HOWEVER the compression gained over MP3 isn't enough to push me over the edge to reencoding my collection.

i AM rearing to see AAC hit headunits and discmans and home audio systems as 128kbps is good enough in my ears and almost half of what i'm getting with APS-forced stereo (that's another of my "things").

*quietly avoids asking the dumb question about forced stereo*

i'm slowly converting to mpc, as i do most of my listening at the computer. but like most of us, i've got a large legacy collection in mp3.

yeah, classical encodes insanely well. i did a sasha lazard track which encoded at under 640kbps... unfortunately the smallest fraction of my collection is classical, however.

With insanely large hard disks at an all time low price i decided to set up a raid mirror with 2 250gig drives.

What do I use, flac of course. For archival choice lossless is the only way to go. With eac and my drive offset setup perfectly I never have to worry about quality, updating the codec, having to re-rip if something better comes along. And the replaygain metadata is a superb touch, so much better than normalizing.

I guess I won't ever change now unless perhaps flac2 comes along with 200% better compression and even then i can just transcode as its lossless lol

When AAC came along I just decided settling for it at 160kbps. To me, it's very comfortable with the small file-sizes. Also, I'm on a Mac & only using iTunes, hence the decision. If something revolutionary comes along, I just re-rip some of my fav. CDs.

Still using MP3 for use on dektop [preset standard], notebook [preset 128] and portable.

Reasons : transparency (with APS), wide hardware-support and low energy-consumtion. The combination of Lame, foobar200, Winamp5 with mpg123-decoder offers me all the things I need : good tagging, replaygain-support and gapless playback.

For archiving on DVD-/+R I use FLAC. I'm pretty happy with this combination after severall experimentations with Vorbis, Musepack and (oh my god ] WMA.

I always tend to go, either with .mpc or lossless.
But on this poll I rather choose .mpc for the rankings..

FLAC for PC listening, which are transcoded to Vorbis for use with the Rio Karma. If the Karma ever gets MPC support (or something else comes along that does), I'll switch to that because I feel it's the absolute best choice of all the lossy codecs at the moment.

Note about editing this post: Original vote was MP3, made back before I owned a portable or knew anything about ABX testing.

Musepack, soon switching to mp4/AAC since I'm getting an iPod

Even though this poll is fairly young, compared to the previous one, some conclusions can be made. As expected with constantly growing hd sizes, lossless has gained users. The support seems to have pretty much doubled since the last poll. What is not expected, is that in spite of a long period of non-existant development, Musepack seems to have also gained support at the expence of mp3 and ogg vorbis, which have both dropped by ~6% units since the last time. The reasons might include the security of the most largely tested format, and also the individual listening tests (Guruboolez) that have one after another proved mpc to be the best format in reaching transparency. Mpc might also be easier to adopt than ogg vorbis because of the one (or perhaps two) best encoder version, instead of several different branches.

I'm still using mpc myself, because I'm mainly listening to music at home on my own computer. I also still believe that mr. Klemm will get that SV8 done one day, and then mpc would really start to interest people in a whole new way.

Ogg Vorbis all the way. At least my iRiver iHP-100 says so. And I like that.

--Cai

Anyone that has been in computers since 80col card punches, and pc's since keyboards attached to tv and loading from 4track tape, will probably have lots of MP3 as I do. I also support what I use - paid for using MMJB, Copernic and Winzip. I see no mention here of MP3Pro and WMA lossless? It also seems the quality is less important than size / speed. I agree that original CD can serve as backup, but have lost a lot of disks to midnight shopping here in SA, so lossless best option with min disk space would help. For use, whatever will play in the car and on hi-fi cd at least at inaudible degradation will do.

I do MP3pro VBR 100%, not sure if that would audibly compare to the others mentioned, but plays in the car and hi-fi. Will investigate lossless for backup.

PS: I suppose the right to play my stolen CD MP3's now resides with the unlawful owner??

Well Guruboolez also shows that the latest Ogg Vorbis variants (AoTuvb2 and its successors) are on a par with MPC (or very close or sometimes better), which was also backed up by the latest 128kbps test, where Ogg Vorbis fared better.

I personally never considered MPC because it is not prevalent enough no HW support,
It also turned out in this thread there as of now there is no way to cut MPC files let alone I suppose to join them (although I might be wrong). Anyway this lack of basic support is alarming to me.

I considered only MP3 or Vorbis and decided on Vorbis because there is HW support, easy tagging, which MP3 does not have. It has pretty gradual quality settings (10 levels), which the old LAME did not have. Also free so there is no legal issues and fundamentally better format than MP3 by learning from some of the mistakes MP3 had.

Although when I made this decision Vorbis had issues. Now even that is gone thanks to all the very active Vorbis members on HA (Aoyumi, Harashin, Guruboolez, Quantumknot, phong and a lot of others whose contribution made it into the official Ogg Vorbis too recently (Vorbis 1.1RC1)

So for me it seems I have no compromise to make. Ogg Vorbis is a clear winner.

Triza

I have been using and will continue to use MP3 (aps) for my music collection. The reasons are simple: don't want to re-rip, the sound quality is great, and I use several devices that have MP3 playback (car stereo, portable player, etc). Plus the hard drive space taken up by it isn't insane compared to lossless.

Everything goes first to FLAC for my home theater system (2x 120GB), then to AAC 192 using iTunes for my iPod. I still have some MPC -q7 laying around, and some MP3's as well. But all new encodes are FLAC and AAC.

I use AAC mainly since I bought an iPod. I still have many tracks in MPC and other codecs, but I'm encoding new tracks into AAC mostly.
For lossless stuff, I use WavPack.

Very recently, since I have more hard drive space now, I've now started what will probably be my final rips since i'm encoding entirely to FLAC for use on my computer and then encoding the FLACs to Ogg Vorbis for use with my iHP-120. It's win-win and it really doesn't use up all that much space IMO.

Well, I mainly meant higher bitrate levels - consistently transparent levels, like in the most recent test (I think) of Guru's. There mpc still reigns fairly dominant (according to the test). Btw, could someone throw a link to this latest 128k test?


Can't really say it just turned out; it's been like one eternal question about mpc, popping up once in a while in the forum - as said, mpc's development hasn't progressed for ages. So, the reasons for mpc's high support lie elsewhere.

Here you go!

I'm still sticking with MP3 --aps, because of the wide HW support. I was considering to go for Ogg Vorbis but unfortunately I'm still confused with those many various compiles and "transparent settings" so for me it's not enough clear to move to Ogg Vorbis.

I hope one day it might be clearer and Ogg Vorbis would be more supported by HW then I'll go with Ogg Vorbis...

To this day I'm using Monkey's Audio for lossless but I'll consider to convert to FLAC...

The future will show us the way!

I'm using MP2 (Musicam @384 kbps) for compatibility and transparency.
And happy with that !

Use to be MP3/FLAC, but on OS X, FLAC playback is pretty much just regulated to VLC (well for active projects) and its volume implementation isn't the best. With the release of ALAC, I'm pretty much AAC/ALAC now. Compared to LAME, its very quick to encode a new bitrate from lossless through iTunes.

i learned this the hard way!
best quality doesn't mean it will certainly gain HW/industry support
last time i voted for MPC becoz i archive my songs to mpc
--standard is cool = around 180kbps and its transparent to me
but now i voted for AAC!

Industry! I hate ISO!
mp3 10 yrs ago is pretty bad right?
but mp3 still lives today! why? Internatinal standard, HW support etc.........

it takes yrs for WMA is just dominate around 20% of the share
mp3 still yield a whopping 70+% according to cnet's page.
M$ finally surrender to mp3 and added mp3 ripping support in windows
media player 10_ hehehe M$ is afraid that ppl will not
use WMP as it doesn't support mp3

AAC is quite succesful to gain ~5% share after apple launch
its music store for windows recently

even in this poll, AAC is catching up!


in my opinion, (prediction)



lossless format that can last for a long long long long long
time
= PCM

Lossy formats that can last
= Mp3 (Mp2/Mp1)
WMA/WMA Pro
AAC in mp4 container
Vorbis in ogg container

mpc is definitely not a good solution for portable
just do some decoding test with dBpowerAMP converter

WMA 096kbps CBR 76X
WMA 128kbps CBR 72X
WMA 160kbps CBR 67X
WMA 320kbps CBR 50X

WMA Pro 128kbps 2pass VBR 47X

OGG 092kbps VBR 69X
OGG 122kbps VBR 62X
OGG 166kbps VBR 55X
OGG 180kbps VBR 56X
OGG 309kbps VBR 43X

AAC 096kbps ABR 50X
AAC 128kbps ABR 50X
AAC 160kbps ABR 48X
AAC 320kbps ABR 42X

Mp3 128kbps CBR 17X (something wrong, decoder too slow compared to FhG acm)

MPC 146kbps VBR 23X

NOTE : decoded with P4 1.4 GHz


OGG Vorbis is really excellent at "portable" bitrates 128-192kbps
which should use less bettery than AAC around that bitrate according
to this test

but OGG Vorbis decoding is on a par with AAC above 300kbps

WMA, oh my god, very very fast.......no wonder it produces crappy
sound!

WMA PRo which can produce much better quality seem to loose to AAC n OGG Vorbis
in decoding speed

Great, now I'm totally confused...

http://www.foobar2000.org/foospeed/