I have my entire cd collection on my hd in wav format. And have desided to use lossless compression. I have read many posts here about lossless codecs, and wonder:
Will the codeks all sound similar?
Is it only how fast and how good they compress (I know some supports tagging ande some do not) that makes the difference?
I am very sceptical to compress all my wav's into a format that removes 40-50% in filesize and still "sounds like wav". But if it does I am glad to put even more on my hd.
Hope someone here can clear things up for me.

Happy new year to you all.
Snire

yes, the sound will be exactly the same as your original wav file - no matter what lossless format and setting you choose

Works the same way as ZIP, learn math and compression algorithms if you want to learn more.

Not "similar". There's a perfect identity.


Yes. There are others important things (depending on users):
- decoding speed
- seeking abilities and speed
- compatibility with advanced multimedia containers (ogg, matroska, mp4...)
- Linux, Mac... compatibility
- robustness against errors
etc...


Use a bit to bit comparator to be convinced (EAC, foobar2000).


And for you:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=29655

Thank you all for the answers. Then I set my pc to work with some lossless stuff next year.

Snire

guruboolez pretty much nailed the differences between the codecs.

But imo there are one thing that is very important as well, hardware compatibility.
Example: Apple iPod supports Apple Lossless, Rio Karma supports FLAC etc...

You must decide whats most important, then select a couple of codecs to find your favorite.

The best thing about lossless codecs (besides the quality aspects) IMO is the ability to easily transcode between formats without any transcoding quality loss.

You have FLAC and want Apple Lossless for some reason ? No problem.

You have APE and need Musepack ? No problem either ...

Of course you could achieve all that with uncompressed PCM, too ... but HDD storage still costs money and filesize reduction thus is always welcome.

A decisive factor for me was the excellent FLACattack which makes the cd->backup process a matter of 2-3 clicks. If you are concerned with hardware support you should do some research.

Now I have converted all my albums to Monkey's audio. It is 146 albums and I got 30 Gb of harddiskspace back. Nice. The job took only 4 hours on my Dell 3Ghz ht with 2 Gb ram.
And best of all: Monkey's tagged all the files from the filenames.

Snire.