I plan to update my Flac Lossless archiving guide (see my sig) for at least FLAC, wavepack, and APE, and would like others feedback that are more familiar with the other codecs as to the command line settings of choice for a reasonable encoding time balancing the one time act of encoding with decoding and getting a reasonable size

wavpack -hm ?

I don't use the -x modes as seem to they really slow things down.

Do you use REACT,MAREO,mkaenc,etc?

I don't know. I find quality 8 for FLAC to offer such negligible file size savings over 5 that I just use 5 all the time.

I do make sure, though, to set Verify and to avoid Ogg FLAC. "Verify" because I want to be certain the FLAC file has the same audio data as the WAV, and Ogg FLAC doesn't play on Winamp.

For tagging, I use the autodetect procedure I've mentioned in a previous thread here. Set "Add Tags", go to "Tag Conf.", set "Auto detect" and fill in the fields that are common to the whole compilation. Of course, it requires that the source WAV files be named appropriately.

WOW, I cant believe how dead this thread is. I expected alot more input. Anyone else?

I'm not really that surprised at the lack of response.

First of all, lossless is lossless whatever you use the output will be the same. The only other considerations really are those you suggest, speed of compression/decompression and compression ratio. I'd say all the lossless compressors are pretty well documented and easy to use. A quick read of the manual will provide the user with the information they need.

Right. Besides, most often than not developers are smart enough to use the best compression ratio X compression speed setting as default. Other than that, it's only minutiae.

For instance, I would probably recommend the standard compression setting in WavPack, and maybe add -m for MD5 signature. No need to worry much besides that.

I agree too. I experimented with Wavpack -h, -x, and -hx, and found that the default with no switches is probably the best for me, and the best speed/size ratio. It actually took some effort for me to wrap my head around the concept that NO switches could be better than using some switches . Although I'll probably start using -m for MD5 since it shouldn't have much effect on speed or size.

I always use wavpack -hmx2, because my music library partition is only 80gb and i'm happy with every bit reduced
It encodes as fast as lame mp3 on my system and saves a good portion of the normal x-switch. So it is a very good speed/size ratio for me.

But you'll probably get a better compression ratio with optimfrog --encode --md5 without any additional switches. Its faster than my solution in encoding (but slower in decoding...).

For WavPack i use -hx2m. Having the extra compression on can be helpful for certain types of music. I can't remember an example, but in some cases it can lead to a lot more compression than usual. Plus with -x2 it compresses at a speed comparable to FLAC -8, which I use when compressing to FLAC. There is little reason not to use the -m option in wavpack, I can't tell a speed different, and it's handy for verification.
With FLAC anything from -5 to -8. I always use -8V. May be a bit slower, but you only have to compress it once.

Mostly on artificial samples.

personally I'm going with 'wavpack -hxm' currently, as I have a fast computer and patience, and assuming you don't screw up, you only encode once, so I don't mind the extra time -x takes

though, if you want quick decoding times, note that -h will make the file take ~1.5-2 times as long to decode

also, I'd suggest avoiding APE since it has a screwed up license (APE's site has various mentions of the license that contradict each other) and has trouble with being included in software/hardware because of it; the author has ignored everyone's attempts to change to a better license after originally considering it, and there has been no development on it for over a year and may end up being dead

if you use flac, go with flac -8 unless you have a really slow computer or time is really important, as you never know when you'll need 1 less mb for burning onto that backup dvd

ttaenc works well, fast and efficient and easy to use (as it has no encoding options!), though it needs move away from ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags...