hi
i want to store my music in a lossless format than i have to choose.

1)best compression rate
2)no problem of speed or cpu usage during decompression (i will convert to a lossy format very rarely). i will not play the lossless files but mpc ones.
3)good tag support
4)error recovery: i store my music on a usb driver (even if i will store it in a rar archive with recovery information)
5)cuesheet (embedded or not)

wich should i use? optimfrog?flac?

another question:
it is possible to convert a lossless format to another lossless one without problems?


thank you in advance i know my english isn't very well

I would use FLAC, and yeah, you can convert lossless files to other lossless formats with no drawbacks.

Try Monkeys audio extra high and optimfrog --highnew or higher depending on speed of you pc.

I think FLAC is the right choice

1) maybe don´t have the best copression ratio but...
2) is really fast during decompression.
3) uses Vorbis comments, that is powerful
4) it has good error recovery
5) support both.

edit: See the Lossless comparison and see the right format for you... but I think that FLAC is a good choice.

If you care a little more about compression ratio and think FLAC doesn't offer enough you could try WavPack -h. It is what I personally use, but won't compress like OptimFrog, LA, or Monkey's Audio however. If your sole purpose is compression ratio lean more towards picking one of those

HA Wiki: Lossless comparison

I'd recommend WavPack 4.22 -hm, just like DT291.

I'm not going to tell you what codec you should use - please see the wiki quoted above.

However, I would just like to say that I only recently realised that compression ratio is really not so important compared to things like error tolerance. I switched from Monkey's Audio at the expense of around 5GB of space. However, I have a 300GB drive that cost me around £85, so I believe this space is negligible compared to the ability to not totally lose a file due to one small error.

I can confirm this having tried FLAC and wavPack. Compression ratio doesn't differ very much. I would rather consider things like: will hardware player support for that format will become an issue one day? Than I would prefer FLAC, as this is going to be the best supported format there (apart from ALAC in the apple world).
If for your MPC use there might be an alternative with the hybrid codecs like wavPack. You can get high quality lossy wavPack together with a correction. Using them together with foobar for instance yields a lossless result. File size of lossy + correction file is pretty much in the lossless only range. Hardware player support for wavPack is with Rockbox firmware anf iRiver H1x0 players.

WavPack would be basically perfect if only for more hardware support and probably software too (although if using foobar2000 means stopping using WMP I'm all for it! ).

Monkey's Audio didn't seem that fantastic when I tried it. On any of the higher modes - and especially the new Insane mode - seeking was painfully slow for me on foobar2000 (Athlon XP 2500+@3200+, 256 MB).

After looking at your spec, I would say WavPack!

It's not that fantastic, is it? But do you really think Monkey's needs a lot of power? I like WavPack too much to switch but I wondered before. My PC's okay for me anyway - all it's ever doing is playing music!

If you will be storing it in a rar archive with recovery information, why not just compress the wav files directly with rar?

No. It is error robust in the aspect that it won't choke ugly if it finds a stream error. But it can't recover the erroneous part using Reed-Solomon code or some similar error resiliency algorithm.



RAR is a quite lousy WAV compressor, being much worse than even Shorten in compression ratio.

this is correct though usually in this context 'error recovery' means the decoder can recover from errors and pick up decoding again at some place after the error (which FLAC and others do), and the term 'error correction' is used for reed-solomon and other error correcting codes that can get data back even in the presence of errors.

I don't know of any lossless codec that offers integrated error correction; usually this is handled as an external layer as part of a transmission protocol.

Josh

So be it, in this thread the context is of parity data for error recovery because people threw RAR and its "recovery information" into the mix.