okok.....virtually tied with the margin of error ensuring no one opponent being crowned the clear winner...but the graph is still the most prevalent in one's mind post listening test and private listening tests have confirmed this superiority around 180 kbps in the realm of classical where it previously performed poorly:

Not exactly a smoking gun but certainly something not to be brushed aside.

One private listening test (conducted by someone with very good ears) is not indicative for the most of us. And even here Vorbis is not 'king' like you said before.

Let's just face it, we thankfully have arrived in an era where the quality of a lossy encoder does not necessarily has to be our biggest concern in making a choice of them anymore.

You're correct...for the rest of us without "bat ears," differentiating at such bitrates would be nigh to impossible. I'm just pointing out trends as of late. It was only a year prior to the above test in 2004 that Vorbis was performing comparatively poorly in Guru's tests.

In the past I chose Musepack as (prefered) lossy codec for personal use (as I use no portable ). It is still OK, but it is going the way of the dinosaurs.
Because I see no reason (yet) to redo the existing collection in another lossy format, the major lossy part is still mpc. Also I find myself not adding as much music to my collection as I did some years ago.
These days I lean more to lossless, also LAME would rank quite high as my choice for new lossy codings now.

MPC --quality 8 --ms 15 --xlevel
as PC/laptop and DVD space saver, small-sized backup of my Lossless archive.

MP3-Lame -V5 --vbr-new
for my portable USB 1 GB stick, running outdoors, car stereo.


and to complete:
Lossless as archive & HiFi PC listening
formerly Flac and WavPack -x -m
now Flac -8 -V , as Flac is already supported in various HiFi hardware, which is less and more uncertain regarding wavpack unfortunately.

So I have 3 encodes (made as 1 step automatic process by Mareo.exe during EAC ripping) of each album on 3 different DVDs,
Lossless ca. 600 - 1000 kbit/s
MPC ca. 280 kbit/s
MP3 ca. 128 - 140 kbit/s
and feel safe to never rerip again

Nero encoder used in that test is quite obsolete - latest Nero encoder (used in Sebastian's 128 kbps listening test, however with a bug that is fixed now) and Vorbis were quite tied.

I hope Guru will do a new higher bit rate listening test sometimes - I am quite sure the quality picture has been changed compared to the last year.

maybe he will in August 2006...and I'm sure the results will make it even more difficult to pick a favorite.

I have been using Musepack ever since the year 2000. Now that development has stopped and other codecs as AAC and Vorbis (and even MP3) catch up in quality i'm thinking about switching to another format. What is important to me are several features MPC has:
- native gapless playback (bybye AAC...)
- replaygain support
- high quality

From my POV the latest aoTuV oggenc features all this, plus it's free. There's just something I couldn't find by googling: Is replaygain just something most players feature, or is it explicitly mentioned in the Vorbis spec? I wonder if replaygain will work in mobile players or car stereos that support Vorbis.

Nero AAC, Vorbis and LAME mp3 are all natively support gapless playback. Of course only if the player or decoder also supports this properly.

The same basically goes for replaygain. Although in the case of AAC and MP3 it is not natively supported by the command line encoders and decoders. Depends if that matters to you I guess.

MP3. Quality and features are not an issue when using -V2 or higher and proper tagging.

Nero/CT AAC and Lame becouse very good encoders for all situations.

And Vorbis too.

I really belive that if LAME don't exist, Vorbis probably will have the most votes, that for sure... well that and the fact that MP3 has been more than 10 years arround and because of that is a standard de facto.

What can I say? AAC VBR 128 on my iPod(s) sounds great. Simple to encode via iTunes and small file size to boot. It's my codec of choice for 2006. No problems with MP3 though - LAME rocks! Still burn MP3 CDs for the car from time to time. -V4 vbr new.

All archives are ALAC on DVD via EAC and iTunes encode.

hödyr: Vorbis and ReplayGain are two separate things. RG support is even less common than Vorbis support (and non-existant on hardware players, unless Rockbox supports it). It's just a tag for a RG-enabled player to know how much to scale the volume by.

Yeh, ReplayGain is virtually useless outside of Foobar. I wish Winamp (and also some DJ software) supported it natively.

Rockbox does support ReplayGain in tags for just about everything it plays including Vorbis. But comparatively to the amount of devices in the world support is very low.

iTunes/QT AAC VBR 160 for my iPod. I use iTunesJoin for gapless live shows etc. which is basically a front end for chapter tool.

FLAC for archives, converted to AAC when needed with Toast 7.0.2, tagged with Media Rage/iTunes.

Sadly Monty excluded replaygain from the vorbis standard. I saw a thread about the whole debate. This in my view was a big mistake. I personally would be very much surprised if any portable or non-PC solution would support the de facto standard replaygain tags. Hence I convert my FLAC onto Ogg Vorbis using the secret and not lossless (!) --apply-replaygain-which-is-not-lossless FLAC option, which in effect waivegains the decoded signal and I encode this into Ogg Vorbis

i dont think so.. even at 300kbps i wasnt able to distinguish it from original; so i already have some headroom at 250 i was actually able to hear a little added noise (i know waveform comparsions arent quite accepted here but at 350 (320) it least differs from the original when compared w/ other lossy encoders)

edit- i am using the "high quality" option, which lowers a little the quantization noise

Okay... I just remember Bryant once saying that 384 kb/s in Wavpack should be transparent, so that's where I got this notion that you'd have to use a bitrate higher than that.

IIRC WinAmp 5 supports ReplayGain, depending on the input plugin. The input plugins that come with WinAmp 5 all support RG.

Edit: There are lots of players that now support ReplayGain. See the HA Wiki page for ReplayGain.

The MPC contigent is still managing to hold onto their lead over MP4 by a thread.

yes ... and they have been by Vorbis.

mpc (Musepack) for home collection (-q 5)
AAC for low-bitrate mobile music listening; mp3 (lame of course) for ringer tone (my SE K700i can't use AAC for this)
mp3 again for portable player (bitrate is low because of environment noise)
and no lossless at all

Uhm... that's news to me... is there any way of verifying this from Within WinAMP? It seems like my replaygained tracks all sound like different volumes when played in WinAMP.

They all usually sound quite a bit louder than my music videos, in any case.

[edit]
This forum thread in WinAmp's forums seems to contradict your statement pepoluan.
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=234302

Whoopsie. My bad. The built-in input plugin for MP3 does not support RG. You must use Shibatch's in_mpg123.dll (which I use now)

But Winamp's built-in input plugin for Vorbis does support RG! Go Vorbis! Heh heh heh

Ogg Vorbis! Best choice.

Just FYI, MediaMonkey's built-in input plugins uses in_mpg123.dll, and so it supports RG for all formats it can play. (Sadly, only track-mode RG).

I use either Mp3 or AAC because of their Hardware Support.

I switched from AAC back to MP3 at the end of 2005 and haven't looked back.

MP3 since it is so easy to encode... lastest lame MP3 and alt-preset extreme

with AAC, I like AAC but, hmmm , so hard to choose... Nero or Apple, and I hate iTunes T_T

For me Lame MP3 (-V 2 --vbr-new -Y) exclusively

Below mentioned points clearly covers my thoughts on this topic...
WavPack (-m -h) for lossless

Ogg Vorbis and FLAC for me.

I switched to Ogg from musepack at the beginning of this year. Even before that I was ripping classical stuff in ogg because the long tracks made the seek situation with MPC intolerable. Then at Christmas time I was ripping music from some people and thought, "Why am I still using a near-dead format?" I don't have the ears to appreciate it. So the switch to ogg was made.

I have a MP3 only portable, but I don't find that maintaining a seperate collection is that big a problem. Mostly because I don't change the music on it all that frequently...

With software like MAREO around, your choice of codecs easy to achieve, but I wonder, is there really a point in having the same tracks on lossy twice? Is there a resaon I don't see?

One for use on the PC, the other for the portable, and the FLAC relegated to backup on DVDs or something?

If you were asking about why I said Ogg and FLAC, it should have been Ogg or FLAC. Lossless gets used for any cds that are scratched bad enough that ripping them in EAC is slow and painful. Also sometimes when I borrow a cd from a friend. I don't bother making backups of all my cds, I figure anything that would distroy my cd collection would get the backups too.

But yeah, I keep duplicate mp3s for my Rio of most stuff I rip to Ogg on a 60gb usb drive. It's a much smaller job since I never load classical (and hardly ever jazz) to the portable.

Lame MP3 to be specific. Main reason is compatibility and hardware/software support. I mean, even Sony HiMDs can play MP3s now. Also, Lame is well developed and tested, and provide excellent quality.

Atrac: Mainly for gapless. Untill manufactures get their acts together to support gapless (OGG support but no gapless?) or Rockbox takes over all DAPs firmwares, I'll stick with Atrac.

[quote name='de Mon' date='Apr 9 2006, 07:36 PM' post='380604']
[quote name='Maglor' post='380499' date='Apr 9 2006, 03:56 AM']
I seem to to be the only one in here that has about 2000 albums all in WMA at 192Kbps. Do I seem stupid? Well, I may very well be one. But all I know is that not even with Lame can MP3 at the same Bitrate be better than WMA... tested.
[/quote]


I would like to see these tests.
[ /quote]

I've tested with these hears of mine... it's much easier. Try ripping it at the same bitrate and then compare.

WMA better than others? I have a suspicion you have never heard of ABX tests. Am I right?

@ Maglor: Have you ever heard of HydrogenAudio Terms of Service?

TOS #8:
All members that put forth a statement concerning subjective sound quality, must -- to the best of their ability -- provide objective support for their claims. Acceptable means of support are double blind listening tests (ABX or ABC/HR) demonstrating that the member can discern a difference perceptually, together with a test sample to allow others to reproduce their findings. Graphs, non-blind listening tests, waveform difference comparisons, and so on, are not acceptable means of providing support.

The Musepack codec has my preference to backup my CDs in a lossy format

I still in mp3 'cause your quality and great compatibity with a great number of devices.
But in the nexts years i think in replace mp3 for ogg,aac or mpc they starting to offering great quality and when the implementations of these formats are in the begining,except in mpc, of the mp3 are so close of the end.

Accually, I heard that WMA is highly optimized for low bitrates (64Kbps), so they can do the marketing stuff (You know... "We beat MP3 at 128, with our 64!" stuff), but it fails considerably at higher bitrates. I dont know where I heard this, I havnt done tests, so dont warn me or anything. It could very well be wrong, but it does sound like something microsoft would do.

Same here. I've taken to backing up my CDs to flac with embedded cue sheets (can I put the album art in there too?), and as of now have 80gb of new CDs that I need to back up. I was going to use the opportunity to change to a more supported codec than musepack but as far as I can see it:

1. I don't understand all the aac variations/encoders, and which is the 'best'. I tried aac on my smartphone and ipod/rockbox and they both sucked power and jumped about, whereas the musepack files playback fine whilst using minimal cpu.

2. I need to transcode to mp3 for my girlfriends player occasionally and i've never had a problem (i.e. an obvious artifact) transcoding from musepack.

3. Ogg again is too slow on smartphone and rockbox, especially compared with mpc.

I'd love to change but where is the obvious replacement? mp3 would be fine but even cloth eared me has ABXd artifacts fairly easily, though admittedly that isn't with the latest lame encoder. I need something thats efficient, easy to encode/decode, supported on smartphone (tcpmp) and rockbox(ipod) that doesn't transcode too badly to mp3.

For lossy in my music folder, Nero AAC 1.0.0.2 (26 May 2006) -q 0.55
Due to it being true VBR AAC.

OR, Ogg aoTuV -q 6.0 ...can't decide on which to go with as Rockbox or native support is keeping me up in the air.

All CDs are ripped to a single wavpack file with cue sheet and eac log, than burnt to DVDs for backup of my audio collection. Than later I can take the archive, pop it in foobar200 and convert to whatever lossy format catches my listening fancy. With the lossless backup I am not stuck or feel confined to a single format.

Just using Nero AAC at the moment due to its VBR and my possible DAP will be an iPod...though the Cowon iAudio X5L is nice too. Pretty much the reason I have been making a lossless audio archive my music collection to save me the hassle of being stuck.

- Gow

Edit: Added in my ogg support

Vorbis here! I've been using the format since 2002, and I won't stop using it, unless there's a major catastrophe leaving AAC as the only survivor. In that case, I have FLAC copies of the files

lame 3.97 apx. excellent compatibility and quality.

I encode my vast collection of harpsichord music at 5kbps Blade MP3 and it sounds AWESOME!

You should at least pick a real bitrate, the lowest MP3 can go is 8.

Not MY version of the Blade encoder. It can go as low as -20. Of course, you can't hear anything and the tracks start sucking bits out of other songs. And then the universe implodes. So it's best to go with a positive number.