Long story short: Got the new IRiver 2nd Gen DAP for a close friend who is dying of cancer. He loves music (alot) but can't haul around his audiophile habit....and he is pretty weak from a second round of Chemo. Aside from putting some cool pix of the family and friends on there, I want to rip a decent amount of his collection and upload it to the DAP in OGG Vorbis to get as close to transparent as possible without taking up a ridiculous amount of time encoding and additional disk space. While I'm there though, I want to first rip all this to a lossless format on a 500gb portable drive...would like to have as much tag information as possible with each CD. Then, from what I'm reading the conversion of the FLAC or TAK to Ogg should be fairly simple. Some of his stuff is on vinyl....but that's not the main point of this discussion (I've read a number of previous threads regarding vinyl) except to deal with artifacts, scratches, hiss, pop...

So, here is the thing. I've spent the past three and a half days reading HA, and many other sites to get a clue as to the most efficient and effective way to get this project done, and the programs and formats to use. For long term lossless, I don't care about playback (at least for now), I just want all of the data (with detailed and customizable Tag info either from the disk or supplied by me) with as little pop, hiss, jitter, etc. as possible, and I would like it as small as reasonably possible. I also want to be able to later use the Lossless to create lossy content for the DAP in Ogg (supported on the IRiver) as this appears to be not only a high quality compression method but also Open Source. Although I would like something reasonably simple (GUI's are nice), I will read the manual.

So for the long term storage, should I go TAK or FLAC? Which Ripper (EAC, CDex, Foobar, JRMC, Lame) will get me there? Don't need a ton of options...just efficiency and reasonable simplicity (again, don't mind reading...just want to avoid needless experiments and rely upon some of your experience). Finally, lots of add ons available (i.e. TAG by Mr. Case, and many others...) so which ones will be needed to get the job done right the first time. (I'm using xp pro operating system on a fairly new PC)

Thanks, and apologies for the lengthy post.

P.S. I never knew how deep this digital audio world was till I started on this mission...your experience here is greatly appreciated!

Ultimately, either encoder is suitable. If it were me, I'd go with Tak since it's my preference. It gets files a little smaller and/or works a little faster. Sure it doesn't have much installed user base now, but that's ok for me. And since you're not looking to play the Tak files, then there's nothing to worry about.

For rippers, you could go with EAC, dbpoweramp, or foobar -- I know that most at HA feel secure using any of those. I use EAC, and might switch to the next release of dbpoweramp. EAC has done it's job for years and still does, but dbpoweramp has some nice features as far tagging with online databases, really nice gui, etc. but you do have to pay for it.

I record the bulk of my music in FLAC over WavPack or TAK because, in 2007, of all available lossless audio encoders, FLAC has the second greatest odds, next to ALAC, to be playable on non-PC devices in the long term, which, for me, outweighs incremental compression improvements. Of course there are opposing viewpoints: save space with TAK now then convert to FLAC for the music that needs to be in that format being one of them. The same operates in reverse: if TAK becomes dominant, then bulk conversion from FLAC to TAK works as well.

Needing help is fine, but you will find few forums on the internet that take the terms of service as seriously as this one. There is a link to them at the top of every page. In this case, read TOS 6.

As far as ripping software goes, I've used EAC for years with excellent results.

Foobar is not ripping software (unless they just recently added that in the last year) but it will do an excellent job converting your lossless files to Vorbis (or mp3 or aac or whatever).

LAME is an mp3 codec. It is not a ripper.

Welcome to HA.

Lemme grab a piece of wood and TAKKK!!! in your head for posting at so many places...

Just kidding...

Well, I would go with FLAC since it's popular on the NET, it's opensource, it's supported by almost every Operating System, and there's more hardware that supports it.

But that's only FOR NOW. If the world goes crazy and the manufacturers start shipping popular priced devices that support TAK ( devices a.k.a DVD-Players) then we will have a scenario where there is going to be one predominant format (as MP3 is in the realm of lossy). I believe FLAC is going into the right direction, but as I said - it all depends on hardware player popularity. We can't tell you right now which format is going to be the best and predominant and future proof, all lossless codecs are doing pretty well altogether. I recommend you stick with the one you feel more confortable with.

Thanks for the wood...and all of the advice Just got the DAP today, and decided to go ahead and give DBPoweramp Ref. a shot. Don't mind paying for good stuff, and from what I have seen and experienced with the trial version, it looks very good. EAC looks like a great program, but with little experience, I think it would be a pretty large undertaking just to get up to speed enough to get this project done. And given the circumstances, I can't just do this at my leisure.

Love what I have seen and read about TAK, and once this project is completed I may look at TAK again, but again, FLAC will work (perhaps a bit slower and a byte (or two) less compressed) and give me a reference for later conversions.

Thanks again to all for your patience and assistance...I will post later (but only in one spot!!!) to give some insight as to how things went and my friends health.

Best regards,

Chris

I am probably going to get the regular bashing but I am using WMA-L for about a year now for variety of reasons. First of all my network player (Philips Streamium) SL-400) plays WMA lossless over my WIFI network straight from my Buffalo Linkstation server. The second I can easily RIP to WMA-L while visiting friends (I know I will burn in hell for this, thank you) using omnipresent Windows Media Player. The second I can easily share with my friends - again, everyone has a MS Media Playerbutt . The last but not least I have foobar which means transcoding between formats is as easy as it gets... I am not sure if you can use WMA-L on your DAP but keeping your library in WMA-L as you can see has a lot of advantages...

I wasn't aware anything other than Media Player supported WMA-L. Sounds like WMA-L makes sense for your uses.

Well if WMA-L is easily re-encoded bit-perfectly to other formats, can be encoded without DRM, and is technically reliable, there's nothing wrong with using it. It's in a different ballpark from WMA lossy.

WMA Lossless also enjoys native decoding support by several popular applications, just like Winamp and the Nero Suite. Its major problem is the handling outside of Windows, I don't think that any player/engine except Windows Media Player for the MAC supports it.