Happy new year to everyone.
New year, new poll.
Lossy/lossless polls are a tradition here in HA.org. The first one started few weeks after the site was founded by Dibrom. As explained in last year's poll I think that polls should be rationalized in order to compare more easily the choices of HA members. The 2007 general poll was created exactly one year ago and got 921 voters ; I hope this one will last one full year¹ as well and will reach the 1000!

I made small changes in the poll structure:
• WMA and WMA Pro are now one unique poll choice (they got less than 1% of total votes last year and I needed a free row to make the other changes possible)
• WavPack lossy was added
• LossyWAV + lossless whcih appeared this year was also added
• other lossy format and I don't use lossless AT ALL! are split
• I reordered the list according to the 2007 popularity (TAK before OptimFROG)
• Apple Lossless was accidentally removed

9000 new persons are registered on hydrogenaudio's forums since last poll. I hope that many of them will answer to this new poll. In advance, thank you for your vote.


To finish, a very big thank you to houyhnhnm who offered us a pretty complete synthesis of HA Polls since the beginning, here:






___
¹ or maybe less if a moderator/admin wants to act differently

I am VERY interested in the future of TAK. Once it goes open source and gets a little more software support it may well replace FLAC for me. I switched this year from MP3 to AAC. I use an ipod, my wife uses an ipod, all my friends and family use ipods. I had alot of playback problems with VBR Lame MP3 files on the ipods, so I have switched to ABR AAC.

Since its a "ripping" poll as well, you should have added an option for ripping software of choice.

I've given up Vorbis in favor of MP3s ubiquity, but still love the completeness of the Vorbis format. When I find a portable device with proper support I may go back.

Long live FLAC! Josh Coalson for President (of some small island somewhere)!

Hello guru and Bonne Année!

I voted:
- MP3: for compatibility.
- WavPack: because Bryant is a nice guy from San Francisco and I like the foobar2000 icon.
- one file per track: for no special reason other than I never had a problem with that.

Interesting how Wavpack lost its users to FLAC. The current poll seems to show that this trend continues. Or is it because of TAK?

My guess is that growing hardware support for FLAC caused this and maybe even FLAC's new feature of embedding images. Now that there's a new competitor out there (TAK), it may also draw some specific users to it, those who always look out for the most efficient codec.

PS: my choices

• MP3 - it's transparent to me, compatibility and it's still actively developed.
• WavPack - I like its efficiency, it has a "full" feature set (except embedded image functionality isn't widely supported with players yet, tho it works with fb2k which is most important), it's free software.
• One file per CD - I don't play lossless on devices that need track-based audio files, when I need track-based files I transcode to lossy anyway using fb2k. And I don't like non-compliant cue sheets, also one file per disc is easier to manage when having a large music library on HD.

-

I was thinking the same.

Indeed. But I can only put three questions per poll.
Someone should maybe create an advanced ripping poll.

Mp3: Lame 3.98b6 -v2 -vbr-new, transparent to me on most of my tracks and is easily read by the xbox360 that my computer networks with, along with being a good choice for my Zune player.

TAK: -p4, offers good compression and I only use it as a means of archiving audio so compatibility is unimportant as long as it plays and can be encoded with foobar2000.

Mix: I use a mix of single track image with cue and tracks, depends on the CD.

As for lossless I used wavpack before, but now I encode anything to tak.
And I switched from mp3 to nero aac, all my devices support it.

My lossy format of choice is MP3 for universal compatibility -- my hardware players are old and relatively featureless, yet nonetheless they suffice for my purposes. That said, the overwhelming majority of my rips are lossless, I only encode to LAME 3.97 --vbr-new -v4 on-demand.

Lossless-wise, all my music is in WavPack High, sometimes having used -x3, sometimes having used -x6 with no real consistency (and feel no need to enforce it). Once TAK will support seeking without seektables like WavPack, I'll consider a migration to that format.

A possible reason why WavPack could've lost "market share" in the previous year is that its hardware support still lags behind that of FLAC, so users looking for hardware support that are more likely to use FLAC anyway. That leaves users looking for higher compression (than FLAC) but decent flexibility (more flexible than OptimFROG or Monkey's Audio) using WavPack (like me), yet these are the users most likely to switch to TAK eventually.

Moved over the years, from Monkeys Audio to Wavpack and now am using TAK p5m with one file per disc for my lossless archive.
Use MP3 (lame 3.86 beta V4) as my primary lossy format for its universal compatibility.
Anish

For lossy I've been using MP3 so far - because it will play on my old DAPs. I imagine this will change to vorbis in the new year because I am thinking about buying a new DAP with vorbis compatibility, and I love the gapless nature of vorbis files.

For lossless I have been using FLAC so far, because of the wide acceptance of them. I love that it's open source, too. It's entirely possible I might try TAK and WavPack both this year, just out of curiosity, and one of them might replace my FLACs... but you never know.

For lossy and lossless I use single image and cuesheet, because so many albums I have are gapless.

I think 2008 is likely going to be a year with alot of transition, with the new formats that are emerging (new hybrid lossy/lossless) and the other promising lossy and lossless types that are appearing and being developed. It'll be interesting to see how this year compares to 2009.

Unsurprisingly, I use lossyWAV + FLAC for my on demand lossy transcoding and FLAC for my archive.

++

FLAC and TAK for lossless. Voted for TAK.

TAK -p5m single file with embedded cuesheet for the lossless archive.

Vorbis -q5 for use on the go on my two Rockbox-enabled DAPs.

my vote goes to the most compatible formats: flac and mp3. compatibility is king for me.

on a sidenote, the graphs are quite interesting. i did use ape and mpc years ago and made the switch. looks like a lot of HA members did too.

-MP3 LAME 3.98b6 -V2 (I switched back from AAC for device support, ubiquity, etc.)
-WavPack (For efficiency reasons at the time I started archiving)
-One file per disc with cuesheet or chapters (This makes it easy to recreate CDs and maintains proper gaps)

I voted Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and per track.

Most of my lossy catalog is still MPC, but I voted for Vorbis because if I was to encode more lossy files I would probably use Vorbis. I'm about as confident in Vorbis's quality as I am in MPC's quality now and it is more likely to be supported.

FLAC simply because it is most widely supported, open source, and "good enough" as far as compression goes. TAK certainly looks interesting for the future.

Lossy: LAME for my wife's PAD.

Lossless: FLAC. I love WavPack but I'm now using Catraxx for audio management and the only lossless codec supported is FLAC.

One file per track. I can't see the image/cue solution advantages anymore, and anyway Catraxx don't support them. Plus, I delete the many identical songs I have more than once.

Lossy:MP3, LAME 3.97. One file per track, ABR 266 for "classical" music (Enya, Bethoven.etc.) and "-V0 --vbr-new" to all the rest.
Lossless: APE, Extra High, one file per album + cuesheet.

I use mp3 for lossy and Apple Lossless. Strangely Apple Lossless was not an option unlike the previous year!

Noooooooooo! My mistake
I don't know if it can be edited without reseting the whole poll....

EDIT: just tried: I can't edit the poll, only my first post.

I use FLAC level 5 to archive my CDs, all kept on an external HDD. As I own an iAudio X5, I use Vorbis q5.0 for portable play and home listening.

Since I Only use PC+Foobar (No DAP here. Don't ever need one) Compatibility is not my concerned. So I use Vorbis lancer build q-6 for lossy for highest quality with giving bitrate and speed. (q-4 is good enough but a just a peace of mind.) and TAK 5 for lossless.The new version usually has compression (sometime significantly with quieter music) better than APE high while still decoding a lot faster and usable not like APE more than "high" which is damn slow.

In ripping mode however, I rip them using image+cue AND use foobar to split them in to individual tracks. It's a bit tedious work but I can have backup of my disk (image cue file) and convenient of using individual tracks at the same time. If I ever need to burn it back to CD I just merge individual tracks together using foobar+image cue file to burn.

Well, last year is was AAC since I bought a Mac, but this year I'm re-ripping everything to MP3 since I built a new PC, and want to use my music with Media Center and such.

The AAC tag extenders just don't cut it for me.

As for lossless, OptimFrog, compression to the max!

What's the disadvantage of seektables (except for the additionally needed bytes)?

Wavpack and MP3.

I too am very interested in TAK and may make the switch this year. I would switch to AAC but my car stereo doesn't currently support it (my phone does) and I have no reason to change it ... unless there is one with gapless AAC playback?

I voted for MP3, Wavpack and mixed settings (cue file for Wavpack and multiple files for MP3).
MP3 is the most compatible code with the software/hardware I use (VirtualDJ, PDA, my car's MP3 player) and Wavpack provides me a good storage option.
I use Lame --vbr-new -v 2 since I cannot ABX it from the original (I doubt I could even from -v 4 ) and Wavpack -hh -x1 (more than x1 is SO overkill).
Have a great year, everybody!

Interesting poll, curious to see what everyone else is doing. Voted mp3 format for all. Have not gotten around to buying a large hd. So lossless is out of the question. Just bought a refurb Sansa e280 off ebay. May rockbox it so, I have a real reason to use other formats . Best wishes to all for a prosperous New Year.

cheers,
herefornow

lossyWav + FLAC is what matches my needs perfectly for listening purposes, Monkey for archiving purposes.

I am still interested in mp3
a) because of its universal usability
b) because at a bitrate of ~250 kbps on average (which more and more users can afford) I'm sure all my quality demands can be fulfilled by a hypothetic ideal encoder, and we do have encoders which come close to that (Lame 3.98b6 -V0, but Helix and FhG @CBR256 are real good as well, with each of them having specific strengths in the various problem areas).

My feelings are also with wavPack lossy which one day - with an added quality control - may outperform the lossyWAV/FLAC combination.

mpc + flac + "mix of cue and tracks"

although i do use mp3 (lame) and wavpack - but not as much.


later

Vorbis for new lossy encodes. All my devices support it and I am satisfied with it at 96kbps.

FLAC for new lossless encodes. I have a great deal of Wavpacks but now I choose FLAC simply because it decodes faster in my slow computer and I feel it is more widely accepted as the codec of choice for most people in the lossless scene. I do not intend to convert my Wavpacks to FLAC because I don't see the point.

One file per track for new rips because it is easier to manage and suits all my needs.

Lossy: Ogg Vorbis, though I use AAC for transferring to my portable (if I ever get around to loading Rockbox, it will be Ogg Vorbis 100%)

Lossless: WavPack. TAK isn't quite as robust as I would like yet (nor does it have the player support I need), but I'll be watching it as new versions come out.

my cd's are ripped to FLAC via CDex, then run thru a ReplayGain scan via foobar2000 for my lossless archive...

for my lossy library (which goes straight to my iPod) I use Nero AAC @ q0.425 and use foobar2000's Converter to run the transcoding, with a pre-conversion +1dB boost. this puts the average bitrate of my lossy library between 128-129kbps, which for me is a good balance between quality and filesize. I've never had any playback issues, and I'm more than satisfied with Nero AAC's performance at this quality level...

Please explain what you mean. Do you have any evidence to back this claim?

MP3 (LAME), only because my lady is content with her iPod the way it is, she doesn't want me to Rockbox it (yet.) Otherwise, I would much prefer lossyWAV+FLAC or Ogg Vorbis.
Damn you Apple for not supporting Free codecs.

FLAC, more support than TAK and fast enough.

One track per file, why not? Keeps things simple. If I really need a hard copy (very rarely) no one I know can hear gaps in Burrrned CD's.

MP3 (LAME) for lossy just because of compatibility.
FLAC for archiving and on my server for the Squeezebox since storage space isn't a problem

I voted OGG for lossy, but most of my lossy files are in Atrac3plus 64 kbs. (I use mostly Sony players.) The OGGs are for my Pocket PC. I might switch to HE-AACv2 as soon as Pocket Player supports it.

I voted Wavpack for lossless. But actually most of my archives are nrg images. I use Wavpack only for my LP rips, since it is fast, efficient, and stores the cues set in Adobe Audition. (Flac and Monkeys Audio loose the cues.) I might rip the images to Wavpack to save space later on.

lame 3.97 -V 0 --vbr-new, till i get a new hd (preferably 750gb minimum), then I'll just copy over my flac backups.

Here we are asked for our main codecs of choice. So I chose the ones I prefer at the moment.

In my case I use Musepack (mpc) and LAME (mp3) for lossy encodes.

For lossless I try more codecs as the differences are only in the CPU load and compression ratio, not sound quality. In the last year FLAC has catched up compression wise and the speed is good too, but I'm using WavPack and TAK too.

LossyWav (with FLAC but maybe also with WavPack) is also something I'm looking into, kind of in between traditional lossy and lossless.

Upon transcoding my lossless collection, I'd prefer to do it with foobar2000, with pipe encoding. TAK currently uses a default seek table size of 8 minutes which isn't suitable for all of my music, given how with longer track lengths, seek accuracy decreases. (Info taken from TBeck). WavPack handles this with seekpoints in the stream, and is thus much more preferable to me. TBeck stated the TAK bitstream also has such a capability, and I'll wait for this functionality to be introduced before I transcode to TAK.

For lossless, TAK all the way. Compresses better than Flac and much faster than other formats when getting those kinds of compression ratios. The only thing that slowed me down at all in jumping onto this format was waiting for it to work in Foobar.

For lossy they're primarily aimed for use on my Rockboxed Sansa E260, which after playing around with several formats I eventually settled on Vorbis at Q1 (~80 kbps). MPC is lightning fast for decoding so I'm thinking should yield better battery life, but I was a bit leary of using it at the bitrates I was aiming for. Same goes for mp3. That left me waffling between Vorbis and AAC, and eventually Vorbis won out.

One track per song, it's worked fine for me for a decade of music on the PC, I've no need to change my ways in this respect. YMMV

TAK does not compress faster than Monkey's Audio at similar ratios. If you you look at Synthetic Soul's Lossless Codec Comparison nothing compresses faster than Monkey's Audio at similar ratios. Decompression speed is an entirely different story.

I rip one file per track using dBpowerAMP. I then convert the WAV to FLAC and WMA Lossless. Finally, I import the WMA Lossless to my iTunes library and convert to AAC before I eventually delete the WMA files. The extra step with WMA Lossless is only in order to preserve tag information. I might switch to Nero AAC soon, though. I didn't check how gapless that is combined with an iPod Touch.

Since giving up on Windows, my choices are fewer but quite satisfying.

* iTunes or Max encoding to AAC for lossy (usually 128kbps VBR). I rarely use Max because iTunes generally works perfectly.
* Apple Lossless for, well, lossless. Plays in all my stuff, supports all the iTunes tags, etc. Plays well with others.

We still have one Windows box in the house, but we just let the kids play with it. The change away from Microsoft has been refreshing and productive and I find that I don't miss EAC/FB2k one bit. Everything works and sounds just great.

Its interesting to see the stats so far reflecting, that once a codec reaches a certain feature-set and "good enough" compression-efficiency, its all about hardware and software support. The ability to transfer music between a high amount of devices and use them as casette-tapes were used in the past (nearly everywhere) has a huge impact. Take AAC for example... above 128kbit, it doest really perceptually offer a big advantage over mp3...... just because of iTunes, iPod and a number of other devices, it is now gaining quite a bit of usage.

That opens up interesting questions for developers of codecs - if ones primary interest is usage-share, then would one be better advised to write plugins and tools for the codec, once it became "good enough" feature-wise? If yes, then that would mean that codec devs also need to be application-devs if they want they codec to be successful.

Largely based on what I've learned from Hydrogenaudio, my votes are:

-MP3 (thanks to the LAME developers)
-FLAC (thanks to Josh)
-One file per track (I use folder configurations for artist/album organization (God bless foobar), and single files for tracks seem to work well for compatability purposes)

The first album I ever owned was Thriller on LP...no mp3 or FLAC. Don't let that void my vote please.

-Marky Mark

• Lossy - I use AAC. It's compatible with all my hardware, and I can push the bit rates lower to save more space.
• Loseloss - I use FLAC. I've used it since the beginning, it's a solid format.
• One file per CD - For organisational purposes.

Lossy: MP3 V0
Lossless: FLAC
One file per track

Et bonne année guru et les autres !