A few days ago, I ripped all my CDs into Nero AAC at Quality = 0.5 (Couple of hundred of them, took me a whole day), as I was starting to grow tired of all the bad quality MP3s I ripped from them about a year or so ago.
Lately I have been reading up on MPC. Me being an "open source" kinda guy, I started really taking affection to MPC (I didn't like OGG because I couldn't embed pictures)
BUT, just now I ABX'd the AAC and WAV versions of the same song, and realised I could notice slight differences in the Drum's Cymbals (the AAC were less 'cut/sharp', and kinda muffled). I also got 11/11 right, meaning 0% chance I was guessing.
I then ripped a song into MPC V8 at "Normal" preset and ABX'd the MPC and WAV, and I couldnt tell a damn thing between them, getting 72% chance that I was guessing on the ABX test (3/11). To add insult to injury, the MPCs are a smaller file size than the M4As

Needless to say, I will now be going back and redoing my CD collection.

Just a warning, don't choose a codec on popularity alone (Stupid Apple...), do your own damn research

You could always rip to a lossless format, assuming you have enough available disk space, and keep those as an archive while transcoding individual tracks to lossy for portable use. Just an option to keep you from re-ripping your cd's again in the future.

Eventually I will invest in a 500GB external drive or something, and rip to FLAC or something. Till then I'm stuck with my almost full 320GB drive.

although i'm tempted to jump on the musepack lovefest bandwagon here, i should say that you should base your selection of format/codec on more than just 1 sample.

multiple samples as well as usability (software/hardware support, etc.) should also be relied upon.

that being said, i've been a musepack user for years. i'm also an open source guy and FLAC/WAVPACK/LAME/MUSEPACK are the chosen ones for me. rockbox+linux point me in these directions


later

Just so you know, you really should stick with LAME -V 2 or -V 0. I am afraid MPC is barely supported on hardware. If you are paranoid bite the bullet and go TAK -p5m, that way you may save hundreds of megs on that 320GB drive (compared to FLAC).

I would stick with AAC man. Or just go back to MP3.

- Jason

Concerning TAK, it seems to be closed source (at the moment).
I have alot of .iso images on my hard drive for no real reason, so I may end up deleting these and going the lossless route.

I would, but when I notice an anomaly in my music file, I notice it every time I listen to the song, and distracts me from the actual song...

It is not open at the present time, that is correct.

Why not rip your favorite cds to lossless and the rest to mpc. You can also rip everything to lossless, transcode to mpc, burn to dvdr the lossless files and keep the mpc's in your pc. Either way, it'll save you time ripping when you do get the new hd.

edit: spelling

Once I ABXed musepack --standard (aka --normal) at one specific song but failed to ABX --extreme. Are you sure that 'mpcenc.exe --standard' is enough for all your songs?

I'm actually leaning towards lossless at the moment.
Just deleted ~100 gigs of CD/DVD images I already have burned to physical discs, so I have enough room for lossless audio.

But I would prefer to go in the open source direction. TAK supposedly will be open source eventually, but why isn't it as of now?

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=52276
(Jan 29 2007)

I believe the developer is porting the code to another language and apart from that he would want a more feature complete format (native tags, embbeded art, unicode, or whatever it is in his todo list now).

One of the many discussions about releasing TAK source code...
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=51511

I'm including it here in hopes of stemming another.

A little question regarding EAC + TAK.
The TAK encoder window still pops up, even if I select "Do not show encoder window" under EAC settings. Any way to make it not come up?
The -silent command only makes the command window blank.

iam using hstart for hidden console windows;
http://www.ntwind.com/software/utilities/hstart.html
(not sure if you can marry that with eac thought)

what is wrong with FLAC btw? (as it seems you care about OS, and you can always 'transcode that to TAK when/if it goes OS).

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=490784

EDIT:
I've split the discussion about TAK compression levels here...
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=64644

My apologies to XI8 1337 for opening up this can of worms.

I created a lossless archive so I wouldn't have to rerip if I became dissatisfied with the quality of my Nero .m4a encodes. Since they are Q=.75 (~300 kbps) I don't think I'll need to redo anything. Perhaps I'm being paranoid to use such a high level, but since I don't mind how much space they take up on my 8 GB Nano, what harm is there?

@greynol
That link 404s.

On topic:
I have gone for FLAC -6, and will re-encode all the FLAC files to TAK -p5 once TAK becomes Open Source.

Moderation: Link fixed. Thank you for the heads-up.

Could you upload a clip of this AAC problem sample you've come across? I am considering moving all my music to Nero AAC, and I would like to know if and where it fails.

Sorry, I'm actually on my back-up Dial-up service at the moment, as my broadband has crapped itself. I will be able to upload a clip in a few days if you can wait till then.

I think that it fails on the higher frequencies in loud, 'complicated' music.
I'm guessing because the other instruments are loud, the encoder will discard too much of the higher frequencies info because it thinks the human ear cannot hear them.
To me, the cymbals sound too 'sparkly', like Nero is trying to hard to mask the fact that it removed some of the frequencies info.

Which version of Nero are you using? The Feb 12 2007 build seems to be preferred to the current build due to issues with the current build.

1.1.34.2; According to the .exe
August 6th, 2007; According to the tags of encoded files.

That's the one that has given rise to complaints about being a step backwards from the Feb version

For some people on some samples version 1.0.7.0 is better than 1.1.34.2. There are also some sample that some people prefer in 1.1.34.2.
You can get some examples here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=61724
Please also post in that thread all problems that you can find.