Now that I'm able to backup a bunch of albums onto one disc I'm curious what other people think is the most stable lossless format to use for backups.

Thanks!

A suggestion: make a POLL. Much easier to respond in this almost I-like-this-and-not-that kinda question.

Edit: Well, I guess I should shut the $#%& up. Did not know what I was talking about

Wait a little for WavPack 4

Roberto: How long is a little?

I thought Mrs. Bryant threw out his computer.

Any other suggestions? I have alwats used Monkeys, but I read that some people had trouble with files which have become corrupted. Now that I can store 8 to 10 albums on a single disc I'd like to make sure that they will still be usable if I ever need them.

Flac is more resistant to damaged media.

hmm....I have had huge problems making flacs with the latest encoder. I got a lot of currupted files though they were playable.
I have however never had problems with monkey's audio.
My vote goes to monkey's audio also because of the "far better" compression.


edit: my problems with flac seems to have been me being too stupid to use a cmd program correctly.
My vote still goes to ape though because of the tagging and better compression.

Really? I haven't had any problems with it at all, and I use FLAC 1.1.0 almost every day (... although I am using the reference encoder from SourceForge rather than the RareWares package, if that makes any difference). What sort of corruption are you running into?

@ Roberto: Do you know something about WavPack 4 that we don't? I remember David and Josh making a few obscure comments about the possibility of combining their efforts into a new encoder, but I hadn't heard anything recently. Any news would be apprecieated.

- M.

My vote would go with Flac, less chance of corruption compared to Monkey's, plus truly open standards based.

No, I don't know that much about WavPack4.

But, AFAIK, David and Josh aren't working together.

All I remember was Josh commenting he would look into maybe adapting WavPack 3 as an optional lossless mode for FLAC (no compability with current FLAC decoders then, of course). But he wasn't very sure about it due to patent concerns. Noone ever did a patent search on WavPack algorithms, I think.
Most of them are old technology, according to David, so it's not a big issue anyway.

And I don't remember David commenting anything about working with Josh.

What I know about WavPack4:

-It'll be much more flexible, what means more sampling rates, more bit depths, and multichannel.
-It'll be block-based, what will address the following issues (and probably others): better seekability, streamability and error robustness.
-Official tagging will be APEv2
-Compression might increase, but David isn't willing to sacrificate encoding time for that. Advanced compression modes would probably require neural networks, like the ones Monkey's Audio and LA use. But, in order to be efficient, neural networks should be coded in assembly - and assembly means a nightmare porting the code to other platforms.
WavPack is 100% ANSI C code, so it should be very easy to port.

There are other ideas, but they are still theoretical and implementing them might prove useless or unfeasible, so I'd better not speak about them now.

Regards;

Roberto.

Edit: I also don't know anything about progress/release date/etc.

@superdumbprob: it's more than immediately and less than some time.
Seriously, I'd rather not speculate. David wanted to have something ready soon, but N things might happen that would delay the project.

@layer3maniac: ???

i just keep the wavs on my backup disc

Just to add, i backed up about 20 CD's with FLAC 1.0.4 and earlier, 80 CD's with 1.1.0 standard version and 30 CD's with 1.1.0 P4 optimised version. I never came accross any errors and they all verify perfectly. If you have problems, i'd suspect it to be more down to incorrect usage or hardware faults!!


Kristian

I agree, flac is robust, stable, fast, great... My favorite

Eight to ten? I've used FLAC extensively, and in my experience you can expect to get 1 to 3 FLAC-compressed albums on a 700MB CD. I don't think you can expect anything drastically better with other lossless compressors. But because it works equally well on Windows and Linux, and because it's open source, my vote goes for FLAC.

I would believe layer3 is talking about DVD.

Greg: clean your Hotmail mailbox, please.

I'd say Monkey's was the most stable, which is true in the sense of the program. But it seems to cause corrupt files on machines with HW issues, especially with high/extra-high compression.

So I'd have to say Monkey's (normal) is stable and Monkey's (fast) is even more stable. Either mode you will be getting great reduction for the time it takes. Ah, the efficiency of it