which one should i choose??? I know monkey audio is a bit like a winzip for music ( audio ) but could i play the zipped ( in this case monkey audio file ) directly or do i have to extract it first??

You can play it directly with a Winamp plugin.

But you will get very high bitrates using Monkey Audio. (Around 600 ~ 1000 kbps). Better have a very big HDD. Or stick with a lossy format.

Two totally different beasts.

If I were you, I would:

a) use lossless (Monkey, FLAC, LPAC, SHN, &c.) for CDR backups [in the event of lost or scratched original CD].

At least, that's what I do. :)

Have you priced 120 gig hard drives recently? $232. That's what I paid for my first hard drive - which was only 40 MEGS! Just get yourself a couple of them, and NEVER look back! :listening

While disk space IS indeed cheap, I'd still stick with a lossy format. Monkey's Audio produces BIG files and while you may have the space to store them, you are still asking your system to stream all this data from HDD to memory to CPU when you want to play a file: extra bandwidth requirements. MAC files also require more horsepower to decode than MPC. It may not be a problem in this era of gigahertz processors, but I like to keep things a little more managable. What about moving stuff off to CD-R (or across a network)? With MAC files, you can't fit much more than 2 hours worth of music to disc. With MPC, you could fit 5-6 hours easily.

And let's face it. MPC --insane is effectively transparent, so why bother with more bulky files? There's a point where 100% perfection (lossless compression) has unreasonable costs. I'd consider MAC for irreplacable "archive" purposes, but anything where you have an original CD calls for lossy compression.

$250 will get you a 160GB hard drive. That means for $1,000 you have 640GB of storage, which is $1.57 per GB, you can't beat that -- lossy vs. lossless compression aside.

I guess that means we only have to wait about 3 more years until we can get 1 terabyte drives for $250, OS limitations notwithstanding. That's about 1750 hours of uncompressed 16-bit, 44.1KHz digital: wow.

Who would have ever thought that a home PC would feature a terabyte of disk storage? We aren't there yet, but it's eminent.

What happens when MPC improves it's quality? Are you going to re-rip and re-encode all those files? Not me. My files are already perfect! Time and effort are resources too.

As has been stated, I think the answer to your question really comes down to how much space you can afford, and how much music you will be encoding.

I personally use lossy compression at the moment, mainly due to the shear amount of music I compress and the fact that it's easier to transport (ie, smaller), etc. There will probably come a time though as storage prices continue to drop and bandwidth continues to increase that I will move to lossless, but I don't quite feel that it's there yet.

Conversely, you could ask what you would do when MAC increases its compression ratio. Since increases in quality in MPC are probably going to roughly equate to the percentage of an increase in compression efficiency in MAC as time goes on, you could effectively be facing the same situation, just from a different perspective.

Unless you don't care about filesize at all -- which wouldn't make sense if you are using any sort of compression -- then you are probably always going to be facing the re-rip and re-encode scenario if you want to stay up to date.

It's not really the same. Once you rip and convert to lossless - you never have to rip again! Actually, Matt improves compression quite frequently. All you have to do is load up the ape files, hit convert, and go to bed. The next morning, you have converted files and a little more free hard drive space. Sweet!

MAC is lossless, MPC is not.

There's a difference between just reencoding and reripping and reencoding your entire collection.

One can be done automated overnight. The other cannot.

--
GCP

This is true in some cases, but was not the point I was trying to make. Instead, what I was trying to point out is that there is probably always going to be some reason to reencode (and possibly rerip) your media.

Even lossless is not the be all end all because as technology advances there will always be a reason to do it again, better than before.

And going back to the scenario you gave, you are assuming that a person would have all of these files stored on their hard drive. What happens if they are backing their lossless files up to cd? Then you lose the automation and are back in the same situation you would be with a lossy format in a sense, because at least instead of reripping, you will have to transfer back to the hard drive, reencode, and reburn.

Does anyone foresee advances in mpc that would make reripping/encoding a couple of hundred cd's worth the time and effort? It would seem to me that the quality can't get too much better than it is now so it would likely be better compression that would be offered in in the future for mpc? If this is the case I know I wouldn't be re-doing anything to get back a meg or so per song when HD space is under 2 bucks per gig. Am I way off base with these thoughts? What might the future hold as far as advancements in encoding digital audio (mpc particualrly)?