Other than MP3, What Compressed Audio Formats Exist?

cd asks: "While the MP3 format has become the dominant form for compressed music on the Internet, is it the most technically superior? What other forms of music compression are available for those who don't wish to download new music or upload their music, but for those who simply want to archive their music CDs? In this article Ken Thompson mentions PAC format. Is this the way to go? Is their encoding and playback software available for Linux?"

Comments

Other formats

[CaptainSuperBoy]

• Some people say that Yamaha's VQF has better quality than MP3 given the same bitrate: http://www.yamaha-xg.com/english/xg/So undVQ/, http://www.vqf.com/
• AAC had some popularity for a while but I haven't heard much about it lately: http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/aac.html
• Many people use shorten for lossless compression: http://www.softsound.com/Shorten.html
• Some proprietary formats:
• Windows media: http://www.mi crosoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/download/defau lt.asp
• Liquid audio: http://www.liquidaudio.com/
• Realplayer G2: http://www.real.com

Shorten & others

[Chris Pimlott]

If you are concerned primarily with archiving your sound, there's a program I've seen being used by people trading bootlegged CD's called Shorten. It's a non-lossy compression that displays around a 2:1 ratio (there's also a lossy version but I don't know much about it, the ratio is less than MP3 though). There's a company called SoftSound that markets a commerical version for Windows/DOS but I believe there's other version.

I also came across the comp.speech FAQ which has a specific section regarding audio compression standards.

Codecs

[brank]

You can always use Ogg Vorbis a free (as in speech) MP3-like audio codec. Vorbis is part of the Ogg family of codecs.

Here is a link to download a Lossless Predictive Audio Compression encoder for Linux (and the page I found it on).

PAC is very likely to be avalible for some other Unix, so it would (with a little work) probably work on Linux.