Which Lossless Audio Codec, and Why?

deadsquid puts forth a worthy follow up question to last week's query on audio codecs: "I'm about to re-rip my entire CD collection for the fourth time. I don't want to do it again, so have decided to invest in a small(ish) array and use a lossless codec to create a reference set of my music. From the reference, I plan on transcoding to a variety of bitrates (depending on where the final product will end up) and whichever format of the week suits the device(s) the transcoded content will ultimately sit on. I don't particularly care about encoding time, but would like something that transcodes nicely to MP3, WMA, OGG, and other formats in a reasonable length of time. I would like to ensure that track metadata is maintained in the reference, and is easily transferable when transcoded. I also want something that's not proprietary to an individual's or small group's whims. I'm thinking FLAC, but was wondering if other people had better experiences with other codecs. If you were to use a lossless encoding format, which would you use, and why?"

Comments

Re:What you mean

[DA-MAN]

What the hell do you mean CODEC and LOSSLESS?

You guys make everything way too complex.

There are two methods for compressing data:

1) Lossless compression: Think zip/rar/sit/tar.gz etc. These output the source file bit for bit when decompressed.

2) Lossy compression: Think JPEG/MPEG/MP3 etc. These output with a lot of data stripped off, the best lossy compression attempts to remove as much as possible without affecting quality too much.

Just because something is compressed doesn't mean anything is lost.