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Which Lossless Audio Codec, and Why?

Posted by Cliff on from the preservation-of-melodic-bits dept.

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?"

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. comparisons of lossless compression by belmolis · · Score: 5, Informative

    I made some comparisons of lossless compression techniques a while back. This web page contains the results of my own tests (for speech data) and links to the tests I found (for music). I use FLAC.

  2. Stay Tuned for Next Week's "Ask Slashdot" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    excerpt:
    "I'm ripping my entire audio collection to lossless audio files and I need a cheap large-volume storage solution...."

  3. We Need a Listening Test by Doug+Dante · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry, but I'm an avid audiophile, and just because all lossless audio codecs generate digital output streams identical to their digital input streams does not mean that they sound the same! We must verify that those bits still sound the same via our one way gold plated speaker cables!

    --
    The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
  4. Re:Consider longevity of the codec by belmolis · · Score: 5, Informative
    the reason WAV has been around for so long is that it's just doing a direct read of the bits on the audio CD, and dumping them to a file.

    Not exactly. WAV is a FILE format, not an audio representation format. The audio data can be in any of dozens of formats, many of them involving lossy compression. One of the registered audio data formats (with ID 1) is straight PCM data, that is, uncompressed audio in the usual format. WAV files often contain straight PCM data, but they don't have to. (I've got some lecture notes on audio data and file formats here.)