Lossless formats

[greeny]

How does WMA lossless compare with WAV, OGG and FLAC? I'm re-ripping all my CD's after learning more about lossless formats (plus I'm annoyed all my songs have a low bitrate). I tried ripping to FLAC with Format Factory, butit has no ID3 tags apart from the song title. Which one of these codecs is best? I'm not bothered about the file sizes, just the sound quality. WMA lossless and WAV would be easier to use, as WMP always seems to have the correct song info. I thought I'd check on ABI first, to see which one is "best".

[CrowdAds]

[Detroit]

I've been using FLAC, but I don't know which is best. Extremely large file sizes can become a problem for me, but ~30 MB per song is ok for me. When I need the tags I use Mp3tag or something similar with the ability to pull info from the internet and tag them. I've never heard of "Format Factory", all I hear about is EAC on here.

[Dreamnine]

Ogg is lossy, but I couldn't tell you the difference between lossless formats.

[greeny]

I decided to use WAV as it has the highest bitrate. U Boat by Kasabian is now 109mb, which is larger than the video files on my ZEN :O

[derf]

Lossless is lossless. They all sound the same, but the size varies a little. The only difference is interoperability. FLAC works with everything, WMA lossless with Windows Media Player and Apple Lossless with iTunes/iPod.

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by derf

Lossless is lossless. They all sound the same, but the size varies a little. The only difference is interoperability. FLAC works with everything, WMA lossless with Windows Media Player and Apple Lossless with iTunes/iPod.

FLAC doesn't work on iPods unless it is an older iPod with Rockbox. And WMA lossless works on Windows Media Player, but not on most DAP's...I think only on Zunes and maybe the Toshibas.

[dfkt]

Everything you want to know about the various lossless codecs: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....mparison_Table

FLAC is the most useful in my opinion. Best hardware support (for an open source format, contrary to ALAC and WMAL), fast decoder (good on the player's battery).

Originally Posted by greeny

I decided to use WAV as it has the highest bitrate.

Well duh. It's uncompressed - but there is no difference to any lossless compressed audio format besides being ~50% bigger. If you decompress a FLAC/APE/WP/etc you will get the same 1,411kbps bitrate (for 16/44.1 stereo audio). You're just wasting space by using WAV on a portable player, and the possibility to tag your files properly.

[saratoga]

If you want to use lossless on a portable, I would get whatever your portable supports.

Otherwise, FLAC is the standard.

[greeny]

I'm not going to be putting them on my ZEN (I'll only fit around 10 songs on it anyway), I'm just keeping them on my laptop, and I'll probably compress them when I put them on a DAP, and maybe convert them to FLAC. It was just easier to rip my CD collection to WAV. Thanks for all the info

[saratoga]

In the long run WAV is probably more difficult since now your files don't have tags.

[greeny]

They all seem to be tagged correctly

[dfkt]

You probably mean file names, not tags?

[greeny]

Nope, all the tags are the same as before.

[dfkt]

I see, so you use an app that uses a non-standard approach for tagging. You might read up here about ID3 tags in WAV files: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=43135

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by greeny

They all seem to be tagged correctly

You can't really tag WAV files, so either your app has incorrectly added tags to them (which other software probably will not read them and may not properly decode the wav file at all) or its just storing the info internally.

[greeny]

I went onto advanced tag editor in WMP and all the info is correct, but I can't edit the tags

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by greeny

I went onto advanced tag editor in WMP and all the info is correct, but I can't edit the tags

WMP doesn't tag WAV files, so its probably just loaded the CD info into its database. I would convert them to something that supports tags in WMP or else they will be lost the next time you clear out the WMP database or upgrade windows. I think this means you pretty much have to use WMA Lossless.