Ive been expirementing here recently with mpc for my audio rips cause I heard mpc is supposed to be a cleaner compression. any truths behind this? what format / compression could be qualified as the best?
At 128kbps and higher Musepack (mpc) is the best lossy encoder quality-wise. Ogg Vorbis and AAC have the potential to become as good (maybe better) but for both formats there aren't any encoders tuned as well as Musepack encoder. Additional advantages: No change in file length (= gapless), fast encoding + decoding, good taging format (APE2). You might want to visit http://www.hydrogenaudio.org for more info, if you don't want to search through the forum try the wiki: http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydrogenaudio/FrontPage
Obviously, the BEST audio compression is lossless compression, where the compressed file can be decompressed to a perfect bit-for-bit copy of the original. The 2 most popular programs that can do this are: http://www.softsound.com/Shorten.html http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ Both programs are free. Depending on the complexity of the music, the compressed files will be about 1/2 the size of the original .WAVs
What are you looking for? Best compression, without loosing any quality at all (lossless), or compression that gets rid of "unimportant" audio data, yet still keeps good quality? MP3 or OGG for compression, while cutting out unnecesary info. For lossless compression, Monkey's Audio. Check out this guide from TechTV too: http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/howto/story/0,24330,3428528,00.html
