Could you clarify which lossless format produces the best quality (e.g. flac, ogg...) Sophocles wrote that Apple Lossless produces the best sound quality, while flac is unstable during decompression. Anyone has different opinions? The second part of my question is the choice of the software: I'm using CDex (free and perhaps unpopular/unknown) to rip the files from CD into wav and then use Flac Frontend to encode those wav's into flac. Does it really matter what software I use since the ripping is done directly into .wav anyway? If it does, could you let me know 1)What is the best combination of freeware to get the best quality AND 2)What are the best softwares yielding the highest and error-free quality regardless of the price I am going to rip thousands of classical CD's onto my external hard-drives and want to ensure the absolute best quality that will last for centuries or longer, if possible.
ok if you are going to rip music you can do it several differrent ways i you can use windows media player 10 rip it but before you do tell windows media player to rip it in a higher format or you could rip a song using a audio recorder or a audio converter cheaper and you have more control over quality and size but even if you rip a cd your still going to lose quality all songs no matter what you rip it from will lose some of it's quality the choice is really up to you i would recommend trying out some trial versions of ripping software you can get a lot of them from http://www.download.com they have a lot of rippers you can try out and you can then make your own decision give it a try
I wouldn't recommend cdEX or WMP for ripping. EAC (exact audio copy) is free and hands down the best ripper there is.
Not to be rude but thats just incorrect. The idea (and term) lossless means that you lose no quality after conversion. If you are a quality fanatic then I would suggest a EAC + Monkeys Audio combo. You are correct about FLAC. I have personaly witnessed its flaws when it comes to decompression. You don't loose any quality but the playback is slug-ish. It realy comes down to the front-end used for encoding. Apple Lossless is awsome, but the only apps I have come across that will let you encode to Apple Lossless is iTunes and dBpowerAMP. Either will do a great job. I recommend dBpowerAMP. Ced
Thank you very much for the info - the first reply did not make sense to me. I am indeed absolutely scrupulous in quality since I am ripping classical music. So EAC is the best ripper, but what about Monkey's Audio? Is Apple's Lossless really better? Also, I compressed using Monkey's Insane compression, but the problem is that when I try to play this .ape file in winamp, it takes several seconds before winamp is able to play it. The same thing happens when I try to forward a song - it takes about 10 seconds to find the forwarded location. Do you have the same problem? Is there a way to go around this? Thanks Emil
I think the best thing to do is to experiment with the APE files and Apple lossless (.m4a) files to see which suits you best. Apple Lossless is great but free and functional is the best anyday. Thats how I feel. I have never had that playback problem with APE. I will admit that it takes about 1/3 of a sec to seek to positions in the file but thats not a large negative (and its not 10 sec!). Find the best DS (direct show) filters for the job of decoding audio files. I use Jet Audio for playback. Find the best front ends for encoding audio files. What are you using to encode your APE files? I use dBpowerAMP. If you want to use WinMedia for playback make sure you have this installed: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/download.html Ced
Only headache and more headache. Instead of doing my physics homework I'm trying to figure out how to encode my files. I used Monkey's Audio to encode WAV into APE - it converted 80mb file into about 40mb. Then I used dBPowerAMP to encode the exact same file and it converted the 80mb's into only 9mb's in 10 times less the time. I think that something is wrong here - it shouldn't be that small (I made sure to choose Monkey's Audio before encoding.) Additionally, when I try to play the APE encoded by dBPowerAMP in winamp, it takes even longer to play the file and the duration shows to be 4 times less, but the song is complete. I have no idea what is going on. I would download Jet Audio for playback, but 15 megabytes is just too big for a player. Plus, I like Winamp. Same is with FAAC plug in forApple Lossless via dBPowerAMP. After compressing, the size is 20% of the original and never surpasses 252mbps. I am sure the problem is in the settings, but dBPowerAMP does not give me much choice (I already chose 500 VBR, the highest.) So I’m lost here. dBP doesn’t seem to work. As for DS, I downloaded RadLightAPE_1.0.0.4 and installed it in the winamp plug in folder. Since I had reinstalled winamp to see if the problem is from within, I had lost the APE DS installed by Monkey's Audio. This APE DS that I installed in Winamps Plug in folder is not working b/c I can’t play APE in winamp at all now. The AAC DS installed successfully directly onto winamp and I am able to play without problem the Apple Lossless files (.m4a.) So if I could figure out how to encode in Apple Lossless without losing 80% of the file, that would be great. If you could help me, that would be great. I could easily go back to flac, but the problems mentioned in this forum, it also has some sort of bugs that destroy the long file names from wav convert them into very truncated tags.
I've never heard of any of these issues before. All the apps mentioned work exactly as there suppose to for me. When I encode to APE from WAV using dMC It creates a file that is about half the size and equal in quality. I havn't used the Apple Lossless encoder for dMC. I encode to Apple Lossless via iTunes. Make sure your following all the installation instructions! http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-monkeys.htm My WinAMP install (Win AMP 5) is able to play my APE files. I don't rember installing any plug-ins. Ced
I don't know what to say. The link that you provided is where I got my codec. I'm also using winamp 5.1. Maybe instead of using dMC I can use Monkey's Audio to encode into APE - afterall, if both of them are used to encode APE, there should be no difference at all. For now, I'll just use APE instead of Apple Lossless and later if I am successful, will convert APE into Apple. Before giving up, I will uninstall every audio program on my PC and reinstall them, including flac. Did you try to play APE in your winamp? Did it play without any delay? (The plug in was installed in winamp if/when you installed Monkey's Audio. If you uninstall your winamp and delete the plug ins, then reisntall it, you'll see that there is no APE support.) If only I could at least play those APE in winamp without any delays. Do you think I should start a new thread on this topic?
I FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM!!! I thought to myself "what if the problem is in the compression"? After all, I had chosen the "Insane" compression. As it turns out, that was exactly the culprit. I tested and found out that winamp will play without any problems only the APE files with a compression "High" or lower. On an 80.69 MB file the difference b/n High and Insane is 0.6 MBs. This is significant considering that for every 100 files I burn, I'll be losing about 60 MBs of space due to incomplete compression, but hey, it's worth it. I also love MA's tagging options. In flac, the tags often get screwed up. The only thing left is the real difference b/n Apple Lossless and APE. Is there really any differemce b/n these two? Depending on what the difference is, I might have to find a way to encode into Apple.
