Originally posted by: Mucman
My CD collection has been in mp3 format for the longest time... mostly because mp3 was the only compressed format that I knew at the time... My mp3 collection is for my personal use only. I don't have it open for everyone so having it in mp3 format doesn't make much sense.
What I need is a format the is as close to lossless compression as it gets, so it has great sound quality even on hi-fi systems. I also want the format to be playable on BSD and windows platforms.
When it comes to preserving the original information you only have two choices: lossless and lossy, unfortunately there's nothing in between.
With the available lossless formats you can expect compression to around 60% (classical music is usually a little lower, pop/rock usually higher) of the original filesize, the differences between them lie primarily in functionality (seeking, tagging, compression speed etc.). There isn't likely to be any major breakthroughs in compression efficency in the near future.
(Un)fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, there are quite a few lossy formats to choose from. Sadly there's also much misinformation and ignorance around which leads to people making bad choices when choosing a method of compressing their CD's (it isn't a big deal if you don't care but the truth is that most of the audio that's distributed around the net sounds like crap).
IMO there isn't a single reason to use mp3 if you want to compress your CD's for listening on a computer only (naturally it's the only option if you want to use a portable mp3 player). It was originally "developed" to provide listenable audio at dual ISDN bitrates (128 kbps), not to produce files indistinguishable from the original. The LAME developers and Dibrom with the --alt-presets and the accompanying code modifications have managed to push the quality near the limits of the format but mp3 still loses to other formats in sound quality at all bitrates, to wma, mp3pro, ogg, realaudio and possibly aac below 100 kbps and to mpc, ogg and (PsyTEL) aac at higher bitrates (don't get me wrong, mp3 can sound quite good on most music but it generally needs very high bitrates to do so and it still fails on some difficult signals).
If you are interested in a lossy compression format with the best quality currently available for high bitrates (>160 kbps) you should try Muse
pack (
mpc).
Official developer page
Software
Musepack.org
AQuAudio
Some really useful links
The best place to find about things related to audio compression is
Hydrogen Audio.
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