Lossless audio compression?

[Jeff7181]

I'm trying to find out about lossless compression for audio. I'd like to put my CD collection on PC without losing quality... yes I know 320kbps MP3's are pretty damn good... but I'd like to get some info on the lossless formats that are available.

Would I be better off creating waves and putting them in a folder and use NTFS's native file compression?

 

[Yanagi]

.oggs are pretty good

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Yanagi
.oggs are pretty good

Bout how much compression do you get out of that type?

 

[Slick5150]

OGG isn't lossless, but it's really good.

If you want "lossless", try Monkey's Audio, that's a pretty popular one.

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/

 

[JetBlack69]

I would say that flac is also popular

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

 

[BoomAM]

Unless you have a £4000 speaker system & hearing like a cat, then you aint really gonna notice the difference between full CD quality and a high bitrate MP3.
Your choice. But its easyier to encode to something like 256Kbps MP3 and have done with it. Saves room, and you can still enjoy the music.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you encode with FLAC like I did, you can always re-encode to other formats and bitrates as needed, with zero loss in quality.

If you encode to one lossy format like 256 kbps Ogg, then want to put the music on an ipod as 192 kpbs mp3 or 128 kbps AAC, you have to transcode from one lossy format to another which results in lower quality.

With FLAC you have 100% CD quality, which means you have a true backup of your CD collection and can burn replacements if you scratch a CD or it's lost or stolen.

The lossless formats are all close to each other in size, they trim 1/3 to 1/2 of the size depending on how well each track compresses.

I prefer FLAC because it's open-source (now part of xiph.org like ogg), and cross-platform.

 

[drag]

Yep Ogg is lossy and it will give you better sound at the same bitrate or a smaller file at the same quality then a mp3.

However if you go from Ogg to Mp3 (say you have a mp3 player that doesn't support ogg (some do)) your going to get the worst of both worlds, because you end up having a file that was cut up by Ogg then it gets cut up by mp3.

Flac is nice because like Ogg, it's free software. That means that players can be made to use flac without the designers paying any royalties to any company. So the likelyhood of you being able to play Flac files 10-15 years from now on any player is realy high and support for it is wide spread. Also since it is free any person is able to make improvements on it. That way you can avoid stuff like the legalities of things like the Lame mp3 encoder.

Lame mp3 encoder is Free software like Ogg and Flac (and Linux). But since it's based on a closed developement codec, mp3, the authors get screwed over time to time because of the legalities of it.

Of course if you have something like a Ipod that only plays certain types of propriatory files then it's not going to help you much.

But that's the nice thing about Lossless formats. They take up more space, much more. But they are archive quality.

Technically they can go from CD to Flac to AAC lossless to WMA lossless to Monkey Audio to CD with no loss in quality whatsoever. Of course thats technically, nothing is perfect...

Flac is also nice because it's quick (if your ripping a cd into Flac it gets done quickly and players don't need high-cpu) and creates resonable file sizes. Some formats are slow and don't have very high rates of compression. It's like those old fasion LZM compressed Tiff files, lots of times they ended up BIGGER then their uncompressed counterparts. Most aren't that bad though.

Also if you have a mp3 player or your using something like a icecaster to stream the highest quality Ogg per aviable bandwidth you can convert lossless to lossy and still get good results. Then when your done the lossy copy can be throwaway. And when you DO get nicer speakers, there is a good chance that you'd be able to tell the difference in lossy formats... And if you have a good conversion tool, or like me use Bash scripts, it's easy to setup playlists and such to build lossy formats for specific purposes out of Lossless fairly easy.

here is a link to a wiki that has links to several very good websites that compare different lossless audio formats.

 

[Jeff7181]

Wow... lots of good info... thanks guys...

If you encode to one lossy format like 256 kbps Ogg, then want to put the music on an ipod as 192 kpbs mp3 or 128 kbps AAC, you have to transcode from one lossy format to another which results in lower quality.

That is exactly why I'd like to have lossless compression... but it looks as though I'm not even going to get 50% compression... I don't think I can afford that much space so maybe I'll check out Ogg... I wonder if there's a hacked firmware for Creative MP3 players to allow them to play Ogg?

 

[CSMR]

Most popular is FLAC. This has support on the Rio Karma and one or two other hardware devices.
Monkey audio and windows media lossless are also contenders. Of these three, monkey audio gives the best compression, followed by windows media and then FLAC. However some people have reported problems with some encoders.
I go with windows media myself, because everything (playback in any program, tagging in any program) is guaranteed to be completely easy.
If you need to change from one to the other it's no big deal; it'll take your pc a night to reencode everything.
Depending on the music you listen to, lossless may not take up much more space than a 320kbs mp3. I average under 40%, but I listen to classical music. I'd give it a try, particularly if you have a reasonably good stereo system or are likely to have on in the future.
Best utility for conversion: dbpoweramp. EAC can rip directly; Plextools rips directly only to monkey audio.

 

[drag]

The thing about WMA lossless (at least 9) is that it's very slow compared to monkey 3.99 and flac.


Flac and WMA using default settings has Flac encoding files 2x as fast and decoding files 4x as fast, depending on the hardware (which is why you see flac mp3-type mobile players here and their because of the low cpu requirements) and the file size differences are only a couple percentages of ratio of compression if that.

but if it's easier to use, then it's easier to use. Whatever counts most for you, definately.

 

[CSMR]

That's true, WMA is slower than FLAC for most FLAC settings at least. Encoding is about the same as Monkey audio. I tested them actually for encoding on an XP 2400: WMA: 23* speed; APE extra high: 21* speed; FLAC medium: 40* speed. However the main thing to note is that these are all very high!
PS do you know how much processing power portable players have. If it's 1/50 the power of a standard modern PC they should be able to handle everything; if it's 1/100th they will have trouble decoding WMA but not FLAC. (Battery use is also a factor of course.)

 

[Sid59]

APE or FLAC

i prefer APE. jsut sounds cooler.

 

[BFG10K]

I use lossless WMA too, minus the copy protection.

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
I use lossless WMA too, minus the copy protection.

I use it with the copy protection. Sounds better that way.

 

[konakona]

last time i heard the difference in compression rate is nothing to write home about. compression speed and cpu utilization however, was vastly in favor of FLAC. maybe thats why its the most popular one out there...

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: VanillaH
last time i heard the difference in compression rate is nothing to write home about. compression speed and cpu utilization however, was vastly in favor of FLAC. maybe thats why its the most popular one out there...

Compression ratio isn't a big deal for a song... or a whole album... but if I want all 200 of my CD's on my PC a few % on each song ads up quickly.

 

[krackato]

Apple has AAC lossless built into iTunes. Plus that format plays on iPods.

 

[BoomAM]

Originally posted by: krackato
Apple has AAC lossless built into iTunes. Plus that format plays on iPods.

Apple Lossless Audio Compression is different to AAC. The "proper" AAC format is a cross between WMA & MP3s imo, smaller files, but the bass is still there.
The lossless format, im not 100% sure, but it might use the same file format (*.AAC), but obviously will have much larger files.

 

[sxr7171]

If I remember correctly the 3G iPods didn't have Apple lossless or .wav playback. Anyway as soon as I saw that the 4G did I ordered it. Looks like I'll be using Apple lossless now.

 

[konakona]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: VanillaH
last time i heard the difference in compression rate is nothing to write home about. compression speed and cpu utilization however, was vastly in favor of FLAC. maybe thats why its the most popular one out there...

Compression ratio isn't a big deal for a song... or a whole album... but if I want all 200 of my CD's on my PC a few % on each song ads up quickly.

maybe. for one thing i really dont have that many cds to begin with but how bad could it be with hard drives becoming so cheap these days?

 

[Ryoga]

OK, example:

1: Butthole Surfer's Pepper ripped to .wav file with Exact Audio Copy. Normalization enabled, high quality. Result: 52,360,268 bytes

2: Above file encoded to FLAC. FLAC 1.1.0 used with FLAC frontend 1.7. Level 8 compression (highest), no tags. Result: 33,685,947 bytes -- 64% of original

3: Above .wav file encoded to OGG. Used Vorbis DLL encoder 20030909 (latest, AFAIK) on CDEx 1.51. Quality level 7 (~224kbps). Result: 7,160,398 bytes -- 13% of original

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: VanillaH

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: VanillaH
last time i heard the difference in compression rate is nothing to write home about. compression speed and cpu utilization however, was vastly in favor of FLAC. maybe thats why its the most popular one out there...

Compression ratio isn't a big deal for a song... or a whole album... but if I want all 200 of my CD's on my PC a few % on each song ads up quickly.

maybe. for one thing i really dont have that many cds to begin with but how bad could it be with hard drives becoming so cheap these days?

It's not hard to figure out how much your going to end up sacrificing. Lets say you have a 100 albums you want compressed. Lets also say that the average wav file size total per album is 650megs. Whatever.

Flac compression runs around 60% of original size
WMA compression runs around 58% of original size

Flac will get you 39000megs total.
WMA lossless will get you 37700megs total.

So that's a little over a gig difference. Maybe 2 gigs depending on the randomness of compression if everything falls into WMA's favor.

And a maximum cdrom length is what?, 74 minutes or so?

So the time it would take to rip a 100 full length cdroms into FLAC (not counting the actual CDROM to WAV rip) would take 370minutes.

Doing the same thing using WMA would take 822 minutes.

So if your using WMA to record your cdrom collection your going to sacrifice nearly 7 and a half hours of ripping time in order to save less then gig and a half of disk space.

Plus then it's going to take much more CPU time to play them back so your more likely to get skips and you will get a higher performance hit if, for instance, you want to listen to music while playing video games and whatnot.

Plus your sacrificing compatability and platform/app independance because it's much more likely that a application will support FLAC vs WMA now and into the future. Plus then your also supporting a propriatory standard in your music vs completely open standard.

With 200 CDs, if they are full length, it gets even worse because at most your going to be saving 4 gigs of disk space and are going to be sacrificing a extra 14 hours of your time in order to get it.

Remember nowadays a gig is less then a buck when you take modern disk prices into considuration. On my PVR I'll record a hour TV show and it'll take nearly 4 gigs of disk space. I have a 15gig file sitting on my harddrive right now that I haven't gotten around to deleting yet.


edit: oh ya numbers are from this page
he averaged out a bunch of albums he ripped.

 

[konakona]

thank you, you elaborated on pretty much everything i wanted to say

 

[Schadenfroh]

any way to have WMAs or MP3s lossless? my mp3 player does not support anything else

EDIT: nevermind, figured it out, i will stick with WMA or does LAME make lossless MP3s?