Lossless audio compression?

[konakona]

mp3 is lossy by nature. as far as lossy codecs go, mpcs are most highly regarded. does your mp3 player support wavs or wma lossless by any chance?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: VanillaH
mp3 is lossy by nature. as far as lossy codecs go, mpcs are most highly regarded. does your mp3 player support wavs or wma lossless by any chance?

it supports WMA, as for lossless, i do not know, its an RCA Lyra 40 gig, ill get the link

This is what i own

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Wow... lots of good info... thanks guys...<BR><BR>

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.

<BR><BR>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?

You would be much better off with ALT-PRESET-STANDARD encoded LAME MP3 files. They are a universal standard and will playback on just about any MP3 player. OGGs have not gained widespread support yet, nor is it likely that they ever will.

As for lossless, nobody has mentionned the Apple Lossless codec which seems to be about equal to the others. iTunes is free software and makes working with the files very easy. Monkey's audio is probably a more widely accepted format though. I should probably pimp it because of my avatar.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

mp3s could very well be replaced, it all depends on what format has the most support, heck thats how mp3s came to dominate in the first place. Ever notice that Mini Discs were taking over Japan the same time mp3s were starting to heat up in the US? All about support. Companies will usually try and pimp their own format - M$ has WMA, Real has their own, even Sony is trying to push the Atrac compression technology used with Mini Discs as their own compression format by offering Atrac support with their own mp3 CD players (and obviously its what their MD players use)

While there's high quality lossy formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Musepack, they aren't backed by companies, enthusiasts developed them and the only way they could take off is if thats what users want to use.

Otherwise the best bet for an mp3 replacement would be AAC, Apple and several others have shown support for the "mp4" format (naturally the uneducated would assume mp4 > mp3 but the standard hasn't even been hashed out as there's still a raw .aac or .m4a)

We shouldn't think along the lines of "what formats can hardware support" but rather "this is the format I want to listen to, I'll try to help promote it and wait for support to come".

I dunno, but I'd really like a player that could have support for just about whatever format has decent support behind it. A "winamp" portable player would definately kick ass.