Wave encoding

[feet]

I was using eac with the latest lame mp3 encoder until I read the new article at tomshardware.com, in which he compares compression formats mp3, wma, and aac. The article concludes that aac has the best quality. I am trying to archive my cd collection. When I read that the quallity of mp3 was at the bottom of the list, I began questioning my archiving process. I want the absolute best quality becuase eventually I plan to save all of my music on dvd(when I can afford a burner). PsyTEL seems to have the latest aac encoder which I found down loadable here http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/aac.html . I have a five speaker suround system to which I have my sound card connected via the reciever. I want my stereo to do any decoding of suround(dolby, lucas what ever). I just want my collection of cds to be accessable from my comp and archived in the absolute best possible sound so I can decode onto cds whenever I want and to be able to decompress to wavs when a better ratio of sound to compression is avialable. Can eac work with psytel latest encoder? Is that the best solution for quality? I would like to utilize my suround and I want top quality. Quallity of audio in ecoding will reach a top limit but the compression will get better. I don't care to much about the size of the files, other than the fact that wav files are still too big to be a practical solution. What should I do?

 

[HendrixFan]

AAC doesnt sound any better than a LAME MP3 IMO, just gives better compression (aka smaller filesize). AAC has been waiting to come out for quite some time, but liscensing has kept it from really hitting big. THe fact that you have very little ability to playback AAC should worry you. LAME MP3s (highest quality VBR) are the way to go for you it would seem.

If you were intent on the best quality, regardless of filesize, Monkey's Audio is the best. You get good compression (around 50%) and lose no data whatsoever. Perfect lossless compression. You can even use a winamp plugin to playback Monkeys Audio without decompressing back to WAV, all with very little CPU overhead.

 

[mk]

LOL! The comparison of audio formats in the Toms' article is almost completely worthless (even if there's some truth in the results). You really can't judge the sound of lossy audio compression format by looking at a frequency analysis (at best you can tell if any lowpassing has been used; there aren't many people around who can judge the sound by looking at those ).

The whole idea behind psychoacoustic audio compression that all the different formats use is that you try to remove as much inaudible information as possible (in a fa graph you really can't tell which parts are audible and which ones are not). Poorly designed formats/encoders usually waste precious bits on parts that you cannot hear instead of using them where they are really needed, the result may in some cases closely resemble the original freq graph while sacrificing the sound quality (as is the case with the current version of WMA). If you have a song compressed with two different formats with the same average bitrate the better sounding file will almost always look much worse in frequency analysis than the other.

If you need the best possible (= original) sound quality you should really use a lossless compression format such as Monkey's Audio, FLAC, LPAC, Shorten, OptimFROG, WavPack etc. The drawback with all of those is of course the size, all the aforementioned formats provide compression to roughly 60% of the original size (over a wide variety of music genres, classical music usually takes less space than pop/rock).

With lossy audio compression you always lose (usually a large) portion of the original material. Whether it's perceptible or not depends largely on the format used as well as your ears and audio equipment. For highest quality lossy encoding I'd recommend mpc (the king at bitrates above ~160 kbps, should be transparent @ ~200 kbps, very small user base), PsyTEL aac (by Ivan Dimkovic , likely the best AAC implementation available, should be better than LAME MP3 at all bitrates) or ogg (Vorbis 1.0 code went gold yesterday, release probably next Sunday , quality should be better than with LAME MP3). Stay away from WMA at least for now, the current version is pure garbage (the next one might be worth looking at - or maybe not). LAME of course gives you high quality MP3's, you'll find plenty of LAME threads on Software and OT forums by doing a little search.

You can find more info on audio compression in Hydrogen Audio.

 

[feet]

Thanks for the response. I'm probably overly concerned with quality and I will check out Monkey's Audio.

 

[feet]

Thanks Mk4 when I posed my previous response it was for HendrixFan as soon as it posted I saw yours. I appretiate the help and will probably research a little more into your other suggestion. Again, I appritiate the responces I like the input.