I am looking for information on different audio codecs, since I have everything now in MP3. I know the FLAC is highly spoken of because it is lossless. But are there any other widely enough accepted lossless codecs available? I heard something about Monkey Audio and SHN files, but have not been able to decipher info about them.

My concern is that I am thinking of converting all my CD’s into FLAC so that I don’t have to store them anymore. But I don’t know if that is a good idea, since future iPods may never support that format. Does anybody know about any happenings on that front? I looked in ipodlounge but there are only a couple of murmurs. I know some other players offer FLAC support, but I find the iPod to have exactly the GUI which I like, no contest.

One of my biggest gripes about converting to FLAC is that it really takes up a lot of space, just over half as uncompressed WAV files! Or is there something I’m missing?

Since people here are always tuned in to the latest info, this is why I’m asking this stuff…

[quote author=“babahi”]I am looking for information on different audio codecs, since I have everything now in MP3. I know the FLAC is highly spoken of because it is lossless. But are there any other widely enough accepted lossless codecs available? I heard something about Monkey Audio and SHN files, but have not been able to decipher info about them.

My concern is that I am thinking of converting all my CD’s into FLAC so that I don’t have to store them anymore. But I don’t know if that is a good idea, since future iPods may never support that format. Does anybody know about any happenings on that front? I looked in ipodlounge but there are only a couple of murmurs. I know some other players offer FLAC support, but I find the iPod to have exactly the GUI which I like, no contest.

One of my biggest gripes about converting to FLAC is that it really takes up a lot of space, just over half as uncompressed WAV files! Or is there something I’m missing?

Since people here are always tuned in to the latest info, this is why I’m asking this stuff…

I’d uneqivocally say FLAC, if you have the storage space.

First, if you want to archive your music on your hard drive, you definitely should go lossless.  Store as much of the original information as possible, then when you need to compress it further, create the lossy version from your lossless one.  Your options for lossless are pretty much FLAC and MonkeyAudio.  FLAC seems to be the most robust, and has my vote for its open source roots.

With iPod, your ONLY option for lossless is Apple’s AAC Lossless.  But iPod (and indeed pretty much all portable MP3 players out there at the moment) are not optimized to play back lossless.  Why?  Lossless tracks are big.  That means the player will have to access the hard drive a lot to read data (iPod has a 32 MB buffer iirc).  It also means the processor will have to work hard to keep up with the bitstream.  Both of this severely reduces battery life.

As for FLAC, i’m pretty sure iPod will never support it through official firmware.  If you must have an iPod, ripping to AAC Lossless is probably your best bet, but keep in mind iPods won’t be “in” forever.  I’m staying with FLAC.  Open source means more potential options.

FLAC isn’t well-supported by hardware players. The only popular one I know offhand that does support it is the Rio Karma. Apple, Creative and iRiver don’t.

I guess the real answer to your question is dependant on what sort of equipment you listen to your music on habitually and what sort of quality you demand of your music. If you’re set on the iPod, try higher-bitrate (like 192 kbps) AAC files and see what you think of them. If you need to switch formats later on, you still have the CDs as your “masters”. I’d say to test a bunch of bitrates out and see what’s acceptable to your ears with the equipment you usually use.