I prefer free, and open codecs so they'll never go away, because no company can take the secrets with them. That said, ALAC has been reverse engineered well enough to encode and decode them with non-Apple software.
Still I keep all my file in .wav format on my hard drive (again, disk space is cheap), and then transcode to what ever I need for the player I'm using.
ALAC, FLAC, Monkey, WMA Pro, they all only get about 50% compression at best. Sure that means you can store twice as many songs, but it isn't like the 90% compression of MP3s where you'd get an order of magnitude more songs in the same amount of space. You can fit over 2000 CDs in .wav files on a terabyte drive. That should be enough for anyone.
Yes and i agree.
Space isn't so much an issue with large HD and smaller devices such as iPods will increase with storage capacity over time. That being said, to recode a 150 mb wav file vs its 50 mb flac equivalent is more time consuming (with an automated process one can run such batch files overnight i suppose but still, if both are equally lossless then why not just go with flac?).
Is wav considered a more simple, standard?
It has been around for a LONG time.
So why use wav files then instead of flac which is an equally lossless format, but still producing smaller file sizes?
I'm curious.
Is it easier to recode wav than flac to other formats? (and by easier, more user friendly apps, no codec package installs, etc.)
