Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Promise of lossless at 60% compression ???

Hi folks, quick history.
I'm like many who have posted about how much they love thier Axiom speakers but now realize that thier inherant accuracy now makes listening to most MP3s almost unbearable now that they can actually hear the compression loss.

I used to really enjoy playing mixes of random tunes from a PC and choosing these tunes on my TV screen with a remote. The phsycadelic add ons on my 46" widescreen were also cool.

One option is to by a megasized new hard drive and do the same thing with the pure .wav files taken from all my CDs.

I've also been reading up on ther compression formats that promise better sound quality than MP3. There are the mainstream ones but there are some smaller names making bigger claims.

For instance, "Monkey's Audio" promises lossless audio quality at 60% compression. WinAmp compatible with an add on. They have a section explaining the math behind the theory but I don't have the patience to go through it as it looks like a physicists blackboard and my skills are pretty rusty.

Anybody out there experimenting with 'better' compression tools or is CD the bare minimum solution for you guys and I'll take a virtual whipping for asking?

Murph

IMHO
forget about proprietary formats such as monkey audio.
go with FLAC.
flac website

Sorry but I cant recommend a specific windows client as I use linux (xmms). Here is some windows specific info
Windows and flac

If you find something that works well, please let me know.

I know I have listened to flac in windows, but dont remember which client i utilized. It was only a test.

hth

Randy

ps I have 26G of flac, much more of mp3. didnt hear the limitiations of my mp3's till I got my axiom speakers

Think of it as winzip for audio files.

You can also use iTunes to rip them to ALAC as well. Downside: You can only play it through iTunes or Quicktime player for now. There is talk of a module for Winamp to play ALAC. FLAC is of course more portable, being F/OSS.

I have all of my CDs ripped in FLAC. As mentioned above, FLAC is a free open source lossless codec. This means no DRM, and you're not tied to a proprietary format like AAC and ALAC. I stream it wirelessly to a Squeezebox connected to my receiver - sounds perfect.

There is a free FLAC codec enabling you to play FLAC files with most players - Windows Media Player, WinAmp and foobar2000 being examples. The Squeezebox/Slimserver interface handles them natively as well.

For iPod use, etc, I used foobar2000 to convert the FLAC files to mp3s at fairly low bitrates. Therefore I have 2 copies of each track - one lossless FLAC copy for critical listening and one mp3 at 96k for portable media player use. Given how relatively cheap hard drives are these days, this isn't that big of a deal.

I also recommend using FLAC. If you ever decide to get a squeezebox, it will play FLAC's. Your best bet is to get EAC and accuraterip and take it from there. You might also want to check out http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php
They have a ton of info regarding compression formats. You should also check out foobar2000.

FLAC is great for home but not for portables. 128k mp3's (or anything) isn't enough, but a "properly" encoded mp3 sounds just as good as the origonal content to me on my Axioms. LAME is a great encoder. I have also found WMA's to be a great format, and it's probably second only to mp3's in usability. AAC is just not as good from what I've read compared to other modern formats like WMA and OGG.

Foobar is a great player. Efficient, lightweight, yet it offers advanced features such as kernel streaming and normalization. FLAC and Foobar2000 are a great way to go.

I've just looked, and I'm not finding anything that says that AAC is inferior to WMA. Can you site an article? AAC works just dandy for me; I can't tell any difference between ~192k and CDs.

Moreover, here's some results indicating that (at least at 128k VBR), they're largely identical.

Also, the Apple Lossless format purports to get 50% compression, although I've never tried it. So I think it's reasonable to assume that 60% compression would be, well, pretty much lossless.

HydrogenAudio has a good comparison of lossless codecs here.

Personally, I rip music from CD to FLAC using ExactAudioCopy.

Then I use Foobar2000 to convert to lossless WMA and apply AlbumGain to normalize the volume across all my CDs.

There's probably more efficient ways to do this, but this is how I roll. I like WMA because it's the easiest lossless format to use with Windows Media Center.