Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Lossless MP3

Yet another format to contend with, well at least they say it is backward compatible. I like the idea of downloading lossless music, just wish more would start to do it.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/15710-MP3-g...ivestories_week

This seems to work the way that DTS-HD MA does. Uses the lossy MP3 encode as a prediction as to what the lossless data should be. Then only the difference is stored in part of the file which older players should ignore.

Pretty cool. But I doubt there'll be much player support.

Since I have multiple terabytes of storage now, I just rip all my CDs to WAVs. That's the most compatible way, and if you save a .cue file you can recreate the original CD exactly.

I thought about just using .wav for simplicity but I wanted ID tags to show up on my Squyeezebox so I could browse the music library. WAVs don't natively support tags and there are work arounds but they can be messy and are not universally supported.

I'm very happy with FLAC and I keep a sister library of MP3s for the Zune but any music played out loud in the house comes from the flac libray.

The lack of tags on .WAVs is a little annoying, but I use this naming scheme which allows me to quickly find any song I want:

Artist\Album\##. Artist - Song Title.wav

FYI, if you use FLAC (lossless) you can turn the FLAC file right back into the orignial WAV file.

But FLACs can't be played directly by copying to any media player I own. Also they must be decoded on the fly by a media server to stream over the network. The ~50% space savings isn't a big deal, I've ripped my entire CD collection (300+ discs) and still have room to spare.

I was just saying that WAVs are (almost, what's up with the Oppo BDP-83 not playing them?) universally supported, and with virtually unlimited storage these days its just the easiest format for me.

Ahh I see. Whatever works :-)

Exactly.
I need tags for my Squeezebox and they also play nicely via Tversity to my PS3 for listening over my HT speakers. You need a more compatible format. Were are both hearing what we want, where we want it in the end.