Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater I think I finally found the right solution

I really don't want compression at all.
With increasing storage space even on small devices like iPods, non-lossy files can be stored in reasonably large numbers.
I don't think i need to have my entire music collection on a 1GB iPod at the sacrifice of compression.


True, but if i were to rip my files to WAV lets say, 60-100 MB per file is a bit too large.

Flac is still kicking around?
I just haven't heard much about it lately.
Can flac files be played back on common players like iPods? I'm assuming they can with codec installation or even replacing the base player software to something else.

I agree with Fred. 95% of my music is in Flac. The Sonos supports Flac (and other formats to, MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA etc..)

I use to favour APE but Flac is more supported and sounds excellent. I have very few MP3s and I look to replace them as soon as I can find a lossless version of it.

And like Fred says..disk space is cheap.

Chess,

FLAC does compress the file size but not the bitrate, you still get maximum sound quality, just like the original WAV file, but in a smaller file. There is no downside to Flac compression.

Flac is very well supported, not sure about ipod cause I don't own one but most players I've seen do support Flac. Either natively with via a plug in.

Well this really is the key.
If flac is widely enough supported for media players (iPod or other, Windows Media Player or Winamp or other common player), etc. then that's the way i will go.

I've been eyeballing Sonos so it is nice to hear it supports the format.

ALAC is also likely to stick around. Like it or not, Apple rules the market right now.

Damn Apples.

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.

I believe I have 3500 on my 20 GB iPod. Not ALAC or WAV, of course.

EDIT: oh wait, you said 2000 albums. Nemmind...

Assuming the average song is about 20 MB in an uncompressed wave, that would be 50,000 songs in 1 TB.

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.)