MP3, OGG, APE or FLAC?

[TeePee]

What is your prefered audio codec and why?

[Agent]

OGG.
4 min song into 1.3 meg of listenable quality for portable devices (granted, i wouldnt use the same quality for listening to it on my PC, but listening to it on the bus and its un-noticable) on my p900.

Means i can fit a full 13 track album in under 30 meg.
Yes please

[Knoxville]

Do any solid state players support ogg yet?

[Agent]

Yup, a few, but most seem to be very expensive as they are the top end model "MP3" players.

OGG is open source to, which means they could update most of the players already out there with a BIOS flash.

The quality compared to MP3 is also amazing. A 128b MP3 vs an 128b OGG dont stand a chance.

[Dfhaii]

id go flac, lossless, good support etc. For a lossy codec either vorbis or musepack, more musepack for high bitrates though.

Col

[unrealrocks]

OGG is good in that respect although a high quality MP3 is much better quality.

I choose MP3, mainly because my MP3 player supports that and WMA ... I know which I prefer

[Howard]

I aquired an album the other day that was encoded in APE (I think it was) and I played them and was astounded at the quality. Quite a difference compared to MP3s.

It's also a shame you can't put ID tags into WAV files, otherwise I'd use those on my MP3 player!

[Trash Man]

I use MPC+ have been for quite some time now. Better quality than MP3, and the files are smaller also. Although I don't think there are any portable MPC supported players out at the moment.

[Dfhaii]

howard the reason you were impressed is ape (monkeys) is a lossless format. it is the exact same quality as the wav/cd it was encoded from just a bit smaller although the compression isnt great.

Col

[Aaron]

I use MP3 (205kbps VBR using LAME) for all my music. I only really rip them with my iPod in mind so my options are limited to MP3 and AAC.

[Raz316]

MP3 - 128kbps - Sounds good enough when played on my PC, and also, not too big so I can fit about 140 tracks on a CD and have it play in my car If I had an OGG player in my car, I'd consider using the OGG format instead.

[Bindibadgi]

Do any solid state players support ogg yet?

beta firmware is available, should make final retail with mp3 players soon aparently.

Usually ogg/mp3. ogg cause it sounds better and mp3 cause its more compatible. Wont do anything less than 192, usually 320. VBR always though.

[starside]

wehat software do you use to rip CDs into OGG format?

[Bindibadgi]

easy cd extractor iirc

[Aaron]

Wont do anything less than 192, usually 320. VBR always though.

320kbps VBR?

[directhex]

320k with a lossy codec

i take a look at the codecs question in my Rio Karma review, mostly as it supports all the codecs in the topic except APE. FLAC & APE are both lossless formats, APE has been aaround longer whereas FLAC is newer - but FLAC is open source (making adding support for it to anything very easy), and has ingrained support for ReplayGain (some simple tags which say how much gain to apply on a per-rack and per-album basis so you don't distort things but don't have tyo reach for the volume knob between albums & tracks to hear things properly)

between MP3 & Ogg Vorbis, Vorbis definitely sounds better, has slightly lower filesizes, has better gapless support, is easy to add ReplayGain info to

and it's easy to rip to Ogg Vorbis, FLAC OR MP3 using CDex.

if you MUST use MP3, use LAME build 3.90.1, with the "--alt-preset standard" flag. the rest will take care of itself.