Lossless audio format

[GrahamGarside]

I thought it would be a good idea to rip all my audio cd's to a lossless format and didn't really notice the time, ahh well tis a saturday tomorrow

[DimViesel]

Snap! (Not doing it right now just something I will be doing.)
Why are you doing the convo to lossless though?
Which codec you go with? What were your reasons for choosing that over the (@ least 5) other alternatives?
How many CDs you managed to get done an hour & how many were you planning to covert all together?

[GrahamGarside]

Using lossless cos I got 400gb hd space so it won't leave too big a dent in it, I won't have to do it again in the future when even 400gb is a drop in the ocean, plus I'm a reet ponce with my music
I'm being lazy and using wma format just because I like windows media player and it sorts my library out for me plus it's quick and compatable
it takes about 3 mins a cd maybe a bit less. I've got about 150 cds to do

[Toro]

windows media player is the devil's creation, i hate it!

or its maybe that i cant work it but i deffinatly hate it

[GrahamGarside]

I know it's all part of ms's conspiracy to have it's formats part of the official formats because everyone uses it's mediaplayer but so what, it's free does te job well

[DimViesel]

Does the M$ wma lossless format allow you to "seek" within the encoded data stream without any 'delay' ?
(e.g. earlier versions of WavPack & perhaps other implementations of lossless audio codecs would make it appear that the seek bar got jammed when you tried to seek withing a stopped or playing track... it would move to the point but not in real time...)

PS These posts really, really (from #11 onwards that is) should be moved to a Lossless audio thread... :/ if only to alert others to the discussion & allow them to be part of the convo/discussion... (I believe that is what a forum is about )

[Áedán]

How does MS WMA lossless compare to something like LA or FLAC?

[GrahamGarside]

wma lossless does let you seek with no delay, don't know how it compares with others, obviously the sound quality is identical to the original but I don't know about the file sizes
on average most of my albums are about 330mb but a few are in the region of 480mb

[fantomfreq]

Apple has it's own lossless format. However, I prefer to rip my CDs into Apple's .m4a format. The music sounds great in that format and it really doesn't take up that much space. Oh yeah, and WMA format is the work of Satan.

[GrahamGarside]

as much as it's easy to hate ms the corporation, wma is a very good format in my view, it's fast simple and good quality. it's not the best lossy format below 128kbit/s, oggvorbis is great for that but who keeps files that small anymore other than for memory based protable players.
Space is getting to be a none issue these days, I would keep my files as raw wav files if it weren't for the fact that a lossless format is just as practical

[Allan]

My semester project at college this year is about making our own audio codec, we'll be calling it "MyP3" as it is somewhat similar to the MPEG1 standard. (Only layer 1 though). This is LOSSY compression, so I'm actually straying away from the topic here.

We'll be using Hanning (or Hann if you will) window with 50% overlap, a scaled DFT, our own psycho-acoustic model and frame format in the encoder.

The Decoder is almost the reversed process, using an inverted DFT to take the signals back to the time domain instead of the frequenzy domain used for signal analysis.

All this is to be implemented in software, in C++ and Matlab. If we get time, we'll be trying to make a working winamp plugin for it.

[Áedán]

Both FLAC and LA support seeking. LA managed a compression ratio of about 0.5, FLAC sits at about 0.54. FLAC is OpenSource, so it'll run on any platform. That's good for me, as I have a mixed network, with OS/2, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows!