the WMA thread below got me wondering now about the best way to preserve my music.

i'm curious about what our readers think is the best quality mp3 encoding solution.

i've always used lame, but i think thats mainly because its free..

LAME is the best MP3 Encoder you can get.

Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder.

FLAC

RAR or UHA then.

Since when have RAR and UHA been audio encoders.

FLAC is a pretty good codec but it causes extremely large files, Ogg Vorbis is pretty good too.

As already stated LAME is the best mp3 encoder you'll get, plus its free and fully open source.

thanks for all the input. i figured lame was pretty much as good as it gets. i'm gonna try OGG vs mp3 and see how the difference sounds.

ogg is better or same quality for less bitrate. for the same bitrate ogg is better.

bitrate isn't an issue. i just want the highest quality compression

FLAC is the very best because it is lossless. The next best is OGG. MP3 technology is more than a decade old, you know. If you encode to MP3, just use a program that bypasses all that DRM crap and outputs at 320 kbps for optimal quality guarenteed to sound awesme on home theater setups with surround sound.

i started listening to mp3s in DOS on my 486 so yah, it's a bit old.

thanks for the info jeremy

giving FLAC a try right now

daaaammn....dbpoweramp is a NICE utility

do you you want the most compression or the best quality. The highest quality with highest compression would fall under ogg, the highest quality with lowest compression would fall under FLAC.

Both are written by the same group, Flac is lossless ogg is lossy. But although ogg is lossy most of the compression is achieved by removing the higher frequency components of the audio, e.g. the stuff that we cannot hear. Many people would say that there are no frequencies in the music that cannot be heard but these people forget about the harmonics automatically generated in music production.

Anyway. If you want best quality and almost the same size as cd tehn use flac (it achieves som file reduction but is not designed to give too much) or if you want the smallest filesize go with ogg.

both can be found on
http://www.xiph.org/
(OGG is actually the name of the container format (like rar, or zip archive), the actual name for the audio compression format is ogg vorbis. See http://www.vorbis.com/faq/#what. FLAC can be used in the ogg file format.)

FLAC is pretty like RAR or UHA since it is lossless. Only thing.



And why not MPC, it's trully wonderful?
http://www.musepack.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musepack
Decoding is natively supported in Foobar.

In fact, I checked some websites and it seems that Ogg now beats MPC which has not been updated for months. Conclusion : go with Ogg.

Lossless: FLAC is my choice mainly becuase the dev is a regular on Hydrogenaudio.org. FLAC, Wavepack, Monkey's Audio, etc... are all very close in terms of compression ratio. Encoding and decoding speed are where the differences lie.
Lossy: OGG has the advantage at 128kbps. Anything higher and you start to run into problems of testers not being able to ABX any of them.

Want portability with compatability? mp3 (LAME)
Want the ability to re-create your CD's bit-wise? Lossless...pick your flavor.

i use EAC with lame

320vbr

LAME with these settings should give perceptual transparency for almost everything (while maintaining a decent bitrate.)

Ogg is the best
for Quality and portability and compressibilty

Hi

If you want something that will work in any player that offers no compression
whatsoever, it's going to be WAV

The downside is, being the largest in terms of file size.

For MP3 Encoders, I like Fraunhofer, but it's not free.

I usually encode mp3s @ 320 Kbs 44100 Khz for CD copies, or 320 48000 Khz,
if I'm making my on mixes.

There are so many out there, I would suggest you listen before you decide.

There's no better, just what sounds best to you.


Good Luck!