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Help a noob on lossless codecs

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strid3r

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So I've finally decided to take the plunge on these lossless formats. I've gone back to my cd's and ripped the wavs and they are ready to go. I've been using EAC + RazorLame up till now, which has been great, but looking to play around and experiment. I have a couple questions:

1) Which format is best? Monkey's audio? Flac? Others?
2) What program do I use to convert the wavs to that format?
3) Any other info and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!
 
1) What do you mean by best?
Lossless CODECs are lossless so they all sound exactly identical to the source and to each other.
FLAC is probably the most widely supported, with some portable hardware support, and is somewhat error resistant, but has rather mediocre compression ratios. It's very easy to play hardware wise, and compresses relatively quickly except on the highest setting.
There are a bunch of other lossless CODECs, including WavPack, Shorten, LA, Monkey's, and OptimFROG. Most of the newer ones (Wavpack, optimfrog, monkey's) have better compression ratios than FLAC, but playback support is limited to what you use to play them with. Foobar2000 will play nearly all of them by default.

2) EAC can output to most any external encoder. There is a FLAC frontend like RazorLame as well.

3) http://www.rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/lossless.html
 
But of course, if you pick a better compression ratio codec (Monkey's seems to be popular), you can always write a quick script to transcode all your APE files onto your portable in FLAC or mp3 with no quality loss due to transcoding. It's the beauty of storing in lossless.

Now if only iTunes had transcoding support.
 
For my first question, I meant which is best in terms of compression ratio. Sorry if I was vague. Thanks for info and link.
 
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