mp3 vs ogg vs wma vs lossless wma

[mbunny]

Just find a winamp plugin rather than an mp3 script. Its much easier as winamp can play all formats, all you need is a mirc script to read the titles and control the winamp controls.

 

[Gus K]

Luna,

The tags are there, right clicking in windows only gives me a name on any mp3 on my rig. Here's a ss of the ape tag info created from a wav, as shown in QCD.

 

[Gus K]

missed it

 

[muzikool]

SHN

I believe that this and Monkey Audio have some kind of relationship, I'm not sure though. But since nobody has mentioned SHN... I will.

Shorten (extension .shn) is an audio compression scheme written by Tony Robinson of SoftSound that can compact wav files without subtracting out any frequencies. It's "lossless"- everything in the original wav is there, so that full quality is maintained. For many traders of live music, Shorten files (shns) therefore have an undisputed advantage over "lossy" mp3-format files. A shn file made from a wav is quite a bit larger than the corresponding mp3, with a size perhaps ~50-70% of the orginal wav.

SHN Resources

 

[espionage_man]

Okay, I'm not a professional audiophile or anything, but I have played with virtually every form of music compression format out there, and in my opinion, here are the best for each type of useage...

1) For true lossless storage but without the size of a wav, use Monkey's Audio. It compresses on average about 50%-60% of the original wav, and encodes at a pretty decent speed as well. Yes, the files are still big (50mb wav is now about 25-30mb ape), but hey, you can now store more music on a cd than you could before and without sound quality loss.

2) For storing and listening on your computer, use mp4 aac format. Incredible sound and very, very small file size. Want to compare sound quality? Compare an mp4 aac with ogg, mp3, mp3pro, or wma. You will be amazed. And yes there are appropriate decoders for winamp, wmp9 or foobar2000 (which if you haven't used yet, you should.) Foobar2000 is a very small player (about 250kb zip file, 540kb on your computer, and uses less than 2mb ram while running), it's playback quality is quite incredible. http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org/

3) For compatibility with mp3 hardware players, I recommend mp3PRO. It is backwards compatible to work on mp3 players, yet it still keeps that small file size.

Honorable mentions to OGG Vorbis. It is open-source, which is always a good thing and it sounds great too. If you can't get your hands on an mp4 aac encoder, go with OGG for storing on your computer.

That's my 2 cents worth.

 

[82ross]

Im a fan of Ogg Vorbis, even as low as quality 1 can be good enough for many people.

I tried mp3PRO when it first came out, i was impressed at the time but now it sounds like its coming out of a tin can speaker.
Real Audio had a look in for a while but streaming type media just aint that good for normal playback.

For now all my music is Vorbis and shipped over to me xbox 120Gig HDD where i play them from
/me tilts his hat to XBMP team.

Happy days.