Whats the best Audio format?


  

61 members have voted

  1. 1. Whats the best Audio format?

    • WMA
      12
    • MP3
      38
    • OGG
      10
    • AAC
      0
    • other...
      1


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Just wondering what peoples opinions are about audio formats. I either use WMA or MP3 at 192 kbs.

Also what encoders etc are people using, I've just downloaded Alto and that uses Lame which gives pretty impressive results.

It also has ogg support in it, I've ripped a few songs in the ogg format at 192 kbs and they sound very impressive, although its never gonna beat MP3 for the sheer volume and widespread use. :) ;)

Anyway, vote & opinions...

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As far as quality and coolness ... ogg wins. Its better quality than the others AND its open source. As far as practicality ... mp3 wins. Its the most widespread dispite the fact that players and rippers must fork over royalty payments. WMA ... eweeee. And a big stinko to Real Media as well. I cant stand proprietary nonsense. Just me humble opinion.

I use EAC and LAME, usually at variable bit rate but often at 224 and never less than 192. I pass on anything below that.

Happy ripping ! :D

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Originally posted by postertoad  

As far as quality and coolness ... ogg wins.  Its better quality than the others AND its open source.  As far as practicality ... mp3 wins.  Its the most widespread dispite the fact that players and rippers must fork over royalty payments.  WMA ... eweeee.  And a big stinko to Real Media as well.  I cant stand proprietary nonsense.  Just me humble opinion.

I use EAC and LAME, usually at variable bit rate but often at 224 and never less than 192.  I pass on anything below that.

Happy ripping !    :D

Wrong! You might think MP3 wins... Trust me... I have done a huge amount of testing between WMA and MP3 for quality and file size... thought that MP3 sound superior but you can tell the big difference when you try to lower the bitrate... If you only want a file at 128K bitrate or over, then yeah MP3 sounds fairly enough... under that bitrate, MP3 quality goes bye-bye to a good ears...

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i personally prefer .wav :) mp3's are just too crappy sound quality wise, and i usually listen to live music, where the loss is even more noticeable. you can also lossLESSly compress wav's into .shn and play those in winamp with the shn plugin. but i normally just burn the wav's to cd.

cheers,

joe

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Krome - who wants a file less than 128Kbit? I use 192KBit normally, 256 for songs I really like.

OGG is the best, for compression and license. I really hope this format catches on, because it is the best loss format there is. Most of my music (total 7GB) is mp3s but I'm converting to ogg as soon as WinAMP3 is properly out with support. MP3 is good. MP3Pro sucks - not as good as Ogg compressionwise, appalling license wise. WMA are OK but there is no reason to use them over Ogg.

Two you forgot are Monkey-Audio and FLAC. BroChaos, you might be interested in these. These are non-loss formats. You will not lose any sound detail with these what-so-ever. They don't compress nearly as well as MP3 or whatever, but disc space isn't really that expensive. I'm considering using one of these for furture CD rips, probably FLAC. Monkey-Audio gives slightly better compression from my experience (about 1/4 of the size of the same music in .wav), however FLAC comes with a good license, similar to that of Ogg I believe. It gives slightly less compression, maybe 2/7 of the size of the same music in .wav.

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There's a way to have winamp 2 plugins work in winamp 3, I used a WMA plugin to play WMA files on winamp 3. I didn't forget about monkey audio, I knew about it but I just thought the others are more common. I have to admit to not knowing about FLAC though

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Originally posted by [saint dark] 

winamp 3 beta 3 supports now the wma and ogg format

Straight out of the box so to speak? Is there a need for additional plugins?

Also, is there the equivelant of the winamp toolbar controls for winamp3 yet?

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Yes, WinAMP3 b3 does support OGG without plugins. Good, although not surprising. Ogg encoding/decoding support can be added to anything easily and freely, the main reason why I like it so much. There is loads of info about implementing it in hardware or software available and anyone can use it without restrictions or cost. The fact that it gives the best sound:space ratio is also nice :)

WinAMP3 b3 also supports WMA.

I'm not about top change all my music because it's still in beta form and there aren't any skins that grab my fancy yet.

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It would be nice if MP3Pro would catch on. I've listened to a few MP3's in MP3Pro format and you can't tell any difference between 64kbps with MP3Pro and 128kbps with regular MP3. MP3Pro in my honest opinion would be the best format for good space saving audio quality. I don't like WMA much because I think that the high channels sound distorted. If it wasn't for that I would use WMA over MP3 right now.

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Originally posted by Xain  

Yes, WinAMP3 b3 does support OGG without plugins. Good, although not surprising. Ogg encoding/decoding support can be added to anything easily and freely, the main reason why I like it so much. There is loads of info about implementing it in hardware or software available and anyone can use it without restrictions or cost. The fact that it gives the best sound:space ratio is also nice :)

WinAMP3 b3 also supports WMA.

I'm not about top change all my music because it's still in beta form and there aren't any skins that grab my fancy yet.

look at my wa 3 beta 3 skin, is named ohe3 and the author is monaux

amp.png

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Originally posted by Zombie9920  

It would be nice if MP3Pro would catch on. I've listened to a few MP3's in MP3Pro format and you can't tell any difference between 64kbps with MP3Pro and 128kbps with regular MP3. MP3Pro in my honest opinion would be the best format for good space saving audio quality.

I hope MP3Pro dies a quick death. It uses the same variably bitrate as Ogg, which means it will only use the full specified bitrate if there is enough data to fill it. However it doesn't do as good a job of this and takes slightly more space than am ogg of the same music. It also has one of the worst licenses around, comparable to that of DVDs.

EDIT: [saint dark] - yeah, you showed me that before (twice!) and as I said both times, it's too big. I want a small skin to stay always-on-top and opern all the time.

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