Music storage formats???

[arkay1]

Hi everyone, ok, first up, Im new here so please be gentle with me!

I have a little library of music, about 13 gig of my favorites.

Its all in mp3 format which was and probably still is the most popular format for music storage. (its an old collection and mp3 was about the only format available back then!)

Unfortunately its not a very good format if you are really into true hi fi, too many losses etc.

So, can anybody tell me what the best format is, Im looking for good compression without losses.

 

[its phillip]

Flac. You'll need to rerip your library from the original cds, since transcoding from a lossy format results in more loss.

 

[ChrisFox]

Any lossless would be best. Depends on which mp3 player and software you use. iTunes and iPod would go with Apple Lossless. Zune and media player would go with wma lossless. I use sansa fuze and it plays flac so I went with that.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Flac. You'll need to rerip your library from the original cds, since transcoding from a lossy format results in more loss.

What he said.
And I partially disagree with ChrisFox. While technically any lossless format would provide same quality, going proprietary format like wma lossless or lossless apple is probably not good idea for longevity and portability of your collection. Flac is already very widely supported and it's good idea to stick to it.

 

[ChrisFox]

I would agree that all things being equal flac is the way to go. But if you live in a itunes/ipod world, getting flac to work with either of those is "rusty nail in the eye" painful. With any lossless, if circumstances change, you can transcode easily to another lossless without loosing meta data.