Have an interesting discussion going on. If you have what are your thoughts? I does sound like the way to go but not sure quite yet.

BTW, Exact Audio Copy is the greatest thing ever thanks Sketch!

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

flac takes up too much space. even songs encoded at 320 kbps are still smaller than flacs, and youd never know the difference.

192 is still where it's at.

Lossless formats like CDs are where it's at.

I have a friend who went Apple Lossless, and it just took up too much space. He keeps backups on CD (I.E., the original disk), and sticks with 192.

I prefer 278.1828, myself.

very true.

but if ripping, I tend to stick with 192 MP3's.

FLAC is a waste of space.

I have officially crossed that line. 192 is no longer good enough for me anymore. Now it almost has to be VBR that is at 192 minimum and usually end up at around 220. Those seem perfect but I don’t use iTunes yet so it’s for quality reasons.

i encode at lame preset standard and cant tell the difference 95% of the time.

if you can tell the difference between 220 and 192 while listening to it, i'd be very surprised.

Anything 128 and up is fine with me. I can't really notice a difference with the equipment that I have. pinkeyedwink sent me some of Josh Pearson's stuff on flac. I've yet to figure out what to do with it.

IMHO I think all the noise about lossy vs. lossless depends on the environment you are in when listening.

If you are jogging then who the hell cares what bit rate? Honestly!
If you are in a normal car I think 192 is more than enough, a higher-end car like Lexus etc. MAYBE, but probably not, be able to hear the difference at all between 192 and higher.
At home in a listening room with anechoic foam and shit then get a life! and stick with your tube amps and virgin vinyl.

For my purposes, I want portable music that Is flexible and can be burned back to an audio CD with acceptable results.

If you have a dedicated PC with terabytes of storage then why not rip in the highest bit rate possible? if space is at a premium, then sacifices have to be made, quality is the first to go.

EDIT: I have now had a chance to read the the info on FLAC. and it is interesting. I still stand by my post. It depends on your use and storage capabilities.

i converted it to mp3 if you'd rather have that.. and you really need to hear his hank williams cover.. its the only one that actually sounds any good

I've converted a lot of my collection to FLAC, but basically just for backup purposes. My mp3 player supports it but I haven't noticed enough of a difference to make me sacrifice the space.

I am a big proponent of lossless encoding though. I download more FLAC files than mp3s these days thanks to newsgroups and bootleg sharing sites. And when we get to the point where a portable device holds hundreds of gigabyes or more then mp3s will be mostly obsolete, and it'll be nice to have a head start.

YES

I use 128kbs and can't tell the difference 99.9% of the time.

I can tell the difference sometimes between 128/256...the lesser sounds tinny to me. It might be that I listen to it in my car, loud, but I have all my stuff at VBR 256+

Yep - there's almost no way the human ear could actually hear a difference. Do a blind test - have a friend play you a wav file and an mp3 at 192 of the same piece of music without telling you which is which and I'd bet you'd never be able to guess. Of course, I have the original CDs of things that are important to me, so if some better compression scheme or REALLY huge capacity players come along, I've got the originals to source from again.

You are right there might not be that much of a difference between 192 at 220. I’m going strictly out of blind research that is available on the net. They are using EAC of course.

----------------------------------------------------------
After participating in a blind listening test linked above, I am now using this preset:
--alt-preset xtreme
as my switch of choice. In that test, I could definitely hear a difference between
three of the files and the others. Those three (best-sounding) files were:

MPC -insane -nmt 99 -tns99 +lowpass 19.5 (700+ kbps)
--alt-preset xtreme (232kbps)
--alt-preset standard (222kbps)
All other files sounding noticeably inferior to these three.

http://mp3.radified.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------

I have done one test. I was converting the new remastered songs from the Boo Radleys. First I was converting at 192 but than switched to VBR ~260 and there was a difference with songs from C’mon Kids. Now that I’m using EAC that standard is becoming “--alt-preset standard (222kbps)” which seems to be where most files from 5l5k are heading. Listening to files at 128 or 160 is a joke and I won’t waste my time anymore.

192 to 260 is quite a jump, so yes, you can probably tell the difference.

anything under 192 gets hissy to me. if i file is ripped at 128, i'll find another source.

I did this about a year ago. I've ABX'd between --alt-preset standard and FLAC and agree, as far as perceivable sound quality goes, they're the same. The main difference is FLAC is gapless by nature, and there's no good mp3 player for OS X that's coded to playback mp3's gaplessly like foobar2000. Plus, its nice to know that if anything ever happened to the discs, I'd have perfect copies to make new ones, or to give copies to friends so they don't end up trasncoding from a lossy format back into a lossy format.

Moral of the story is, if you have the space, go for it, and transcode if you need smaller bitrates for a portable player. That's what I do.

BTW, I highly recomend hydrogenaudio for researching stuff like this.

I'm sticking with my alt-present standard.

Bee: a belated "you're welcome" for the EAC.

anyone who can tell the difference between 192 and 256 is lying.

sent

got. you're right, that cover is awesome. thanks a bunch.