Format War: Your Favorite Lossless Format
 

We all know MP3 is easily the dominant lossy format (with WMA, AAC, OGG and MPC far behind), but amoung the lossless it's a slightly different story. Lacking any widespread mainstream adaption, it's at best a 2-4 way war. Which comes to the question, what (if any) is your preferred lossless format? Give some explaination, what makes you choose Real Lossless (probably not :)) over FLAC?

Monkey's Audio is by far my favorite format. I've heard people whine about decoding time and seeking, but what other lossless format encodes so quickly and with such high compression raitos (the 'fast' mode compresses just as good as FLAC under almost any circumstances)? MAC was designed as a syncronous codec, meaning it compresses/decompresses equally fast. This may sound bad for decoding, but 10x encoding/decoding is not bad on a 1st generation Athlon, especially considering that FLAC (at its best compression settings), spits out files larger in size and takes an extremely longer time to encode.
Yes seeking on APE files is slow (especially in APE/CUE files compressed with settings greater than "High"). Even the argument that FLAC is better because it can be played on more platforms is slowly starting to be untrue (with the somewhat loose closed source nature of the program).
So while I'll accept a FLAC file from someone else, MAC is my cup of tea for my lossless needs.

WavPack does everything FLAC does and more. The only drawback is that it's not supported on many devices. But I mean, if you want to listen to it off your computer you can burn it to CD-R as audio or transcode it to 320 (which contains as many frequencies as the human ear can hear).

Rockbox supports FLAC and Wavpack. Rockbox is alternative firmware for a number of portable audio players. I got it on my iRiver H140 and it's awesome.

They wanted to include the Monkey's Audio format but they stumbled on these problems:
That's a good reason not to like Monkey's Audio, i'd say.

I voted for FLAC, since it's the only one I have used that I have liked. It's also the most common lossless format people are using, in my experience...

FLAC, because in a comparison done some time ago (on HA, I think) it was found to be the best lossless codec overall - good compression, low CPU usage, fairly robust......

Another nice thing about FLAC is that you can put it in an OGG container.

I chose FLAC, mainly because other people use it over APE and those other formats. I rip CDs in FLAC as well and so I hope other people will be able to play and enjoy them to the max.

For those wanting to know how almost all known lossless formats stack up, check this comparison.

Also of particular interest to FLAC users: use the attached FLAC compressor. It's known to compress/decompress faster and produce smaller FLAC files, while maintaining 100% compatiblity with all FLAC decoders.

Which Flac encoder from that comparison is that? "Flac - CVS" or "Flac - Garf"?

The Garf encoder. The CVS one is unstable (based on latest builds) while the Garf encoder is stable. While CVS gets more compression than Garf, the difference is so extremely tiny (less than 500KB on all but the slowest settings), it doesn't even matter.

Although I still don't know why you would want to put any lossless file directly onto a portable device when you can transcode to mp3 and save space.

Maybe because you value audio quality on the go or use the thing as a portable hard drive for a car audio player or something? There would be many legitmate uses for lossless on the go, Eleo.

And FLAC is by far the superior format. Sure, it takes longer to encode than it does to decode, as mentioned above, but that's good because most of the time I'm only encoding something ONCE, and listening to it a lot.

And encoding really doesn't take that long anyway in my experience. You're not really wasting much time with the medium settings.

I wonder who voted for OFR?

But the audio quality of a 320kbps mp3 is audibly identical to a lossless file; ie no normal human can hear the removed frequencies. Thus I can think of no reason why you would want to place lossless audio on a portable device when mp3s accomplish the same ends and save disk space.

Oh hey look, that's my rationale

Those are also reasons why I use it, that, plus it's open source IIRC...

So which lossless format did you vote for?

Actually, there are plenty of instances where a lossy encoding will sound very different from the original. To put it really simply, these are cases where the encoder screws up.

Search HydrogenAudio and you'll find a list of "problem samples" which are known to give encoders trouble.

"Plenty of instances", or "a small chance that"?

If I recall correctly, LAME (and the mp3 format itself) has trouble handling audio data above 16kHz. 320kbps is a waste of space for me, VBR or Lossless.

And since Monkey's Audio is slowly picking up again (with Linux decoders working), I see a bright future for it. All I want now is native ReplayGain and better seeking, and I'll never need to see FLAC on my HDD ever again. Though I'm curious about MPEG-4 lossless as well, the tests I saw had good compression with fast decoding, a lossless standard would help get more lossless rips out there (we badly need an mp3 of lossless).

Good luck getting many to make the move from FLAC to APE... :D

If you're referring to mac, I've barely gotten that thing to work, and no player I'd consider using (Musik or MPD exclusively) supports it. mac was also the biggest pain in the ass to get installed, since the usual make chain didn't work for me with it (much less a lacking of documentation); this was all about one month ago, by the way.

I voted FLAC, for the simple reason that my players support it, and the decoder on Linux works perfectly. Add to that the really low decode time compared to APE when both run with high compression, and I find it to be the winner by leaps and bounds.

The only reason I even have mac installed anymore is to rip things from APE and dump them to FLAC so my players can use it.

A very real chance.

Correct.

Never gonna happen. That's how APE squeezes the extra 1 or 2% out of its encodings: by completely neglecting to have the kind of structure that makes fast seeking possible.

Black people are hilarious.

i know this is off-topic but what's the difference between ALAC and FLAC?

Main difference (besides for lossless encoding): ALAC is a proprietary format, only officially decodable on iTunes and iPods. This is in contrast to FLAC which is open source and is decodable on nearly any media player (if not directly, then with plugins), but since FLAC is not officially decodable on an iPod (or many other hardware digital music players), it has an uphill battle.

Furthermore, though I've noticed I'm the only person saying anything positive about Monkey's Audio, it's still in 2nd place with six votes. While it's dwarfed with FLAC's 22 votes, it still crushes the nearest competition threefold.

ok, thanks for the clarification kaiten.