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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Slogra

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.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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).

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by nyvremzurc

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.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Simple answer: everyone uses mp3. How many digital music players don't support mp3 (very few)? Now list the number that don't support Ogg, Musepack, AAC, or WMA; you'll notice the number to be significantly higher. I think that until multi-terabyte iPods become common, you won't see the majority of scene rips being lossless.

On top of that VBR mp3s encoded with LAME 3.97 sound very good, other formats may have gotten around mp3's limitations, but LAME has proven mp3 still has room to improve.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?