best quality music compression

RobertFoster

I realise that WAV is the best quality, but when it comes to compression for players, is it MP3, AAC, WMA or some other format that has best quality : file size ratio?

Most of the music on my computer is AAC as I found it to be good quality at half the size of MP3. I'm thinking of getting a HDD music player, and the thoughts of converting all my music to MP3 isn't appealing. Is there any other player, other than the iPod that playes AAC?

Mutant_Fruit

It all depends on how much you want to pay.

If you get an iRiver player that supports FLAC, you can get full quality songs, but they only compress to about 60% of the origional size, so they are typically 25mb per track, so you'd need a good big harddrive.

Next in the line (in my opinion) come both Ogg and WMA and AAC. AAC is the best out of those three, with Ogg beating WMA.

the Ipod is the only player to support AAC, and the iRiver players are the only ones (currently) to support Ogg. Ogg is likely to gain more support in future as it is royalty free, so it costs people nothing to implement it in their players. Whereas with AAC i think you have to buy licenses etc.

check out the recent thread to see about the differences between the iRiver and Ipod, but those would be the two best ones if you don't want to go with MP3, which is lesser quality than Ogg, WMA and AAC per given bitrate. (e.g. 128kbps mp3 sounds crap compared to 128kbps ogg/wma/aac)

Personally i'd go for iRiver, as they play both Ogg and FLAC on their players (as far as i know). So you can get lossless files, i.e. perfect quality, and fairly good quality lossy files (in Ogg format).

All players support MP3 though.

Kobie

I don't know how it stacks up againsst the others, but I'm quite fond of variable bit rate mp3's.

hostyle

ehm. WMA is a POS file format. Remember also that on a portable player, you'll more than likely being using earphones most of the time. Earphones don't produce high quality sound.

To be honest I'd rate wma as worthwhile only at very low bitrates; above 64 Kb/s ogg and mp3 are fine on earphones. I have no experience of AAC.

SHN, FLAC and APE are lossless formats, with pretty similar compression ratios (SHN ends up a bit larger).

But to answer your question, very few players support ogg (which is unfortunate as its most likely the best format). AAC and mp3 are supported by a lot of players, but mp3 is the only ubiquitous format.

Basically, while AAC while might sound better than mp3s as smaller files, AAC players (such the ipod) are more likely more expensive. So you can fit just as many (or more) mp3s of larger size on a 60 Gb Nomad Zen, than a similarly proced AAC iPOD.

As always "it depends".

Civilian_Target

As mentioned before its really dependant of your ears. For really good quality, you want FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) from flac.sf.net Offers about 4:1 compression.

For lossy compression, opinion is divided between AAC and OGG. AAC is supported on the iPod and iRiver players, the Rio Karma and iRiver players support OGGs.
For bit rates below 160kbits OGG is generally considered superior, after that AAC seems to be the better format. Either way, you're a wonder man if you can hear the difference IMHO.

Personally I use OGG all the time, but then my Karma supports it so it makes sense, it means I can fit more music in at good quality (a 64kbits OGG has equivalent sound quality to a 128kbits MP3), I use about 112k OGG and can't tell it apart from the CD.


That all said THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THE RIPPING.
It doesn't matter a **** what codec you use if it's full of ripping blips. The best windows encoder out there is Exact Audio Copy which comes preconfigured for high quality MP3s but can be configured to use any codec. For Linux, CD Paranoia is the equivalent.

That said, a good quality MP3 (160k VBR or better, made with LAME and EAC) is more than sufficient for any purpose, and will play on anything, so if you're not too worried about space, that's a pretty good option. And for the record, WMAs are crap.

*EDIT* MutantFruit, for the record, the Rio Karma supports OGG and FLAC as well. That said, money no object, buy the iRiver player.

RobertFoster

thanks for all the replies. I was looking at either an iPod or iRiver - I didn't realise the iRiver played AAC format...do all of them do that? I was looking at specs of one and it said "MP3/WMA" - is it only a specific model that playes AAC too?