music format question

[Macintosh Sauce]

Which is a better format to make music files from all of my audio CDs?

AIFF or WAV? Also, why?

Thanks!

[maniacmusician]

uhh, neither?

MP3 and OGG are the ideal formats (one free, one non-free). Lossless formats (top quality, but take up a lot more space) are FLAC, SHN, APE.

[SunnyRabbiera]

OGG will do you nice :D

[keithweddell]

Depends what you are trying to do and how much space you have. If you just want to get them into a playable format, use mp3 or ogg if your player supports it.

If you have space and want to archive your music, consider something like flac which provides some compression but is lossless. The advantage of lossless compression is that (unlike mp3 or ogg) you never lose sound quality so you can reconvert to mp3 or whatever when you want to put them on your portable player.

Keith

[Macintosh Sauce]

Since I have a Mac Pro, I am going to rip all my CDs with the Apple Lossless Encoder then. That way I can make MP3s if needed.

[Rhubarb]

I would stongly recommend you rip all your CDs using FLAC.
As I don't think you'll be able to change your apple lossless file into any other format unless you use your mac, now or in the future.
Apple uses a proprietary format to try and force you to be locked in to using apple software.

If you use FLAC, your music will be able to be played and converted on any platform, OSX, GNU / Linux, Windows, Open Solaris, BSD.

[Macintosh Sauce]

I would stongly recommend you rip all your CDs using FLAC.
As I don't think you'll be able to change your apple lossless file into any other format unless you use your mac, now or in the future.
Apple uses a proprietary format to try and force you to be locked in to using apple software.

If you use FLAC, your music will be able to be played and converted on any platform, OSX, GNU / Linux, Windows, Open Solaris, BSD.
You are correct. :)

I just bought and downloaded Toast 8 Titanium for the Mac and it supports exporting the AIFF format (found on audio CDs) to FLAC, OGG, etc. For the preferences, I chose zero compression, 192 kHz sample rate, and L/R stereo channels to archive all my music as FLAC files. Once I finish I can finally put my audio CDs away in my closet.

The FLAC files sound awesome IMO! Now, from these master FLAC files, I can make MP3s or AAC files for our iPods or OGG files to play in iTunes with a QuickTime component addon from the FLAC people.

Thanks for the FLAC format suggestion!