I'm no expert, but I'm familiar with most of the sound lossless formats. Shn is used mainly for bootleg recordings (I'm not sure why) and if you look on the a.b.s.shn newsgroup, most of the material are bootlegs. Flac is not that popular, by far the most popular format is .ape; if you look on the a.b.sounds.lossless/misc newsgroups, most of the material is encoded in .ape format. Lossless formats are approx. 50% of the size of the original .wav file I have an encoder/decoder, 'dbpoweramp' which can convert almost all lossless (and some lossy including MP3) formats. You can download it at http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm together with whatever sound codecs (Ape, Flac etc) you want. It's a doddle to install and use. However, I don't use it to encode to MP3's, for that I use Lame w/Razor Lame as my frontend. This allows for far more accurate and optimized sound settings to encode to, for those who quality is important. However, it's more than adequate to the untrained ear *smile* I'm not familiar what platforms all these codecs span, but a little research should answer any queries. I'm only familiar with a P/C setup, perhaps others can add to this about different platforms? EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is considered one of the most accurate software programs for ripping .wavs off your CD before encoding. Thanks JR for setting up the FTP server, you have some Yello material there I don't have which I'd love to get. I'll wait for the fuss to die down first, no rush here. I recently ripped all my Yello 12" to MP3 (Yes, using optimised settings!) and I may follow suit and setup a FTP server....watch this space. Ripping vinyl from your turntable through your soundcard produces excellent quality .wav files as long as you have a quality turntable. For those unfamiliar with it, Soul Seek is an excellent File Sharing program that deals predominantly in MP3's. I've searched though dozens of different programs and it's IMHO the best one out there. Easy to use and there's tons of music there. Somoene recently d/l my whole Yello 12" collection there so I hope it's being distributed :-) Just my tuppence worth. Patrick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Willoughby" <brianw@sounds.wa.com> To: "The moon: beautiful. The sun: even more beautiful." <yello@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 12:49 AM Subject: Re: [Yello] Old Material
[ Have you (or anyone else in this list for that matter) had any [ experience with Monkey's Audio (APE file extension) [ (http://www.monkeysaudio.com) ? It sounds like it's similar to [ FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net).
I have certainly heard of Monkey's Audio ".ape" - but have never used it.
My initial experience was with shorten ".shn" - it did not support AIFF, so I added that feature to the open source project. But I soon ran into shorten's limits, since I have a lot of 24-bit audio files which shorten does not support.
FLAC proved to be much better, but it is only the second lossless format I have used.
My initial research came up with a reasonably long list of options, including APE, SHN, and FLAC. When I first started, it was difficult to locate programs which supported these formats on BSD Unix or Mac OS X. Perhaps APE is PC-only? I don't remember.
FLAC seems to be the best and most widespread. I understand that there are even car stereos and portable personal music devices which support FLAC.
Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting
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