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 -----
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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