Lossless Format

[Jim Casey]

Ok...what is the difference between Lossless and ripping at 192???

[Professor Jam]

Jim,

This is why attending the Summit was important - You would have learned much more than my limited post will reflect.

---------here is a copy of one of my older post---------

Lossless

~Uncompressed~ (this is a KEY term)
AIFF
au file format
CDDA
IFF-8SVX
IFF-16SV
RAW (raw samples without any header or sync)
WAV - Microsoft Wave

~Compressed~
TTA free lossless audio codec (True Audio)
FLAC (free lossless codec of the Ogg project)
Apple Lossless (M4A)
Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless (WMA)
Monkey's Audio (APE)
Shorten (SHN)

Lossy

MP2 (MPEG Layer 2)
MP3 (MPEG Layer 3)
Speex (Ogg project, specialized for voice, low bitrates)
Vorbis (Ogg project, free and similar in principle to MP3)
GSM (GSM Full Rate, originally developed for use in mobile phones)
Windows Media Audio (WMA)
AAC (.m4a, .mp4, .m4p, .aac) - Advanced Audio Coding (usually in an MPEG4 container)
MPC - Musepack
VQF - Yamaha TwinVQ
Real Audio (RA, RM)
OTS

One thing about using lossless you need a quality source which will require an original CD or Vinyl an individual using lossless is not downloading free or illegal music.

You mention an individual with a home computer has the same parts as a CPS DJ, lets clarify. The average home user purchases from a standard retail location and to incorporate the required components we need for professional audio manipulation they would have to greatly upgrade to be equal. The average home pcer is not going to see value in the expense. With that said a CPS is not limited to a computer. It stands for. Computerized Performance System, which is a marriage between hardware and software components for our professional application in audio production.

For an individual just entering CPS DJing I'll give you one huge advantage of lossless audio, for archiving your music collection. One of the major benefits of ripping to a lossless format is that doing so will take much LESS time than ripping to a lossy format.

Let me show you some average encoded album size based with wave @ 100% and making the Ogg, Vorbis and MP3 files created at 256Kbit :

Wave = 100%
FLAC = 66.57%
Monkey's Audio = 63.86%
MP3 = 18.20%
Ogg Vorbis = 17.60%

Clearly, the lossless FLAC and Monkey's Audio cannot compress music anywhere near as small as the lossy formats MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and most people seem to create MP3 files using 160Kbit/sec or higher, which would give even smaller files. For portable storage, lossy formats are very clearly going to give you much more music to carry around at any one time but you will sacrifice the harmonics of the music.

Did you know that ripping CDs to a lossy format will take at least 50% longer than ripping to a lossless format. So archiving your CD collection in a lossless format will take less time than doing so in a lossy format. Why with the affordability of large hard drives, spend twice as long ripping at a lesser audio quality?

It's been my professional opinion for going on two years it definitely makes sense, to rip your CDs to a lossless format if you have a big hard drive, and if you don't want to rip your CDs all over again each time a new format is necessary. (that's a major advantage with lossless over lossy)

The next question would be which lossless format is best for ripping all your CDs to, to create an archive?
I will give an honest answer, there is no answer! It's all a matter of personal preference.

Using the uncompressed Wave format is quickest, but will produce very large files and limit your storage capabilities. Using FLAC will take about a quarter longer, but will reduce the size of files by about a third. Using Monkey's Audio will take about a third longer than Wave, but will reduce the size of the files by a bit more than FLAC. It all depends on which you value more: time or space.

In my eyes, FLAC offers the best mix of performance and features. The difference in compression size between it and Monkey's Audio is not huge. Even comparing FLAC's 'medium' setting (used to get the results for the tests shown above) to Monkey's 'extra high' setting (which was not used for the above tests) does not produce a difference of more than a few percent. Also, FLAC is very much open source "FREE", using an OSI-approved license, so it should remain free and available without restriction. And FLAC seems to have been implemented in hardware devices (such as the Rio Karma, the PhatBox, and the Squeezebox) whereas Monkey's Audio has not. This could mean that you decide you don't need lossy audio formats at all, and simply keep all of your music in FLAC format.

As for actual sound quality, I found little difference between any of the formats used in this test when using home computer speakers, with my ears, each format sounded identical. That's not a reason not to use a lossless format for your archive, but it does mean there's no need to rush away from MP3 just yet. But if you are about to start ripping your prized music collection to digital form, you may as well use a lossless format, so you know that the file represents the original exactly.

Peace...

[Jim Casey]

Jam...

Should I just start fresh and reburn my entire library?

Can this format be used in PCDJ?

If not, what software do you recommend?

[Professor Jam]

Jim,

Many programs are now incorporating the ability to mix Lossless check with your product of choice if available and/or when.