??? LAME mp3 ??? ogg ??? flac ??? ape ???

[IntruderAlert]

I have a huge collection of CDs I need to rip
to be streamed through my 100baseT home network and played on various sound systems around the house
everything from small portable players to a fairly high end home audio system and my upcoming jukebox project

I have made some samples of LAME mp3, ogg, flac and ape and just can't
decide which direction to go

LAME mp3 is supposed to be good but the various bit rates and CBR vs
VBR vs ABR can all be confusing

some of the other formats are lossless but much larger file size and not compatible with some portable players

but I don't want the files to sound crappy on my high end system either

i'd hate to rip all of this stuff and have to re-rip in a few years but that might be inevitable

[garyh]

I'm no expert but I've compared OGG to MP3 and OGG has a much better quality/size ratio. The problem with OGG is that commercial support is much less, i.e. there are fewer portable music players supporting OGG than MP3.

FLAC is lossless so the potential quality is as good as the original but the file sizes are much bigger than the lossy codecs such as OGG & MP3. That is the trade-off you make. However, if you rip to FLAC you can then convert to any other format in the future without having to use the original CD or LP.

IMHO OGG is good enough. If you want to use FLAC for the extra quality then you will need to be investing in a pro-quality sound card to make it worthwhile.

I use OGG on my Sony Ericsson P800 for mobile music, on a touch-screen based jukebox using TouchTone software from Riptide Innovations (uses WinAmp) and in my Arcade machine using DOSCab (wen not playing games).

Regards

Gary

[IntruderAlert]

I have EAC for LAME and I also have PlexTools
Both are high quality CD rippers

If I were to rip everything to FLAC with PlexTools to store as a backup of my collection
is there a high quality tool for converting FLAC to mp3 or ogg?
Maybe PlexTools can do it.. I never checked

[DrewKaree]

Check Foobar2000 to see if they have a plug-in for converting.

For ease of transferring or listening to on portables/CD's/PC's, in numerical order would start and end with MP3.  For anything else, you're locking yourself into a specific portable (usually, although more widespread support is becoming available) or relegated to playing it on your PC only.

In order of file quality to file size:

FLAC
APE
OGG
MP3

OGG and MP3 are lossy, FLAC and APE are not.  Buy a gimongous hard drive if you want to go lossless, otherwise, whatever you wish to settle for in quality is what you should go with, either OGG or MP3.  EAC has OGG plug-ins, and I'm almost positive Foobar2000 either has OGG support natively, or has a plug-in to play 'em.

Obviously MP3 is the most ubiquitous format, but the other three are gaining as use of them is adopted.  Going outside those 4 formats is a crapshoot at best, and even those 3 secondary formats have their own issues.

Check out www.hydrogenaudio.org for a more complete breakdown and some further pointers.  They'll also have a guide for setting up Foobar2000, which you'll need.

[IntruderAlert]

I've done a little more looking around.
I'm thinking of archiving everything with lossless FLAC
Then use Foobar, dbpoweramp, VUPlayer, or some other program to do a batch conversion of everything to either high quality MP3 or OGG files for everyday use

As I purchase new CDs I'll need to do the same thing (add them to the FLAC archive and convert them to MP3 or OGG)

In the future if another type file format becomes more accepted I'll easily be able to do another batch conversion of all my FLAC files to the new format.

Now I just have to decide between MP3 or OGG for everyday use
I've noticed that more portable players are supporting OGG now

I haven't checked any Jukebox software for OGG support yet though