Best lossless audio codec - FLAC? Will it kick out mp3?

[Srivas]

I'm interested to know what's the best current codecs available for lossless audio conversion, what is THE codec for the future, is it FLAC? Haven't tried it out yet, but read some good reviews about it. Will it replace mp3? What's the future development in regards to mp3, is there something better out there, in regards to same size/better quality?

[greymalkin]

Without my crystal ball I can't tell you what the codec of the future will be. I wouldn't have guessed 15 years ago that we'd be happily listening to overly compressed music..but here we are!

I think FLAC has some real staying power since, as it's name implies, it's FREE and it has found quite a following. I'd like to see some set-top players handle this format!

FLAC could conceivably replace MP3 as storage space gets cheaper and cheaper, but the masses are unpredictable, and many will probably stick to what they know (MP3).

I was very excited when DVD-Audio/SACD came out..but in the grand scheme of things it was a total flop!

[El Heggunte]

"Best" is a point of view... Anyway, :

-- lossless is lossless (doh!)

-- there are "too many" lossless audio formats,
let's name just the most "popular" ones: FLAC, TTA, WavPack, APE, WMAL, RealAudio Lossless,
ALAC, MLP, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio;

-- going to the "dirty details": FLAC has a bug with decoding some 24-bit files;
WavPack sometimes introduces clipping during the compression,
therefore sometimes it's NOT lossless ; TTA usually compresses faster and harder than
both FLAC and WavPack; APE and Lossless RealAudio cannot go above stereo ; Lossless
WMA supports only 2.0 and 5.1. MLP, TrueHD and DTS-MA are not very-efficient choices,
regarding filesizes.

Important: until now, none of the *free* lossless audio formats supports "non-standard"
channel configurations (which means, for example, that a 3.1 WAV file, after being compressed,
will be played as a quadraphonic (4.0) stream ). MLP does support correct channel-mapping,
however, whereas the DVD-A plugin for foobar2000 works as it should, the MLP decoder of ffdshow
will decode 2.1 as 3.0, and 3.1 as 4.0 ).

HTH.

[jagabo]

Uncompressed PCM. Audio files are small. Why bother compressing them.

[El Heggunte]

For the uninformed, jagabo has just patented the Minbari data crystal technology.

[Srivas]

Thank you! I'll check FLAC and TTA out, my goals are humble anyway, I just want to compress some audio classes, no classical music or something (but good quality is still important).

[leghorn]

For losseless compression FLAC is a good choice. Also TAK might be of use. It is on par with Monkey's Audio concerning compression ratio and FLAC concerning compression speed. But I dont know about multichannel support.

If you go for lossy compression, you could try Ogg Vorbis using aoTuVb. According to several listening tests it sounds better than mp3, even if you use lower bitrates.