Having said that, let me make a plug for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression). Not only does FLAC not lose *any* quality from the original PCM WAV format (the format on standard audio CDs) but the FLAC header also includes a built-in MD5 hash of the uncompressed audio. This lets you verify a FLAC file to ensure that it's not corrupted. (You use the command "flac --test file.flac"). I don't know of any other commonly used audio format with this *very* nice feature.
FLAC uses much more space than the lossy formats like MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC, but modern disks are *so* roomy and cheap that this just isn't a big deal anymore for a desktop machine.
I chose FLAC as my primary format on my Slimserver, and I can still produce lossy compressed versions from the FLAC masters as needed for various portable players.
Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
