Can't remember exactly why I went in that direction to start with; but there are several reasons I have stuck with FLAC and EAC .. mostly because this combination has met most of the criteria that are of important to me.
1) Quality - FLAC is lossless, no bits thrown away. 2) Compression - Yields about 55-60% compression on average. That means more music per storage $ spent as compared with WAVs and AIFFs. 3) Tagging & metadata - well documented and standardized. Ability to store info about tracks, album art, metadata like replay gain, MusicBrainzIDs, MusicIP PUIDs, LastFM fingerprints, etc. This becomes really important with large collections, and I am unclear about the status of AIFFs and WAVs in this respect. 4) Device support - Natively supported by the SqueezeBox2 (that is you don't need server side transcoding and you can seek within tracks) and the Sonos ZP80, both of which I own. 5) Platform support - works on all the platforms I use routinely - Mac, Win & Linux. 6) Its open source - I like that! and completely free - even better! 7) EAC followed naturally once I decided on FLAC. While I am sure that iTunes provides perfect rips 99.9% of the time - I feel better ripping with EAC and AccurateRip. I usually rip in the fast mode, and only if AccurateRip gives a mismatch do I use the secure mode. 8) Finally I hate the way iTunes messes with my files (playing with the tags, volume settings, and even locations) even though I like its UI. Firefly allows the tracks to be accessed in a read only manner. -- Nikhil ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nikhil's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=993 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41735 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
