On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:22:09 -0000, Peter Merchant
<[email protected]> wrote:
I notice when I look at the directory on a CD for Full recording that it
has the full recording in four formats:
I'm gonna throw caution to the wind and presume this is a "regular" audio
CD and you have some piece of software which is showing you these
different file types as possible transcoding options. I can't imagine any
reason for someone to bundle that lot onto a CD.
Anyway
If I want to save them to my hard disk, which format is recommended?
The .ogg is the smallest in terms of size, but is there a downside?
cda is the uncompressed lossless file, these are probably pretty big so we
can ignore these.
wma is an interesting microsoft format and although we could work it out
from the file size we have no idea of the quality, so I'll ignore these as
well.
leaving us with ogg and flac. Both "free" codecs, good start. Flac is Free
Lossless Audio Codec, the file will contain the same end information as
cda but will compress it. Think like .zip or gzip etc. This should make
the files a little smaller than cda but with the same output.
Ogg is a free codec very similar to mp3. It does lose some of the sound
quality but this saves huge amounts of disk space.
The file format you should choose is dependant on why you are copying to
your computer. If its just to listen to the music later then I'd say use
ogg. If you have lots of disk space and a prized stereo connected to the
computer either copy using flac or just play the CD ;)
If you're looking to archive you CD collection then use FLAC. It can be
transcoded back to the original cda anyway.
P.S. A final word of caution, if your looking to copy straight from
computer to an MP3 player in the future you might note wma support is more
prevalent that ogg.
--
Robert Bronsdon
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