(Untitled)

[annag]

- i will be going to kumoricon.
- i have watched half (24 eps) of kimagure orange road.
- laundry in a bathtub is silly and effort-ful, but less than at a laundromat.
- smart people are often cute. and worse, distracting.
- i have many socks currently.
- flac seems nifty.
- bedtime.

Comments

[mverrey]

FLAC seems nifty, and indeed would be nifty if it were actually supported by portable consumer devices. As it stands though, I find half of the really good stuff in my collection can't be played on my iPhone currently because I thought FLAC would be a good idea. If you absolutely must rip to a lossless format, go with Apple Lossless, or at the very least hedge your bets and rip to both FLAC and mp3.

[friode]

But can't you trivially convert flac to mp3 after the fact? Or does Apple have some DRM that won't let you?

[mverrey]

You can convert, but I wouldn't call it trivial. Most software isn't built around transcoding between compression formats, since with lossy formats like mp3 and ogg, it's usually not a good idea. So what you end up doing is first converting to wav format, and then converting back to mp3. For a couple of songs, it's no big hassle, but when you've already invested the time into ripping your entire collection to one format, it's a nuisance to say the least.

[annag]

I hear .aac and LAME-based .mp3 algorithms are nicer than plain .mp3 encoding.
Do you have an opinion on this?

[mverrey]

Nope. I'm honestly not enough of an A/V geek to know the difference in quality. All I know from internet buzz is that LAME seems to be the preferred way to go for mp3, but I don't know the quality versus AAC or Ogg Vorbis.

What I do know is that everything supports mp3, most stuff supports AAC, and hardly anything supports Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. On the other hand, if you don't mind spending another 5 minutes and 350 megs per disc, there's really no reason *not* to rip to a lossless codec like FLAC or ALAC, as long as you have your bases covered.