BeoSound 5 Forum

Re: getting ready for the future

Puncher — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:40:21 GMT

koning:

what about the tags?

Good point - I'm not sure regarding FLAC, WMA & AAC should be OK depending, I suppose, on what you use to rip. I would have to do a trial rip with a CD. Agree regarding WAV, but as I said I can't think of a good reason to rip to WAV.

Re: getting ready for the future

koning — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:32:41 GMT

what about the tags?

Re: getting ready for the future

Puncher — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:30:05 GMT

PhilLondon:

WAV is uncompressed, same quality as the original CD.
WMA Lossless, is compressed, a bit more than 50%, so you can store twice as many in the same space, but, as it is lossless, the quality is strictly identical to WAV and the original CD. At any point in the future, you can convert it to any other format.
MP3, it is a lossy format. The difference might not be audible, but there is a difference.
WMA (Lossy) and AAC (Lossy) are lossy formats, used mainly by Windows Media Player for the first and iTunes for the second. AAC is an open standard. Both offer a better quality than MP3 for the same compression rate.
--
If you convert to a lossless format, any lossless format, then you can always batch convert to any other format at a later time without any loss to the first compression.
p.

I would say, by definition, any lossless format is the right way to go now, given the price of storage (I personally would use a Raid 1 system, you only want to do it once)!

WMA, AAC or FLAC lossless formats depend upon what you intend to play them on. B&O favour WMA for their systems so that maybe the way to go for some. In any case, as PhilLondon says, all can be converted to each other, again losslessly and so you lose nothing other than time (and maybe disc space) if you have to convert your collection from one format to another.

I feel that lossy formats are now the realm of portable players and internet streaming (and even then, depending upon your player storage capacity). Why forsake quality when a 1Tb drive is only ~£70?

I don't see any point in WAV as it takes nearly twice the space for no audible benefit.

WMA and AAC can have DRM issues if the music is bought and downloaded from the net, if you rip from CD there isn't a problem. FLAC is favoured by some HD audio download sites (and some band sites who allow tracks to b downloaded FOC) and is DRM free.

Re: getting ready for the future

PhilLondon — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:14:06 GMT

WAV is uncompressed, same quality as the original CD.

WMA Lossless, is compressed, a bit more than 50%, so you can store twice as many in the same space, but, as it is lossless, the quality is strictly identical to WAV and the original CD. At any point in the future, you can convert it to any other format.

MP3, it is a lossy format. The difference might not be audible, but there is a difference.

WMA (Lossy) and AAC (Lossy) are lossy formats, used mainly by Windows Media Player for the first and iTunes for the second. AAC is an open standard. Both offer a better quality than MP3 for the same compression rate.

If you convert to a lossless format, any lossless format, then you can always batch convert to any other format at a later time without any loss to the first compression.

Re: getting ready for the future

koning — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:00:55 GMT

Flac.

But at the moment the bs-5 doesn't support it.

editing tags is not possible when you using wav.

Re: getting ready for the future

TWG — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:58:52 GMT

best Quality:

- WAV
- MP3 (256-320kb)
- WMA

If it is an option for Beosound 5 (I don't know if it supports it) you can use AAC, too. AAC on the same compression (e.g. 256 kb/s) sounds better than MP3.
Best sounding codec was ATRAC from Sony ... but they never opened it and now it's dead :-(

Personaly I never would use WMA!

WAV or MP3 is much more compatible and usable on a huge number of devices (computers, phones, mp3-walkman etc.)

EDIT:
I don't think that FLAC is an option because it's just a system that "reconstructs" your music.

If space doesn't matter you should go for WAV as this is some kind of PCM-Rawdata from the Audio-CD. In times of huge harddisks it is the way to go.

getting ready for the future

Seanie_230 — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:27:34 GMT

Hello

i just bought a cd today and want to rip it to data for storing on my beomedia and maybe beosound 5 in the future when one becomes availible second hand so my question is

ripping settings

i hear allot about lossless what is the best way to rip the muisc i have WMA (lossless) or WAV (lossless) or high quality MP3 @ 320kbs