What Audio Format For CD Burning

[UncleP]

Originally Posted by Ken Pachkowsky

Hi All

Just curious what audio format some of you use for authoring?

I just downloaded (wma) and burnt a copy of Peter Gabriel's "So" using Variable Bit Length WMA format and did not like the results. Its supposed to be a high quality lossless format....but the end result was very metalic sounding with what I would describe as horrible mid range hash...

Ken

I don't think variable bit rate anything is lossless in Windows Media Player. There should be another, and clearly stated, pull-down choice for WMA lossless in your "OPTIONS" menu.

I have participated in some double-blind comparisons of various codecs. The lossy ones were painfully obvious. I could not hear any differences between wav, flac or lossless wma. That said, I use flac and exact audio copy for everything. If a portable music player doesn't support flac, then I won't buy it.

[SEAWOLF97]

Only due to forum discussions , I have started downloading in FLAC when available.....but my little Nano is only 8 GB.....started investigating how to make high quality MP3's from the FLAX...

found a nice little freeware prog -FOOBAR2000- that seems to do an acceptable conversion

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Operating System

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Main features

• Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
• Gapless playback.
• Full unicode support.
• Easily customizable user interface layout.
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
• Full ReplayGain support.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

[rdgrimes]

Originally Posted by SEAWOLF97

Only due to forum discussions , I have started downloading in FLAC when available.....but my little Nano is only 8 GB.....started investigating how to make high quality MP3's from the FLAX...

found a nice little freeware prog -FOOBAR2000- that seems to do an acceptable conversion

http://www.foobar2000.org/

There's also a plugin for Foobar2000 to allow playback of DVD-A and MLP.
The standard "FLAC Frontend" also does conversions.

[SEAWOLF97]

Originally Posted by rdgrimes

There's also a plugin for Foobar2000 to allow playback of DVD-A and MLP.
The standard "FLAC Frontend" also does conversions.

Wow, yes...there are some nice addins

http://www.foobar2000.org/components/author/Peter



Description

Performs a double-blind listening test between two tracks.

Adds decoding support for Apple Lossless Audio Codec files (.M4A). ...

Adds ASIO output support. ...

Allows you to burn audio CDs from any of supported audio formats, through context menu commands. ...

Performs binary comparison between two or more tracks and reports differences.

Measures decoding speed of audio files.

Checks specified media files for decoding errors. Note that with most formats, its accuracy is limited ...

Allows arbitrary effects to be captured and used inside foobar2000.

Allows bit-exact playback bypassing Windows kernel mixer. Activated through playback / output preferences ...

Automates various tag editing operations. ...

Adds decoding support for Monkey's Audio files (.APE) as well as APE Link files (.APL). ...

Collects playback statistics for your Media Library content. Statistics can be displayed in the Properties ...

Adds customizable context menu commands for quickly setting tag fields to preconfigured values (for rating ...

Adds customizable context menu commands for copying information about the selected tracks to Windows ...

Adds Windows Audio Session API exclusive mode output support, allowing bit-exact output and muting all ...

[rdgrimes]

http://dvdadecoder.sourceforge.net/

That's the add-in for DVD-A.

[sba2]

Most of my itunes music library is from cds, but I also have some rare tracks from lps and cassettes that were copied using Audacity. Hardly any internet downloads really...except for a few that I snatched from Wolfgang's Vault.

After tinkering around for almost four years with various files on various systems, the wav, the apple lossless, and the 320kb files have always sounded identical to me. I can only detect a difference when going down to 128kb, where I perceive less depth in some of the passages.

FWIW, the most audible improvement in my system turned out to be sound-card related. Very early on I had to order a higher quality sound-card (Echo Indigo I-O) in order to support stereo recording on my laptop..and that's when I noticed the improvement over both the OEM card and the portable ipod player.