Can you hear a difference in qualities? I have copied all my cd collections into my computer, because I bought an audio system for my computer that was my 100W Jamo Power way superior, and they are way easier to access.

I have some songs i copied some years ago. With another grabber I strongly suppose. Now take "Oasis - Morning Glory". It is encoded into 192kbit mp3. I, over time have learned to rely more on ogg vorbis. The complete concept of ogg is free, not like mp3, that is copyrighted by Fraunhoffer labs.

A couple of years ago... nah 1½ years ago, I made a direct test.
A took the song "Green Day - Time of your life" nice short song, where you can hear all the acustics. I took it and copied it to my harddrive into 4 different formats. MP3, OGG vorbis, WMA and ACC (AC3).

My ears concluded that:

¤ MP3: Had one flaw only. Sometimes it sounded a little dull, like it could do better, but sounded okay.
¤ OGG: Sounded well, a little like MP3, just that OGG sounded more clear, but in some way, could do a little bit better, it sounded like it was perfection just waiting to happen, I just waited for the moment where the perfection came but it just didnt come.
¤ WMA: It must be said that the version I used was 8, still... damn. WMA is by far, and in comparison the poorest of them all. It sounded like Billy Joe was stuck in a jar with a wooden lid on. The sound was narrow, and had no depth. Only plus was WMA doesnt take as much space as the others.
¤ ACC: Ahhh... good old Dolby Labs. ACC is really a raw copy encoded with a Dolby codec, hence AC3 sound. I couldnt hear a difference. It sounded good, very. I have to compare it to OGG. ACC actually sounded just as good, but I believe I chose OGG, because ACC is not really that known to the general public.

Space usage.
Actually OGG and ACC took the most space. The difference was a couple of kbs. The MP3 was 200kbs smaller, while the WMA was 40% smaller. At this point I should emphesize that the quality was 192kbit, 44khz, stereo. With all codecs. WMA wanted 196 I believe, but okay... Microsoft has to be different in everything.

Conclusion.
MP3 has one advantage, and one only. It is mainstream. Everyone knows MP3... even my dad? No one knows OGG, exept geek, or audio nerds. WMA is more known because you can copy cds with Windows Media Player, and god forbid the copies it does is poor. (64kbits (CD Quality)) - NOT likely. I can hear imense difference between a 64kbit WMA and a CDA steam. ACC is very underestimated. Perhaps because so few recognize it as something useful.

Games has started to use OGG files, look in the system folder of some of your games. You will be surprised. OGG is starting its official lifespan in the next months I would believe.

Trust me, I have done imense testing of audio codecs. I am almost never happy with things. It is not enough that they run good. It has to run perfect, or as close to perfection as possible.

Ogg may be better in alot of aspects, mp3 wont die easily. There is too much electronics out there that offer mp3 playback, from car stereos/cd changers to home entertainment stuff.

Also, in addition to what out said, you can encode the mp3's in various bitrates, the higher the better. There is a program out there that will do it, I can't remember the name right now.

An easy program for ripping your own CD's with quality ranging from 32 kb/s to 320 kb/s would be easy cd creator. It supports all of that. Along with CDDB support for easier naming.

Anyway, just a suggest.

dbpoweramp? CDex?

LAME Encoder?

...there are many applications out there to encode mp3s

A year and a half old study proves nothing. Rip your tracks off the cd with EAC and burn 'em with winlame's alt standard preset and then tell me mp3 has competition.

As far as I know people are currently trying to shrink their music collections without quality loss. Picking a victor in what I'm sure is just slightly better quality but bigger in regards of space doesn't really favor this trend. Your choice though; for me its mp3.

forever_geek

WAV is best for quality, but huge in filesize.



(I'm a BIG audio guru! )

I just like MP3 quality in any bitrate larger than 192 lol seems fine to me

MartMoz

Yeah I can hear the difference in audio quality, most of my music is in .wma so I doesn't really matter to me. But when I'm listen that has ben ripped in .mp3, I can tell the quality apart quite easyly. I've heard some music in .ogg and that sounded almost perfect.

Hell if you want perfect get the original. Sometimes its best thing. And that goes for anything not just audio files for PC.

lame's newest stable release 3.96.1 fares pretty well on transperancy, for most people the (-v5 --athaa-sensitivity 1) (115-135k) switch should be enough....although (-v2) (180-220k) should be completely transperent on most music

Another downside to OGG is WMP won't recognize that file type even if you download the OGG plug-in OGG won't show up in your library.

so dont use wmp...

i personally find foobar2000 much less troublesome and easier on system resources

True audio guru's would agree that all high compression formats are useless. I must admit though, I have hundreds of MP3's (dont look at me RIAA, most of it is legal ). I have quite a few OGG's and M4A's too. IMO, M4A is the best compression.

but like Travis said, he likes WAV, but the filesizes are very large. that's where Shorten (SHN/MKW) and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) come in. they're lossless formats for WAV compression, therefore they'll have the best quality. sure, the file sizes will still be pretty large, but at least the sound is perfect and smaller than WAV's

Acc /M4a will be helped by the fact that iPod uses that format.......all my files are encoded that way.....