MP3 vs. AAC at 320kbps

[rgATL]

Hey,

I'm digitizing music from CD, and want to do so at the highest quality possible, so I'm setting Winamp to rip at 320kbps (as Festerhead said back in the day, "hard drive space is cheap").

What I'm wondering is if I should use MP3 or AAC at 320kbps. This is for high-quality storage purposes; our stream will still be 128.44.stereo.mp3.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
rg.

[gaekwad2]

320kbps is still lossy, as opposed to this.

[Jay]

yup go lossless if you are going to shoot for the highest bitrates.

[General Geoff]

FLAC's the way to go.

[shakey_snake]

what compresses smaller (usually) Flac or apple lossless?

[General Geoff]

I have no idea, because I've never used "apple lossless." However, they're probably very close in terms of end-product file sizes. FLAC typically has a filesize of ~50-60% of the original wav file, as a good estimation.

[shakey_snake]

yeah I just found this at Hydrogen Audio:

[Wavestreaming]

What the hell is Flac?

What automation systems will support Flac? Not many...

Do the industry standard, either go with MP3 or WAV - if you have the hard disk space, go for WAV. If you go for MP3 don't go below 192k.

[General Geoff]

Actually there are several standalone hardware systems that support FLAC, including the Rio Karma, IAudio M3, Kenwood Music Keg, Phatbox, Rio Receiver, and various other home audio units. Read about them here.

In case you meant automation as in encoding/ripping software, the software support is very widespread.

[Jaak]

Originally posted by General Geoff
FLAC's the way to go.

nuffin' more needed to say

[c2R]

Originally posted by Jaak
nuffin' more needed to say

I prefer the monkey (o;

[morgado]

I see flac got lots of green line at the graph above, and also, it's the one that's got best hardware support, as software too.
So, if I really want quality, I go for FLAC

[shakey_snake]

Well, I've never used a non-lossy format, but based on the graph above Monkey'sAudio seems to make the most sense to me, but that said, I'd probably only use the files for archival use and winamp playing.
Hardware support doesn't seem like it'd be that big a deal for a lossless codec since you'd half to have $400 earphones to hear a difference between lossless and a high grade lossy on a portable player; plus you can always transcode.

[gaekwad2]

You should check CPU usage for playback at different settings (Monkey's has 5, unlike FLAC its higher settings take more CPU % to decode). If high takes too much you could try WavPack (4.2) instead, its -h mode compresses about as good as Monkey's Normal but is as fast as Monkey's Fast.

[zootm]

Originally posted by shakey_snake
Hardware support doesn't seem like it'd be that big a deal for a lossless codec since you'd half to have $400 earphones to hear a difference between lossless and a high grade lossy on a portable player; plus you can always transcode.

But with a 40GB player, you'd probably hope to be able to put the lossless files on it without having to transcode...

[peaceofcake]

Well not many people can tell the difference between flac or any other lossless (they all sound identical) and 320 mp3 or aac. If you like having an original use flac ans somehow transcode for broadcasting. I believe that flac is even easier to decode than mp3, probably faster to encode too, at least it's faster than LAME.

I think you should broadcast aac at around 128, that's VERY good quality for a broadcast. AAC nees some support and the more people use it the better, as it already equals mp3 and promises to become even better as it's fine tuned.