Rants:
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Past Rants
Retire those mp3's!
The mp3 format was a good format in that it opened the door to a whole new side of music archiving. However just like everything else, it gets old and better technology comes along.
There's a new brand of audio compression formats coming out claiming to be "Loss Less." Some are good and some need work, but a lot of these newer formats kick the butt out of MP3 in sound quality. For those who are looking for good rich music archived on their disk give the following formats a try...
This had a lot of deviants out, however recently they've all merged back into FLAC. Uses a compression technique which preserves the original audio signal instead of merely sampling it. Can by played back using Winamp.
Another loss less format that I've tried. Little tougher to get to play back than Flac but comparisons have put the compression style of this one above that of FLAC for sound quality. However in my own test I've found FLAC easier to work with and the sound quality of the two be to the same.
Both of the above can be played in winamp. Unfortunately Windows Media Player seems not to like anything other than wave, mp3 or their own audio format. Which isn't bad, its better than mp3 but worse than flac.
If you looking to archive your current cd's these formats are for you. They can't do anything for files already in the mp3 format as the files have already lost data (hence their limitation, mediocre in, mediocre out).
