Stimpy wrote:

Pooh Bear wrote:
Stimpy wrote:

Pooh Bear wrote:

iTunes. http://www.apple.com/itunes/ Works well, easy to use,
and
has a good MP3/AAC/lossless encoding engine.

What do yoiu mean by a *lossless* 'encoder' ???

An encoder that doesn't irreversably corrupt the input signal as
part of the encoding process.

If you go WAV - MP3 - WAV, the final WAV is different from the
initial WAV.

If, OTOH, you go WAV - FLAC - WAV, the two WAV's are identical

MP3 is a lossy format,

That bit, I'm familiar with.

FLAC is a lossless format

No bit rate reduction ? I haven't come across FLAC yet.

Check it out; along with APE it's definitely *the* format for compressing
raw'WAVs. Sharing The Groove et al won't allow any lossy files to be
traded, everything is FLAC or APE (often further compressed into SHN)

Ok, I've looked into lossless encoding now and the saving on file size seems
to be typically around 50%.

With the rapid yearly if not monthly increase in disk capacity - surely this
will just be a 'flash in the pan' ?

Same might go for mp3 etc before long.

Probably good thing too as far as mp3 is concerned.

Just need faster broadband too for those downloads !

Graahm