Allegedly, on or about 4 February 2018, Ed Greshko sent: > I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats > but in fact their ears aren't up to the task. That's often true (but I frequently find MP3 encoding is noticeably awful). And the converse is often true, that people rip down to a really crappy bitrate, thinking that saving space is more important than it is (producing what sounds like compact cassette recordings from shortwave radio). But if you rip to a lossless format that you use now (e.g. ogg vorbis), and later on change players to one that doesn't support that lossless format (e.g. mp3-only, particularly when it comes to hardware devices), you have to re-encode from one lossy scheme to another, and that *does* introduce audible artefacts. I've faced that situation. I generally compress to ogg vorbis, because it does the job well on almost everything I have, and I don't hear disturbing audio artefacts that I continually hear with MP3 (direct uncompressed WAV to MP3, I might add, too). But, from time to time, find I want to play a file on something that doesn't support it. Given sufficient storage space, I'd rip to a lossless format, like flac. That gives you a good archive of the file. Then if you want to export to a hardware device, you have the choice of doing it any way that you like, without horrible degradation. Another issue that crops up with various audio formats is an inability to do gapless playback of albums. That can depend on the format *and* the player. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 4.14.14-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 19 13:27:06 UTC 2018 x86_64 Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. You can't have equality AND special treatment. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
