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The best music compression format?

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Hello all

I've been debating digital music formats/players with friends and came up with a question.
Which is the best compression format, i'm not talking about popularity, ownership, usage rights etc.. I just wanna know which is the best weight for weight compression. Which format compresses to the smallest size with the least quality reduction?

Let the ideas flow...

M
 
M

meltbanana314

Guest
Lots of people here (including yours truly) will say AAC, Linux users will say Ogg Vorbis, and Microsoft fanboys will say WMA.

Nobody has done a real comprehensive, unbiased comparison of lossy audio compression formats to my knowledge. MP3 is still going to be the most popular, and FLAC will probably take over the lossless encoding market.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
PowerMac G4 Cube 450mhz 832mb
quality vs. size varies between formats, apples lossless format has the best quality but huge files. Id say somewhere between aac and mp3.
 
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Most important thing is what can your car cd or home stereo play. so yea WAV or MP3 for me :D
 
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Jason

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I prefer MP3 for the simple fact that everyone accepts that format, and there's no re-encoding necessary between OS.
 
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Their is a definite noticeable sound quality difference between AAC and MP3 to my ears but then not everybody notices it, so it's also down to whats best for your own ears. Give it a test by importing a CD track into Itunes and see if you can hear any sound quality difference.!!
 
J

Jason

Guest
I definitely notice a difference between MP3 and AAC, just I'm the only one I know who has a Mac :D
 

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