Compression question

Kilarney

Now that my new mp3 player is on order, I have a question.
Which is the best format for my to rip my CDs into: mp3 or wma? Obvisouly wma takes up less space, but are you giving up on quality? This question assumes that I start from a lossless format.

Rym

FLAC.

If you have the storage space, and you really care about audio quality, rip anything and everything to FLAC. It's lossless, and gets compression ratios between 40-55%. Then, compress anything you want to have on a portable via whatever means is best at the time.

This way, you can always take advantage of newer better compression techniques without sacrificing quality by transcoding.

Otherwise, I'd suggest mp3. It's a bit old, but it is tried, true, and universal the world over. VBR0 224-320kbps mp3s are indistinguishable in almost all cases from lossless audio (in terms of listening: editing or mixing is a whole other story).

Apreche

FLAC is the best. Ogg Vorbis is technically the second best. The problem is that those two formats are not widely supported. It is hard to find software that supports them properly, let alone a portable mp3 player that supports them properly. mp3 is not technologically superior, but it has almost universal support. That alone makes mp3 a better choice than anything else. If you encode the mp3s with lame and some good vbr settings it will sound fine and be thoroughly compressed.