Music, which file type.??????

[Tyrant]

Hiya peeps.

Quick question for you..

I am after great quality music, with the smallest file size.. I would rather keep better quality than smaller size though.
Which is the way to go.
I have seen MP3, Monkey Audio ????, WMA, Ogg, etc etc etc...

Which is the top bananaanannannananannanana.
and which player do you use. So many people say use this one, or that one. Are they really that much different to bother about, surely they are all the same at the end of the day with sound quality.


Many thanks
Neil

[Kati Compton]

I like OGG for a good quality/size ratio.

However, if you want best compatibility with players and such (especially standalones, or playing a CD of digital music in a car stereo or DVD player, MP3 is currently your best bet, but making sure that if you do VBR (or CBR for that matter), you don't use 320Kbps as the upper limit - use something a little lower. Some players freak out with 320kpbs frames.

Next on the "widespread" scale would be WAV.

Where do you want to listen to this music? Just on the PPC?

[Ripper014]

Nodding head and agreeing with Katie...

For the best balance of size and quality... I would go with Ogg...

[tanalasta]

Ogg is nice and if you're looking for quality vs size then go with it.

But for simple cross-compatibility, I personally go with mp3. :oops: I have a flash mp3 player which also makes my decision that much easier. I encode at 196kbps as it's a great compromise.

[Kati Compton]

Yeah - I was all-ogg, but after buying my husband an mp3 receiver for his car... well, I'm re-ripping to MP3 for convenience. Now, these are my "big" files on my laptop/desktop. I'm still using ogg for "small" files to use on my PPC for when I really want to get a lot of files on my PPC.

[Tyrant]

Hiya everybody,
Thanks for the replies.

In response to the question, I will only be using the PDA for the files to play music.
The Ogg system looks good. What would be the best player and encoder for this file.

Anyone used Monkey Audio system and have any views???

Thanks for your replies

[Ripper014]

I use dbPowerAmp Music Converter... what I like about it... well first it is free... second... it is easy to use... and third... you can batch your files...

[Falstaff]

For a PPC player that will accept oggs I'd recommend PocketMusic Feature pack (http://www.pocketmind.com/). Most of my music is in mp3 format, except for some recent stuff I ripped in ogg format, but I convert all of it to 96kbps ogg format to use on my PPC, it sounds good enough for me, and I can fit a lot of songs on my 1GB of total storage space. Go with Ripper's suggestion and use dbPowerAmp, but you have to download the ogg codec from their site.

[Kati Compton]

I re-rip for the smaller size - transcoding loses some information, and if I'm going to be using a lower bitrate I'd rather get all the benefit I can.

[Jereboam]

For sure reripping is the way to go...transcoded music sounds awful...

I just ordered a new Audi which takes SD cards for MP3 playback, and having 30 gigs of AAC is now a real pain. I don't what an iPod trailing cables all over my dash, drilling holes in stuff is just not an option for a custom installation, so looks like some of my fave music is going to be laboriously reripped.

Here's hoping for a definitive music/video standard soon. I'm all for innovation and stuff, but this is getting ridiculous.

J'bm

[crawwurm]

Well, I'm late to this thread and have a bit to say, so please bear with me! I have an IPAQ 2215 with a 256mb CF card and a 256mb SD card. I used WMP to rip all my music to my hard drive at 192K. When I transferred my music to my ipaq, I kept using a smaller and smaller bitrate and eventually went all the way down to 32K! On my ipaq riding the train to work, the music sounded quite good enough and that allowed me to fit over 400 songs on the 2 cards.

Well, I installed WMP10 tech beta and now the lowest bitrate is 64K! I can only get 1/2 the amount of music to my devices!

I have been hearing about Ogg, so I figured I would check into it and see if I could find a program that would support the 32K bitrate. I ended up dl'ing a number of programs (still trying them out!) but have yet to find one that will support 32K. That bitrate is listed, but when I set the bitrate manager I get an encoder error. 48K is the lowest I've been able to go.

I went ahead and copied a couple of tracks over to my flash card and fired up pocket player on my ipaq. I was amazed at how good it sounded. Also, pocket player has a spectrum analyzer built in...the higher end frequencies hardly move on the WMA files but the whole frequency range was jammin' on the OGG files. I went ahead and ripped one song from Styx at 192K wma and the same song at 192K OGG and copied both files over to my device. I played first one and then the other and there is a definite difference. The OGG just seems to have a deeper, richer, more vibrant sound. All of this I just hate, because all my music is ripped to my hard drive as mp3. I am seriously considering reripping my CDs (about 250?) to OGG.

That said, the end result is great, but ya can't beat WMP for ease of use. I'm torn! Also, I've put in lyrics for about half of my songs. Aargh, what to do! Anyway, my 2 cents...OGG really does sound better at the same bitrate than WMA or MP3. Again, that is just my opinion...grab pocket player and try it yourself...you may be surprised!

I used CDex Version 1.51 to extract to OGG...

[nategesner]

I originally had all my files in WMA format and used Media Player on my Ipaq 2215. But they were taking up too much space, so I looked for a smaller format and a different player. I ended up switching to MP3 Pro. It's supposed to be much better quality than a standard MP3, but takes up half the space and is still compatible with MP3 players.

I ripped my CD collection into MP3 Pro and a full CD at the highest quality (96kbps) takes about 25MB! They sound great and I personally can't tell the difference between the MP3 Pro file and the CD. To be fair, I don't have fancy speakers on my computer, but the music sounds great to me. The files can be played with the built-in Windows Media Player or you can use GS Player. I am using GS Player simply because it has more features.

I've looked around to see how MP3 Pro and OGG Vorbis compare, but can't really find a good comparison site. I would assume they are comparable. The thing that won me over to MP3 Pro is that it is compatible with more players.