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Originally Posted by bryantm3
why have a format that only 5% of us can use? i'm one of those 'audiophiles', and having it in .wav format would be ideal.
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so you don't know what FLAC is then? FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec. Its basically a compressed wav without any loss in sound quality whatsoever and can be decoded to wav or CD once downloaded if you so wish, only half the size of wav (anyway, as UW use Macs the files would be AIFF).
Only a limited amount of mp3 players can play FLAC (the
iAUDIO range do this as well as Ogg) but most people burn these to CD. FLAC is a great way of distributing lossless audio and without any codec royalty payments.
The Grateful Dead offer their
download albums in mp3@128, mp3@256 and in FLAC (although the site incorrectly states that the FLACs cannot be played in iTunes or Windows Media Player).
Also, Internet record label
Magnatune are really leading the way in the way you can download and/or order your music from them in a variety of formats one of which is FLAC (and also AAC/mp3/Ogg.wav). Actually, check em out, they have a great catalogue.
But, right now I'm not gonna shout out and demand FLAC. I would like to see all of the songs that have been released so far, released in a lossless format at some point but I'm not in that much of a hurry. For now, I'm happy enough with 192kbps. TypeCross/34958hq439-qjw9v5jq298v5j's comments about using VBR with --aps are valid though and in the meantime its certainly something that the guys at Underworldlive could take into consideration because it does make a difference to quality whilst retaining the same filesize and compatibility. The Soma shop mp3s are encoded using the lame encoder at 192kbit VBR quality level 2 and then ID3 tagged.