Ogg, MP3, or Flac?

[gruven]

Ok, so I am trying to decide what to encode my collection of cds into. I have over half ripped to mp3 already, but I am willing to encode every bit of it into ogg if it sounds better. This is basically for home network needs, but my truck has an mp3 player, and our future car will probably come with an mp3 player. Ogg is open source, and I REALLY like that, but mp3 is more supported right now.

I am just curious as to what everyone else uses.

[Cabhan]

I personally use OGGs. In my experience, the files are almost always smaller than the mp3 version, and I really don't notice a quality difference.

That said, I am lucky in that my MP3 player (the iRiver H320) supports OGG. Otherwise, I'd be using MP3.

[Game master pro]

I use mp3 i always have and probably always will :P

[deltaflyer]

i use ogg on my fileserver,so kids can listen to all my oldies

andy

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

Ogg's where it's at!

[fingal]

I use OGG for my personal use, and mp3s if I want other people to listen to something. I think OGG has a slight edge when it comes to sound quality, but to be truthful I don't think there's a big difference there ... other than the fact that OGG is open source.

[fingal]

I'm using ogg whenever I can.

Unfortunately, my car cd-player can use mp3, but no ogg.... When will the big companies also support ogg on these

Interesting point that. I have a theory that mp3 has become part of popular culture. With Ogg people aren't even sure how you say it: 'Ogg' sounds like the name you'd give to a caveman. Mp3s ... Eminem mentioned them in one of his songs. So now it's 'cool' to know about mp3s and to have an 'mp3 player' even though the player could support other formats.

When I last looked IRiver were selling Ogg supporting players, but I don't know if that's still the case!?

[Roxoff]

If you're encoding CD's the best format to use is FLAC, because it's lossless. You can encode from FLAC to any other format as though you're taking it straight from the original CD. FLAC files are much larger than mp3's or ogg files, but so what - hard disk space is really cheap these days.

I can convert my FLAC files to low-quality mp3 easily for use in the car - I'd prefer to do them as ogg files, but the in-car player doesn't support them.

[borromini]

Interesting point that. I have a theory that mp3 has become part of popular culture. With Ogg people aren't even sure how you say it: 'Ogg' sounds like the name you'd give to a caveman. Mp3s ... Eminem mentioned them in one of his songs. So now it's 'cool' to know about mp3s and to have an 'mp3 player' even though the player could support other formats.

When I last looked IRiver were selling Ogg supporting players, but I don't know if that's still the case!?

iRiver still does; however, they new models, while supporting OGG Vorbis, are certified by Microsoft (read: only usable on Windows). They need Windows Media Player to upload music and stuff. Plain robbery if you ask me... But I still love my iFP-899. If you can get an iFP range player, you're set .

Ogg is by far the best choice if you ask me. Better quality than mp3, better compression, and of course an open format .

If you got plenty of space, FLAC is the way to go. It's a lossless codec, but compression is at best 50% of the original file. So you still need a big HD .

[bidi]

Currently all most of my music files are still in MP3 format, but that's only because I haven't had time to convert them to Ogg. I still voted for Ogg, though.