[SOLVED] Open format for music

[Kieren]

When I was using Windows I ripped all my CDs as mp3s. Now that I'm using Linux I'd prefer to use an open format.

All my new CDs have been ripped to ogg and I've been looking to convert all of my previous mp3s to also be ogg. Reading about doing this I have discovered that the quality will be decreased so I have decided to re-rip all my CDs again.

As this is going to take some time I want to get some idea about which formats people consider to be best. For instance if I bought an MP3 player which formats tend to work with them?

[MikeTbob]

Have a look a Flac, it's supposed to be awesome, but I'm not sure if most MP3 player will play this format however
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

[hugortega]

Well, the best format could be relative, specially if you're looking for a good portable player... anyway, this page can help you: Comparison of portable media players - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Kieren]

It's not just what formats will play on many mp3 players that I was wondering but what other people prefer to use and why.

I think I might go with MokeTbob's suggestion of using FLAC. I have just ripped a CD using FLAC and it seems quite good and I liked the sound of FLAC from the website

[sdimhoff]

You are right about converting from mp3 to ogg. Encoding from one compressed format to another is never the best. Re-Ripping is the way to go.

Just to share my experience, I got an iAudio7 by Cowan partially because it supports most open formats (unlike many other portable players). I really like it, works great with linux.

[MikeTbob]

It's not just what formats will play on many mp3 players that I was wondering but what other people prefer to use and why.

I think I might go with MokeTbob's suggestion of using FLAC. I have just ripped a CD using FLAC and it seems quite good and I liked the sound of FLAC from the website

Well, I prefer to use MP3 format for portable players because it uses less disk space than all the others, and plus it's kind of hard to locate .ogg or .flac files in hurry.

[bigtomrodney]

iRiver and iAudio usually support Ogg Vorbis files and I think iAudio supports flac.

The good news is that Rockbox firmware which is available for iPods, iRivers, Archos and more allows you to play almost any format you can think of with a slick interface. It really opens up the device to being a lot more useful - with the caveat that you have to be happy replacing firmware on something you paid hard earned cash for. On the other hand I only regret leaving it so long.

[Kieren]

I have noticed that the flac files are about 8 times larger than the mp3s. Is there away to reduce the file sizes at all in flac?

[Kieren]

Looks like ogg-vorbis might be a better option to flac as it is open format and claims to have a smaller filesize than mp3.

Any bad things I need to be aware of with ogg-vorbis?

[bigtomrodney]

Flac files are bigger because they are lossless. They don't lose quality, just compress as much as possible. To get smaller files you would need to use a lossy format like ogg vorbis or mp3. Flac is kind of an audiophile format, most people only need vorbis for daily use.