All you music hacks: How lossless *is* lossless?

[Ghost]

I am currently archiving a rather large number of CDs (because I am sick of always loosing/scratching/lending my originals).

Now, I go for WMA, and what I'd like to know: How good is the "lossless" option, and what does it mean, exactly? Apparently I get much larger files compared to the normal setting, and those are really a bit unwieldy for my trusty MP3 stick... Is lossless meant to be used for making physical copies only? Is a CD burned from files copied at the normals settings really that much lower in quality (I couldn't hear to much of a difference)? Should one go and archive all the stuff in "lossless" quality but copy the "standard" stuff to a player? Or is WMA a stupid format altogether?

I rely on you musicians and music fans for advice.

[dasjoe]

WMA is a stupid format altogether, yes.
Archive your stuff with some nice lossless codec.
The lossless codec of my choice is flac, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Audio_Codec

Use it together with EAC, http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ and follow the guides on hydrogen audio, for example http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

Should one go and archive all the stuff in "lossless" quality but copy the "standard" stuff to a player?

That's what I do, I store my CDs as flac on a fileserver, then I rip the CDs (or convert the flacs) to mp3 with lame, using -v 0 --vbr new.

I do my mp3 tagging with musicbrainz, other useful tools are: mp3val, mp3gain, id3remover, mp3packer, AlbumArtDownloader.

[Nikolas]

Lossless is completely without loss. WMA suchs in general!

One way to ARCHIVE your CDs would be to simply put them in zip/rar folders, thus saving up to 40-45% of the size!

The other way would be flac, of course.

Third way (and very interesting as it seems) would be monkey's Audio which IS lossless (if not mistaken, cause I've only seen it once).

For your mp3 player just got for 128-196 bit. You won't be able to tell the difference at such high rate. It takes an experienced ear and a good set of monitors to distinguish between an 196 kbits mp3 and a CD quality WAV/AIF file! So archive everything in whatever lossless format you want and make mp3s for your player!

[InCreator]

Take a store-purchased music CD. Go somewhere without any background noise.
Wear headphones.
Listen... carefully. Not as usual "music is my wallpaper", but really - pay attention.

Now listen same thing on mp3.

MP3 format isn't generally worse than lossless algorithm. For human ear, there's nothing or very little "lost".

But the quality, especially stereo separation and overall cleanliness of sound -- if you really take a moment and full attention span to notice, is about 50% worse. With all my music needs satisfied with radio, youtube or mp3's, it's quite amazing to listen to CD's sometimes. The difference feels really strong. Especially with noiseless music genres, such as classical instrumental music or hip-hop. I don't think there's so much difference in dance music or heavy metal/etc.

[Ghost]

Thanks for shedding some light! So lossless WMA for archives it is, and though I will try out flac, I think Nikolas' "zip" suggestion is, for the time being, the "easy one".

With all my music needs satisfied with radio, youtube or mp3's, it's quite amazing to listen to CD's sometimes.

I totally agree, that's why I still got a quality stereo when all my friends have switches to using their PC as music box. Sometimes you can't beat the original.

[sergiocornaga]

I really would advise against WMA. It's probably one of the worst file formats for the job.

[Ghost]

I really would advise against WMA. It's probably one of the worst file formats for the job.

I hear that a lot and understand that it's not the most resource friendly thing around, but what exactly makes it bad? Apart from being part of Windows (which probably is enough  )

[deadsuperhero]

Encoding into WMA tends to have a much lower quality than that of FLAC.
I'd recommend just giving FLAC a try, it's really great. Been using that and Ogg Vorbis for years now.

The nicest thing about OGG and FLAC are that they're Free Software. If you were to switch to say, Mac OSX, or Linux, or BSD, or some other alternative OS to Windows, those systems can easily play FLAC right off the bat. (For Mac you'll need the codecs of course).

The nice part is that you can also STORE it and copy it repeatedly without a huge loss of quality.