I'm going to be buying a cowon s9 media player in the next few weeks. Have been using mp3s forever but I want something with the best possible quality. From what I understand theres flac, ogg and ape audio files. Which is the best as far as quality is concerned? Also I would like to know what is the best application for encoding ? Thanks for your time.
Lossless is lossless, there will be no quality difference. Flac and Ape keep getting higher compressions but the size difference is not much from the best to second best. I guess the really best is the format you can hear on all your devices. I did not know oggs had a lossless format.
I would say dbPowerAmp is second to none on quality and is by far the easiest to use and probably has the most formats to pick from.
It is unlikely that you will be able to hear any difference between a well made mp3 and a lossless file. It is common to rip a CD to lossless, archive that and listen to lossy copies made from the archive.
A well made mp3 may easily sound better than the CD. When you listen to a CD you may not get a true read for every block. Serious ripper such as dbPowerAmp and EAC have a long list of stratigies to insure you got it right or you get an error message.
As Mez stated, lossless is lossless..You can always convert >< to another lossless format w/o any quality loss..If I had to choose (for portability), I would use flac..Why? better HW and extensive SW support..Even VLC plays flac out-of-the-box..
That said I only use flac for archiving..Based on listening tests(ABX)I've conducted, I really can't hear any difference from say a V-2 lameMP3 and it's lossless source file..So for me, it just doesn't make sense to carry around lossless tracks on my portable(s)..
I would suggest you do the same and conduct some tests..You may just be surprised when using a lossy codec, compression setting, bitrate, etc. it becomes transparent(from the original) to your ears..
I also find dBpoweramp to be very user-friendly..There are other apps/tools to git-er-done..foobar2k, MediaMonkey.etc..
Good luck!..
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison
