Audio Codec better than MP3?

[ToiletDuck]

I was wondering if anyone could tell me if there is a better audio codec than mp3 for compression. I've just recieved 7 classical cd's that I ordered that I want nothing but the purest quality that I can get from a compressed file out of. Violins and pianos are so hard to record accuratly. Is MP3 the best?
Duck

[The Edge]

Lossless compression, right?

Use SHN (short for "Shorten") which is a lossless compressed WAV file format. It was developed by a company called Softsound (http://www.softsound.com). It compresses music files 1/2 to 1/3 of their original size, maintaining perfect sound quality. On the other hand, MP3s use a lossy algorithm when compressed from WAV files (or ripped from CD). This means that over time, these lossy recordings can be re-extracted and re-encoded so that it sounds very inferior to the original source. Lossless algorithms such as Shorten (.shn) allow for pure digital reproductions.

I use mkw Audio Compression Tool (http://home.att.net/~mkw/mkwact.html) to create them.

Winamp plugin here. (http://www.etree.org/shnamp.html)

Here's a FAQ (http://research.umbc.edu/~hamilton/shnfaq.html) for the SHN format.

Bren

[Teegedeck]

...and in case that you need stronger (=lossy) compression, you should try MPC. The experts seem to agree that it is the best choice for bitrates of 160 kbps [edit: yes I've written a too low value here, as Awatef noticed.:p At that bitrate, AAC really starts to play out its strengths]and above. Below that I'd personally rather go for AAC (produced with psyTEL's aacenc at 'normal' preset) than for MP3.

more (http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org)

[Awatef]

AAC is nowhere better than MP3.

MPC have the advantage over MP3 only in the higher bitrate zones, not from 160k, but I would say 256k and above. The thing is, 256k joint stereo mp3 made with Lame sounds perfect to me, so the MPC advantage must be only theoretical.

So I would recommend you go with 256k JS MP3 from Lame with lowpass on 20KHz (or 320k if you feel like maxing out the quality)

[DSPguru]

Originally posted by Awatef
AAC is nowhere better than MP3.to my ears, it surely is.

[The Edge]

@Awatef

If you have a quality sound card & speaker setup, you will hear the differece with MP3 and pretty much any lossless format. Especially if it's classical music. If you whats to retain quality and don't mind the file size, lossless is your man. Maybe the AAC encoders you've tried were not the best?

Bren

[Awatef]

Of course nothing can beat lossless compression, but still, it takes too much space, that it does.

About AAC, never encoded personally AAC, but heard AAC samples with 128k, sound like crap, the high frequencies sound too artificial. Don't know if it's an encoder issue.
AAC is not widespread anyway, I won't bother with it, not in audio files and not in video files (mp4 can go fuck itself :D)

[mrlipring]

nobody vouching for ogg vorbis?

i've been playing with it, maybe gonna use it with my avis, and i'm impressed.

wouldn't use it for music, cos my archos only plays mp3, but for avis and stuff, it looks like it'll be very sweet.

[Hiro2k]

I love ogg at low bitrates, and I use MPC for the higher bitrates. I use it in all my encodes.

[bond]

Originally posted by Awatef
About AAC, never encoded personally AAC, but heard AAC samples with 128k, sound like crap, the high frequencies sound too artificial. Don't know if it's an encoder issue.of course the quality strongly depends on the encoder used
at 128kbps quicktime's aac encoder came out to be the best in a recent listening test at hydrogenauio.org

see the results here (http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/test/aac128test/results.html)