What sort of file formats provide some level of compression without degrading the sound?

• Audio codecs
  
• Comparison of audio codecs
  
• MP3

A lossy scheme like MP3 cannot allow one to recreate the .wav file if one wants to.

Hope this helps.
-akhilesh

If you will remember, I ran my demos off of a laptop computer. Worked amazingly well. The sound could have been better, since I was using a USB Sound Blaster as a DAC. I am not about to drop kilobucks on a high end DAC, all of which seem to perceive a need for a tube sage. I'm looking for something more modest that is all SS but still addresses the clocking problems inherent with USB audio. But I digress.

Disk space it so cheap that it is pure folly to store your files in anything except a lossless format. TERAbite external drivers are now only a couple of hundred bucks. (Warning -- buy two and make two copies of your library. That hard driver WILL fail some day.)

I am about to launch out on the process of ripping my entire library. I intend to use EAC and convert to FLAC on the fly. I would prefer to leave the files in WAV, but I think that I need the extra tagging available in FLAC to catalog things. My library is mostly classical, ant the standard file naming and tagging doesn't work.

Perhaps Akhilesh has a hint or two for me? BTW Akhilesh, what are you using for playback?

Bob

• NY Times article

This is the Iaudio X5 by COWON. I have the 60 gb version.

For my laptop, I use Winamp player: it is free and excellent.
Hope this helps, buddy.
-akhilesh

If I understand correctly, the Iaudio is for stand-along headphone listening. If so, I have little interest here.

I will download a copy of Winamp and look at it. I had heard that it was becoming bloated with features and tends to run slow. Foobar is a bear to learn, but it does have a native half octave equalizer which I am looking forward to for room equalization. However, as long a Winamp sound OK through my amp and speakers AND I can find stuff in my library, I'll go with it. Some library systems support artist-album-song only making classical stuff impossible to find. Example -- try to fine a particular classical album on Amazon. Nearly impossible.

Bob

It has a 1/8 inch standard stereo analog output. YOu can connect a headphone or whatever to it. I actually connect a home made amplifier to it (burr brown OP amp) that gives it a 25 db or so fixed gain and really mellows out the tone like a tube amp) and then play it either on headphones or through a regular power ampifier/home setup. I can also play it in my car, which is cool. and also in my office. And everywhere i go.

I don't use winamp for anything but playback. My library is organized as such: artist-album-song. I suppose you could organize it otherwise, but it's adequate for my needs...however my file structure has nothng to do with winamp. Winamp plays m3u files, if that helps you any.
I've never tried foobar (perhaps the name scared me away? )
-akhilesh

I'm a Linux fan and it looks like its pretty easy to extract cd's to flac format with the tools provided. The software seems to automatically handle all the tagging (and album cover) issues on the jazz, rock and pop discs, too. So most of this project will just be putting the discs in the computer and hitting the extract button. My job has me in front of a computer all day so it'll just be a matter of feeding the discs into the computer.

Bob, thanks for the tip on the library backup.

Figuring out where to store the cd's will be a harder task. They can't go in the attic (heat) or the basement (humidity) and they'll need to be accessible from time to time. Anyone have any tips on how to store the physical discs without eating wallspace?