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Topic: WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best (Read 79670 times) previous topic - next topic
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WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #75 –
Quote from: sld on
In the same painting, thanks, Digisurfer. 8400 files is quite a solid testimony

Here is how my collection currently pans out if anyone is curious:

Christmas: 16
Classical: 249
Comedy: 42
Country: 250
Easy Listening: 1679
Electronica: 655
Religious: 71
Rock/Pop: 3015
Showtunes: 229
Soundtracks: 1915
Video Game: 202

Total consecutive play time: 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 43 seconds.

That is a total of 8323 files in Monkey's Audio format, all using -c3000 compression. I recently converted these all to FLAC at level 8, and here are how the file sizes compare:

APE (-c3000 -v):
178 GB (191,406,413,329 bytes)

FLAC (-V -8):
188 GB (202,040,058,006 bytes)

It may not look like a big difference to some, but still it does slowly add up. To be honest, I'll bet that my collection is actually quite small compared to a lot of the real music freaks out there, and I am definitely not one of them lol. For example, if my collection were to double in size, that would be about a 20GB difference. Double again, a 40 GB difference. So yeah, for those who do care about space (because music isn't the only thing I store on my hard drives), Monkey's Audio is a good choice indeed as far at that goes. On top of that, it's also never given me a reason to switch... yet. Even though I like Monkey's Audio as a format, I'd also have no problem switching if I had to for some pressing reason. See, I feel all the lossless formats are good and have their place. Each have their own niches the depend on the individuals needs. There is no one right format for everybody obviously, so what point is there in getting all caught up over semantics? Loyalty? They're just a thing, a tool. Some of the arguments I've seen are like if Canada and the USA were to go over war over which is better, Coke or Pepsi lol.

I'm also having some trouble understanding where a lot of folks are coming from regarding error handling. Specifically, I don't get why the size of the error matters so much, or why it matters that one format will play through an error where another format won't and just skip over said error, perhaps continuing to play despite an audible gap in the faulty audio file. I guess my confusion stems from the reason most folks use a lossless format in the first place, which is for archival reasons primarily. From my point of view an error is bad no matter which format one uses, and when encountered should be erradicated immediately either by re-ripping the album in question, or by restoring from a clean backup copy. I played with the hex edit thing a long time ago because of some long forgotten discusion about error handling (probably that post that was quoted earlier in this thread) and it showed to me that a corrupt APE file would quit playing with an error message given. This was in foobar 0.8.3 back then IIRC, and to be honest I felt this was a good thing. After all, I want to know right away if there is something wrong, so that it can be fixed quickly. Basically what I'm trying to boil it down to is that an error is an error, and is bad regardless of which format you use. Hence my confusion as to why folks seem to be getting so caught up over that one point.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #76 –
Quote from: Digisurfer on
From my point of view an error is bad no matter which format one uses, and when encountered should be erradicated immediately either by re-ripping the album in question, or by restoring from a clean backup copy.

It's not always possible. And people don't necessary have a second copy of their copies. So if your original is lost, or broken, and if you start to get some troubles with your lossless backup, the recovery performance would become dramatically important.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #77 –
Hi all! I've been reading a lot of posts lately about bad blocks or crc errors on wavpack files, and I can't find the solution to my problem, which is: recently I've bought a new external drive where I've passed all my rips still on folders, not rar's, and many of them have now been corrupted when they weren't before that.
So now what I want is to recover those files, because many of those CD's that I've ripped aren't with me anymore. So is there a little something like this that could recover those wavpack files?
I appreciate very much all the help! 

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #78 –
Guys, glad to see this being discussed.

I have about 1600 songs I keep in lossless format mainly for both active use and archival purposes.

I started with them in WMA 9 Lossless format and found that to be the most widely supported format for the devices I had at the time. The one problem was that dbpowerAMP's various pieces had trouble working with the format reliably. I'd rip songs from CD and end up having to manually enter a slew of tag information anyway.

I finally took Spoon's (the author) advice and switched everything over to APE format.

A couple things have cropped up since that move.

While I find that the compression sizes are great, I also find that most products simply do not support APE or do so only via plug-ins and such and sometimes only partially support it. I now want to use a server applet on my PC to stream to my Xbox 360 and my DirecTV DVR. Twonky doesn't support APE and while TVersity claims to support it, like in other cases, it's hit and miss. TVersity will serve up the files but it can't read the v2 tags (even though the author claims he does). This is being troubleshot now by its author but I suspect it'll be a while before anything is resolved.

I'm wondering if I should just give FLAC a try as my current tools (TVersity, MediaMonkey and others) all support FLAC natively and solidly.

Do I give up anything really other than some space (which I can afford to give up)? What about tagging? Are the two basically the same? I've read that APE tagging is considered excellent.

At this point I don't want to convert everything to FLAC only to find I'm back in the same boat just going in another direction.

I even thought about just going back to WMA 9 Lossless but no one seems to like it (though it has a LOT of hardware support).

Thanks.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #79 –
Practical considerations are the most of concern, and other than with lossy formats with a lossless format like ape, FLAC, wavPack, wma lossless, other considerations usually don't count much. file size is pretty much the same not counting peas.

As your situations seems to make ape unusable, why don't you just try a few FLAC or wma lossless files and see whether or not your tagging works throughout your chain?
lame3995o -Q1.7 --lowpass 17

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #80 –
Quote from: Agrajag on
Do I give up anything really other than some space (which I can afford to give up)? What about tagging? Are the two basically the same? I've read that APE tagging is considered excellent.

the two are equally powerful in that neither really have any limits on what you can put in tags.

Quote from: Agrajag on
I even thought about just going back to WMA 9 Lossless but no one seems to like it (though it has a LOT of hardware support).

what makes you say that?  I've found very few things that support WMAL, a lot less than FLAC.

Josh

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #81 –
Quote from: jcoalson on
what makes you say that?  I've found very few things that support WMAL, a lot less than FLAC.


Must be the things I've looked at. I just seem to find it here and there. Certainly more than APE though I do see FLAC from time-to-time.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #83 –
Quote from: jcoalson on
compare http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware vs. http://www.google.com/notebook/public/1751...QiXSwoQ_ayZ_PAh (reference)

actually I think more things support even APE than WMAL due to the chinese portables.


Uh, those lists are extremely lacking. The Zune, 360 and Xbox aren't even listed there. Sqeezebox and Roku also support WMAL and they're not there.

That's just off the top of my head. I wonder what else is missing for both of them?

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #84 –
Quote from: Agrajag on
Uh, those lists are extremely lacking. The Zune, 360 and Xbox aren't even listed there. Sqeezebox and Roku also support WMAL and they're not there.

That's just off the top of my head. I wonder what else is missing for both of them?

the squeezebox and roku transcode on the server to a format the device can support (usually FLAC or WAV), which is not feasible for some servers and breaks things like FFWD/REW.

360 and xbox are basically PCs, which can play FLAC too, and they're not on either list probably for the same reason that 'windows PC' is not on either list, it's just assumed.

the zune should be on that list though, so +1 for WMAL.

Josh

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #85 –
Hi,
I'm one of the guys to blame for the lacking list of supported wma lossless players. Sorry to mess up this thread with off-topic stuff. If you wish to continue this discussion, please add postings here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=50346

Quote from: jcoalson on
the zune should be on that list though, so +1 for WMAL.


It should be on the list, but for some reason microsoft decided not to support wma lossless. This is quite strange, as the zune is based on the Gigabeat S. The Gigabeat S does support wma lossless.

http://www.zunescene.com/comparison/
http://www.zunescene.com/forums/index.php?...07778#msg107778
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabeat

Roku Soundbrigde:
The Roku seems unable to play wma lossless natively (please correct me if I am wrong):
http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t...ht=wma+lossless

Squeezebox / slimserver:
I've got one of these myself. It supports apple lossless, flac and wma lossless right out of the box. I love it.  It should definetively be on the wma lossless list.

Xbox (360):
Does the Xbox support wma lossless right out of the box (without hacking it / installing software) ? I found this in the FAQ for the 360: "Windows Media DRM protected WMA Lossless is not supported" I guess that you can play back wma lossless if you encode it yourself? In that case, the 360 should be included on the list.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/xboxmediafaq.htm

regards,
Øyvin Eikeland

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #86 –
Every codec have different adventages when comparing and I'll say Monkey's Audio fits me because Monkey's Audio have APL metafile helping me keeping compressed images and cue files clean and original.
Sorry for my English.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #87 –
 the smaller the best ????

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #88 –
Monkey Audio is great!  I love the *.ape extensions.  When I started using lossless, I believe Monkey Audio and FLAC were the only things around.  I liked the nice front end for Monkey Audio, and the funny *.ape extension at the time, so that is what I used.

Its really a matter of personal taste.  The only drawback originally to using Monkey Audio for me, was years ago, it only had Windows support, and I do have a fondess for Apples.  Now it seems there is Mac OS and Linux support.  Anyone who is uncertain of what lossless codec to use, I would certainly suggest Monkey Audio.

You can't beat the APE

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #89 –
Well I've decided that the small gains in compression with all these encoders isn't worth the decoding penalty which means slower transcoding and limited or no hardware support. So my vote goes to FLAC for hardware / software compatibility, Wavpack for hardware friendly higher compression and TAK is great for fast high compression PC solution. Then Optimfrog high modes and LA when only compression counts.

MA is stuck in the middle for me.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #90 –
OptimFROG?  It ought to be called OptimTURTLE.

I transcode with pipes and find that MAC at the compression that I use decodes no slower than the speed at which my lossy encoder encodes.

MAC might be in the middle but not any more so than other codecs mentioned, as where you draw the line is pretty arbitrary.  Speaking of the middle, there's one fairly popular codec currently getting its clock cleaned when it comes to compression and speed (encoding AND decoding) and it isn't MAC.

Yes MAC isn't the fastest decoder but it is certainly faster than OptimFROG:
Code: [Select]
Encoder                    Comp      Enc    Dec
OptimFROG Mode Extranew    62.565%     3      4
Monkey's Audio Extra High  63.062%    21     21
OptimFROG Mode High        63.183%    11     15
OptimFROG                  63.386%    17     23
Monkey's Audio High        63.507%    36     34
TAK Extra Max              63.527%     7     87
TAK High                   63.684%    28     96
Monkey's Audio Normal      63.793%    41     38
TAK Normal Max             63.795%    25    110
TAK Normal                 63.875%    45    109
TAK Fast Extra             63.963%    50    113
OptimFROG Mode Fast        64.068%    23     32
TAK Fast                   64.145%    66    112
WavPack -hhx3              64.378%     4     54

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #91 –
I have been an OptimFROG lover... but yes I teeth at its veeeery slow decoding.

When TAK solidifies more, I think I'll switch over to TAK High.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #92 –
Quote from: greynol on
I transcode with pipes and find that MAC at the compression that I use decodes no slower than the speed at which my lossy encoder encodes.


Isn't that enough to ring a bell? decompressing MAC as complex ( CPU-time wise ) as encoding of a lossy format.
Compare this to FLAC and TAK, which can be decompressed at 100x realtime with current PC's.
This implies that encoding from flac/tak to lossy, takes not much more than encoding directly a .wav, while for MAC/optimFrog/LA, the time actually doubles, or more.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #93 –
Quote from: pepoluan on
I have been an OptimFROG lover... but yes I teeth at its veeeery slow decoding.

When TAK solidifies more, I think I'll switch over to TAK High.


Once TAK is more "stable" and more feature rich, using Monkey's Audio would make very little sense; you can get approximately the same compression levels upto "high" without the decompression penalty. True, MAC is still better at compressing than TAK at levels like Extra High and Insane, but at those points, using OptimFrog at its most lax setting might make more sense.

One gripe about TAK though is the lack of support for piping... having to decompress to wave every time i want to "transcode" to TAK is just such a nuisance.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #94 –
Quote from: rjamorim on
Quote from: spoon on
The whole idea about lossless is either it is perfect or it is not


Nope, the idea is also about archival. And being able to recreate most of your music is better than not being able to recreate anything. That's the problem with Monkey's.

\

Anyone know of a good way to convert Monkey's audio files to WavePack without going through .wav format?

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #95 –
Quote from: Steve J. on
Quote from: rjamorim on

Quote from: spoon on
The whole idea about lossless is either it is perfect or it is not


Nope, the idea is also about archival. And being able to recreate most of your music is better than not being able to recreate anything. That's the problem with Monkey's.

\

Anyone know of a good way to convert Monkey's audio files to WavePack without going through .wav format?


foobar?

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #97 –
Quote
' date='May 2 2007, 10:48' post='489678']
Quote from: greynol on
I transcode with pipes and find that MAC at the compression that I use decodes no slower than the speed at which my lossy encoder encodes.
Isn't that enough to ring a bell? decompressing MAC as complex ( CPU-time wise ) as encoding of a lossy format.
Compare this to FLAC and TAK, which can be decompressed at 100x realtime with current PC's.
This implies that encoding from flac/tak to lossy, takes not much more than encoding directly a .wav, while for MAC/optimFrog/LA, the time actually doubles, or more.

It's obvious you don't get it, but that's ok.

Quote from: kanak on
Once TAK is more "stable" and more feature rich, using Monkey's Audio would make very little sense; you can get approximately the same compression levels upto "high" without the decompression penalty. True, MAC is still better at compressing than TAK at levels like Extra High and Insane, but at those points, using OptimFrog at its most lax setting might make more sense.

One gripe about TAK though is the lack of support for piping... having to decompress to wave every time i want to "transcode" to TAK is just such a nuisance.

Not just Extra High and Insane, but High as well, at least according to Synthetic Soul's data.  This data also shows that MAC High encodes over five times faster than TAK's closest compression level (p4m) for as little as that may be worth to you.

What MAC has going for it that TAK still lacks is multi-platform support, otherwise I'd ditch MAC for TAK in a heartbeat.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #98 –
Quote from: greynol on
Not just Extra High and Insane, but High as well, at least according to Synthetic Soul's data.  This data also shows that MAC High encodes over five times faster than TAK's closest compression level (p4m) for as little as that may be worth to you.

On some classical music or audiobooks (speech) TAK can even beat Monkey's Extra High. It always depends on your files. Synthetic Soul's selection is not very TAK friendly, but TAK likes for instance the FLAC comparisons' files. And nobody hast to use -p4m. -p4 is up to 3 times faster and usually compresses less than 0.05 percent worse. Possibly i should better remove the 'm'-option...

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #99 –
Classical music comparison.

TAK P2e 'normal': 323 923 956 bytes
MAC normal :      327 401 528 bytes
WV -hx                333 323 282 bytes

CD: Pachelbel Canon & Others


TAK wins. MAC is looking unattractive even if it did compress a little better than TAK on some music. Differences between MAC normal and the new WV high mode are not great. This WV mode is hardware friendly too. So for these marginal compression differences we are loosing too many features by choosing MAC. MAC was great before TAK was born and only when fitting files on CD-R or DVD.