FLAC vs. Lossless WMA

[babi8987]

I have recently recived a Squeeze Box 3. I have a 300 gigibyte storage
drive to store all of my CD's. I have been advised by Slim Devices
support to rip my music to FLAC file format. I have downloaded and
installed Exact Audio Copy. I have downloaded and installed FLAC
Frontender. I have ripped WAV files with EAC and converted them to FLAC
files. I played them, and they sound pretty good.

But I have some questions.
EAC can rip WAV files to 44,100Hz @ 4 Bit Stereo.
Easy CD Creator rips files 44,100Hz @ 16 Bit Stereo.
Which would be better to use?

Windows Media Player can rip Lossless WMA files
Are there any sound quality differences between Lossless WMA and FLAC?

If there are no differences in sound quality between these two formats,
then Windows Media Player would be perfered for ease of use.

I would appreciate any advise that could be offered on this issue.

Thanks.

[m1abrams]

WMA is not support in hardware so it must be transcoded to WAV at the
server. FLAC is supportted in hardware.

Advantages of this is that you have lower server requirements, lower
bandwidth requirements, and you can FF/REW through songs with FLAC.
You can not with any server decoded codecs such as WMA.

FLAC is open source
WMA is closed source

As for sound quality either will be the same that is the nature of
Lossless.

EAC is what you should use. Not sure what you are referring to with
4bit stereo with EAC. The bit rate and freq. is determined by the
source, not by the tool used to rip it.

[nelamvr6]

Exact Audio Copy, as the name implies, can be used to ensure an accurate
rip. Easy CD Creator does not have all the capabilities that EAC has for
ensuring accurate rips.

There is a good Wiki guide for setting up EAC floating around here
somewhere. It's worth a look.

Once you get EAC set up it really is no harder to use than any other
program, it just works better.

[m1abrams]

Here is that wiki
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?EACBeginners

[Jon]

While I agree with everything people have said in this thread about the
benefits of FLAC ... WMA definitely wins in terms of ease of use and
accuracy of tags, which is why I switched to it after ripping about 200
CDs as FLAC using Easy CD Creator.

I've ripped almost 800 CDs with Windows Media Player, and have found it
to be about 90% accurate in terms of retrieving tags and album art
(meaning, 90% of my albums retrieved accurate tags and art). It
requires much less manual intervention in terms of retrieving album
art, and since it supports both auto-eject (when a rip is finished) and
auto-rip (when a CD is inserted), the ripping process is mostly a
no-brainer.

While the Squeezebox does decode FLAC in hardware, I have streamed WMA
lossless to four different squeezeboxes and haven't run into any
network or CPU overhead issues, running on an average CPU (AMD Sempron
3100+). And an "average" length CD rips in less than three minutes (at
least on my average-powered PC; and I've had similar results ripping
FLAC with Easy CD Creator).

If your #1 priority is a guaranteed accurate rip, then EAC is
absolutely the way to go. In my case, my #1 priority was to get
through my stack of CDs quickly (which means fast ripping with minimal
intervention, and accurate tags) which is why I chose the WMA route.
So far, I haven't encountered any accuracy issues with my WMA rips (at
least that I can hear, and admittedly I am not an audiophile) with the
exception of one very badly scratched CD ... and I figure I can use EAC
or Easy CD Creator to deal with those CDs.

[Josh Coalson]

after you're done you can always batch transcode all your wma lossless
to FLAC with dbpoweramp or foobar2000.

Josh


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[Jon]

Post by Josh Coalson
after you're done you can always batch transcode all your wma lossless
to FLAC with dbpoweramp or foobar2000

Originally, I was planning on doing that, until I discovered that Easy
CD-DA Creator wouldn't carry across the tags and album art when it
transcoded the file. Do dbpoweramp or foobar2000 carry across the
tags/art when they transcode a file? If so, then that reopens a useful
option for me. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Josh Coalson]

Post by Jon

Post by Josh Coalson
after you're done you can always batch transcode all your wma

lossless

Post by Josh Coalson
to FLAC with dbpoweramp or foobar2000

Originally, I was planning on doing that, until I discovered that Easy
CD-DA Creator wouldn't carry across the tags and album art when it
transcoded the file. Do dbpoweramp or foobar2000 carry across the
tags/art when they transcode a file?

I'm pretty sure they do. not sure about the cover art... best way
to find out is to ask on http://hydrogenaudio.org/ which the authors
of both frequent.

Josh


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[babi8987]

I want to say thanks for all of the input with regards to this question
that I had.

All of you good people helped a newbie like myself to understand which
direction I needed to go to set up my music library.

I've started ripping my CD's with EAC and converting to a FLAC format
in the background.

Again, thanks for all of the help, and I will continue to visit this
forum site to learn of all of the neat things that I can do with my
SB3.

Steve

[Mark Lanctot]

Post by Jon
While I agree with everything people have said in this thread about the
benefits of FLAC ... WMA definitely wins in terms of ease of use and
accuracy of tags, which is why I switched to it after ripping about 200
CDs as FLAC using Easy CD Creator.

All good points, but note that the advantages and disadvantages you
mention are not related to the ripped format itself but rather to the
ripping tool used.

You're not the first one to say such positive things about WMP either.

[Jon]

Post by Mark Lanctot
All good points, but note that the advantages and disadvantages you
mention are not related to the ripped format itself but rather to the
ripping tool used.

You'll get no argument from me on that ... but the ripping tool seems
to be important to the original poster, who said

Post by Mark Lanctot
If there are no differences in sound quality between these two formats,
then Windows Media Player would be perfered for ease of use.

If there was a ripping tool available (free or fee) that could make
easy work of ripping FLAC while retrieving accurate tags and art, as
effectively as WMP does, I'd be ripping in FLAC. The fact that WMP
does this so well is not due to the quality of their ripping tool, I
don't think, so much as to the data sources that Microsoft seems to
have access to that others don't.