The MP3 format, widely popular and well supported, has come to rule over all other music encoding formats both on personal computers and portable audio players. However, MP3 and other “lossy” encoders do not offer the best possible audio quality. In certain cases, it is worth ditching “lossy” in favor of “lossless” encoding when ripping music from CDs.
“Lossless” encoding, true to its name, offers compressed audio encoding without sacrificing even the minute details of the signal. Analogous to zipping a text file, this sort of encoding simply processes the raw data file (such as a CD’s ‘.wav’ files) using a variety of optimizations in order to reduce its size. The content is unchanged, though the resulting file requires significantly less disk space to store. The encoded file can then be decoded by a player which essentially rebuilds the original signal in real-time during playback.
“Lossy” encodings, on the other hand, significantly alter the original signal, attempting to remove portions of it that are inaudible to the human ear. This allows for much smaller file sizes, typically resulting in compression ratios as high as 10 times or better. Whereas lossless codecs, at best, can only provide a reduction of approximately half the original file size.
The concept behind lossy encoding (attempting to remove all of the unhearable data in the signal) would be an ideal compression algorithm if it were possible to execute it properly in each case. Loud music of nearly any sort is the best subject for such compression, as the alterations are often undetectable. However, often times such algorithms unintentionally remove portions of the signal that are audible, perhaps only to some listeners. If you have a sensitive ear or listen to softer music, lossless encoding may provide you with an improved listening experience.
This trade-off between storage space and audio quality can prove to be worthwhile in certain cases. With the ever-increasing capacity of hard drives, and the recent popularity of “media center” computers, lossless encoding has become an important option to consider. Those interested in achieving high-fidelity audio reproduction should definitely give it a try.
There are a variety of free lossless encoders available online. The best of which, a program called Monkey’s Audio (http://www.monkeysaudio.com/), provides very good compression ratios with a functional user interface and a generous amount of options. Resulting files have an ‘.ape’ extension and are playable with Winamp, foobar2000, and a few other audio players with the proper plugins.
iPod owners also have the option of going lossless, thanks to Apple’s new proprietary lossless encoder which creates files that are playable on its popular device. Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is currently built into iTunes and provides similar compression ratios as its competition. Unfortunately this codec is closed-source and is supported only by Apple products.
Microsoft has also tried its hand at a lossless codec, adding an option for lossless CD ripping to current versions of Windows Media Player. The compression ratios are comparable to the previous two; however, compression time is typically much longer, sometimes as much as twice that of the others. The saving grace of this codec is that the ‘.wma’ files it creates are playable on a wider variety of players than any of the aforementioned file types.
Given the options, whichever codec you choose, you will definitely be allowing yourself an improved listening experience. As limited disk capacity becomes less of a restrictive factor, lossless encoding will undoubtedly increase in popularity. After all, why lose data if you don’t have to?
