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Old 2007.12.29, 02:16 AM   #3
Glathannus
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When a portable player supports FLAC, you get the longest battery life possible with lossless, as well as the shortest gaps - if there's even any gaps at all. Ideally the player natively supports FLAC, because I hear Rockbox has a lot of 'overhead' cost on battery life, independently of whether or not you even use lossless.

I don't really judge formats by which companies do or don't support the format. I judge a format solely by how effective it is at saving me space (compared to having WAVs), as well as how quickly it loads. I've cut it close on running out of space, way too many times - so every bit helps, but at the same time, if all I cared about was space, I'd still be using Monkey's Audio (that was actually the first lossless format I got into), and for half a second practically my whole system would lock up whenever I wanted to jump to a specific point within a song. And it would take ten minutes to uncompress a full album, versus one minute for WavPack, and maybe forty seconds for FLAC.

So when I say that the 'best' format depends upon how you intend to use lossless - this has nothing to do with company support. If all you want to do is back up your whole CD collection, and never actually play these backup files you ripped, then Monkey's Audio wouldn't be a bad choice for stashing. If you're using no-nonsense portable players, or you convert to copies in other filetypes all the time, then FLAC is the best choice. If you have a huge collection of music (and a limited amount of space) that you regularly listen to, and casually convert to other filetypes, then WavPack is the best choice.
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