EAC + WavPack + Ogg/MP3
 

Hi guys,
Just been to HA for a while browsing their forum.
Here's what I could find.
Lossy
Ogg still has an edge over LAME, MusePack and WMA.
They are now advising Ogg Vorbis AoTuV 4.51 or alternatively LAME 3.97b2.
Lossless
Wavepack has recently step forward to the 1st place over FLAC and the rest of the pack by a short margin.
Be sure you use Wavpack 4.3 or FLAC 1.1.2
Rippers
Yep, good old EAC is still the leader with not much opposition.
EAC is currently on version 0.95b3 with cdrdao inside.
If you don't like EAC then by all means don't use anything less then CDex.

You should always use EAC to rip your audio and make a Wavpack extraction on the fly.
Since Wavpack is lossless it is the exact same thing as having a wave file.
Later on use oggdropXPdV1.8.6-aoTuVb4.51 which is a GUI for Ogg to compress your Wavpack files.
Alternatively use lamedropXPd2V-3.97b2 if your hardware player don't support Ogg decoding.
Oh, here's a wonderfull guide for EAC newbies http://users.fulladsl.be/spb2267/.

Cheers

Thanks for the update Rui :D
I'm still using "-V 6 --vbr-new" with LAME, as my basic parameters.
I find the file size very small, and quality is transparent, at least to my ears :)
I've stopped using Ogg, mostly because all players we currently have are MP3 :?
But I still archive all my music, ripped with EAC to FLAC on DVDs, so I will be able to re-encode to any future format :cool:

-kwag

"-V x --vbr-new" with Lame 3.97b2 is now what HA recommends , instead of alt-preset with lame 3.90.

With -V 2 it's ~192k similar to alt-preset standard.

The vbr-new is MUCH faster :)

@GFR,
Hi pal, long time no seeing!
Nice to see you around ;-).
Yep, --vbr-new is a whole lot faster than --alt-preset that's for sure.
BTW I'll conduct some encoding speed tests between Ogg and LAME just to see who wins in that particular department.
Not that it is very important since most PCs nowadays will rip and encode 74 minutes of CD-DA to MP3 in a handful of minutes.
But I want to know which is the fastest anyway :twisted: .

@Karl,
Yeah, having all in lossless format is veeeeery advisable because that way no matter which format (Ogg/MP3/MPC/AAC/WMA) becomes the "standard" in the future you can always leave your original music CD in the box, pick up the backup DVD with all the FLACs or all the Wavpacks and encode them again to the new "standard".