As bandwidth and storage have steadily increased, we’ve gone from 128kb mp3s being acceptable several years ago to 192kb now being the standard quality. I’ve recently been encoding new mp3s at 320kb, which is the highest quality possible for the codec. But it’s still lossy compression, so I’ve started looking for alternatives. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) looks like the best option. It’s like zip/rar for audio, maintaining the original (eg CD) sound quality, and can include metadata such as artist and track names. Support for it is sporadic at this stage: VLC, Winamp (with a plugin) and Songbird can all play it, but iTunes doesn’t, nor do most current portable devices.
But I have a strong feeling that FLAC is the way to go for the medium term, so I’m going to make Alias Frequencies releases available in this format.
My iAudio X5 plays FLACs
Lucky you! It’ll definitely be a requirement for my next portable media player.