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[grahamk]

I made a decision some time ago to use ape as my lossless format in MC. This was because at the time ape files had better tagging than flac, could store ratings, album art, etc, in the tags and that could be imported by multiple instances of MC.

From what I have read the current flac encoder/decoder plugins take tagging issues away and that all these values can now be stored in a flac tag.

Do I have this right? Using flac would make life much easier for me (my brother, who I share files with has a macintosh and they *still* can't play ape files). 

Curious if anyone was using ape for the same reasons and has switched to flac and what the results were.

Also curious is the MC flac plugin breaks any rules of the standard that might make MC tagged flac files problematic on other platforms...

Thanks!
 Graham

[Alex B]

Scthom has done excellent work with his FLAC plugins. I wouldn't hesitate if I had a good reason to store my audio archive in FLAC format.

Personally, I have used Monkey's Audio since the year 2002. I like the slightly better compression ratio of Monkey's Audio when compared with FLAC. After ripping and tagging I usually move the lossless files to my archive and keep only high bitrate lossy versions in my MC library. I convert most of the files to MP3 VBR Extreme because MP3 is universally compatible, but if I hear any encoding artifacts I may try Musepack or Vorbis at a high quality setting or just keep the APE files in the library. For example, electronic music may not always be transparent to me when encoded in MP3 format (transparent = not audibly different from the original). Naturally your mileage may vary.

BTW, these nice programs support Monkey's Audio (and many other formats) on Mac OS X:

Max, ripper & converter  http://sbooth.org/Max/
Play, player & organizer  http://sbooth.org/Play/
Cog, player  http://cogx.org/
Tag, tagger  http://sbooth.org/Tag/

[grahamk]

Thanks - I have been playing around with ape and flac and did notice the slightly larger file size. I've yet to decide if I care about that or not. :-)

Another concern is CPU usage while playing them on the fly - I'll be looking at that next.

Thanks for the links - I sent them to my brother.

Graham