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[Pink Spazz Lancer]

Fellow Interactors

I wish to use the Media Jukebox to create playlists, and have 'em created for me by the aforementioned bit of kit. What would be, in your opinions, the best format to use, as in mp3, flac, ogg, pmt, sos, fu2 etc. In 'best' I mean best quality and best space-wise; I've a couple of thousand discs.

I've tried a fair few media players of late. I don't want to have anything to do with the DVD side of things. Just music. MediaMonkey was decent, but just a tad infuriating. The others were either too much or too little. This seems to be the best.

I'd be grateful for any advice.

[InflatableMouse]

There is no such thing as the 'best format'. Each format has pros and cons. There are only good and bad choices for a given use .

Mp3 is by far the widest supported format in the world. Mp3's encoded with MJ are among the best in quality as it uses the Lame mp3 encoder (isn't that a paid upgrade for MJ? In that case you might be better off getting the latest MC ). Using "-V 2 --vbr-new" (called high in the encoder options) you get a very high quality, variable bitrate Mp3 that I dare say is in 99,9% of all cases transparent, indistinguishable from the orginal.

However, if you want piece of mind and an archive of your precious music CD's and you don't want to look back wondering if you did the right thing with those Mp3's, use Flac or Ape. Both are lossless encoders that typically takes the size down to 50%. If you need lossless compatibility with i-devices, I'm afraid you're stuck with ALAC. ALAC is not suported by MC or MJ by default, so you would need to configure it as an external encoder. Works just as well though, just a bit more work as you need to give it command line parameters.

The thing is, you can always go from a lossless format to an mp3 but you can never go back. Once something is mp3, information is lost for good so do think about this carefully.

[Pink Spazz Lancer]

Dear Air-Fillable Rodent

Thanks for the advice.

Re., '...getting the latest MC': I've already looked at it, and, erm, far more stuff than I would ever use on it. My DVDs sit 'pon their shelves. I take 'em off and play 'em. I put 'em back. Or I take 'em off and rip and burn 'em (using DVD Shrink. I put 'em back. I've no desire to have the things on my PC. I watch the odd 'Poo Tube' video every so often. That's it!

My CDs, like-wise, sit 'pon their shelves. I rip and burn using 'Exact Audio Copy'. The stuff I put on the Media Jukebox is there to stay. One reason only: playlists.

A bit of a shocker, though, the 'mp3 or bust' information. I download a fair bit of stuff. Always legally... E.g., West African Highlife 'ripped from vinyl' albums. They arrive in mp3 format. I've always converted 'em to .wav and burned 'em through E.A.C.
Oh well.

I'm now in the process of filling-up the jukebox with .flac albums. My PC blares away through my stereo's amp and speakers, by the way.

Thanks again for taking the time to give me some very useful advice. I'm .flacking grateful, chap