What's your favorite audio format?

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mp3? wav? wma? ogg? cd-audio? tape? flac? m4a/aac? vinyl? dvd-audio? ...?

I could write a book about most of them.

FLAC, when it comes to computers. I like it because its lossless and free (free as in freedom). I also like vinyl a lot too, with the right equipment you can have some great sounding music.

flac and vinyl too

WMA Pro at high definition and 2-pass high bit rate.

Original WMA sounded a little bit tinny, but was pretty efficient for its time and the tinniness was fairly minimal at 192kbps which was the highest rate. Until VBR MP3 became good (LAME), it was the best sound you could get at less than 320kbps so I used it to rip hundreds of GB of albums. This was in 2000.

MP3 always provided a more full bodied sound, but at higher bit rates than WMA and at a slight cost in sharpness (a large cost at lower rates). I believe WMA Pro goes a significant distance (but not quite all the way) toward providing this as well.

I understand there is an AAC format these days that is functionally similar to WMA Pro, just as original AAC was functionally similar (equivalent?) to WMA. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the streams could actually be transplanted between the two formats (or in at least one direction, with the other direction supporting additional features).

It's irritating that iPods don't play WMA, but if this were a serious issue for me I'd find a way to make it happen.

Lossless is nice in theory but until recently the amount of storage required to hold a large music library in a lossless format was fairly unwieldy. I bought a 75GB hard drive in 2000, when they were around $600, and overflowed it almost immediately with *compressed* audio. At the moment it's still possible to achieve ridiculous amounts of data with a large amount of high definition multichannel albums. I consider WMA Pro close enough to do the job for me.

(Also, a lot of people who are militant about lossless audio compression seem to distribute/store their music in 16-bit/44.1kHz format, which does far more damage to it than WMA Pro can ever do to a native 24/96 or higher stream)

Vinyl and plain out mp3s. I mean, yeah, FLAC sounds nicer, but I like mp3 simply for the universalness of the format. Vinyl records are like buying nice fine cigars or whatever, but mp3s are just convenient as all hell, everything in the world now pretty much plays them, my car stereo does, my home stereo does, and they're reasonably space efficient. The only problem vinyl has is it's all dependent upon how good your equipment is, there's vast differences in how records sound on one player to another, and then even moreso depending on cartridges and how it's adjusted, and then your amp, too.

Currently, my vinyl setups are pretty lame, one is a Radio Shack 1970s record player that's direct drive and pretty much stupid reliable, but has not so great sound quality, and a Magnavox turntable that sounds a decent amount better. I also have a Sony PS-LX2, which is considered a reasonable turntable, but I don't have a cartridge for it, so, gotta fix that sometime. Then I need a proper amp, too, as the Sony has pretty much no preamp to it at all.

But yeah, vinyl and mp3. I can notice a slight difference in digital audio formats, but mp3 just wins because everything is mp3 and everything plays mp3.

I believe MP3 still hasn't been (and probably never will be) updated to support resolutions above 48kHz, so for audiophiles it's out.

FLAC has the quality, but it strikes me as silly to waste the space.

Just my 2c. Of course I think it would be great to have a universal format as high quality as WMA Pro.

I just checked and ffmpeg has had support for decoding WMA Pro for a couple of years, and PowerAMP for Android has the support, presumably via the code from ffmpeg.

I'm tempted to build my own player for iDevices that supports all these formats.

I like Ogg for it's combination of a nice license, decent sound quality, and small file size. Also the fact that most sound libraries that I use support it helps...

Vorbis format hasn't been updated in a very long time. Although the codec has, I believe the format is rather out of date.

I'm not aware of MS enforcing any licensing requirements for the WMA format itself, and would be shocked if they ever did. You are correct that this isn't as good as having an open source license.

The licensing situation with the MP3 format is completely ridiculous, even more so because it too is an outdated format. The situation is very much like Unisys and the GIF format back in the day.

I believe the only technically modern lossy formats are WMA Pro and HE-AAC. Even those are getting a little long in the tooth and I'm hoping for something new soon.

I keep my music in Flac on my phone and computer.

flac

Gramophone

.wav format, 24 bit or 32 bit wordlength and greater than 48Khz bitrate. The downside of this however, is that this makes for files bigger than that found on CD's. The upside is that you get very realistic sound with harmonics produced above the 20Khz brickwall inherant with RIAA CD Audio 16 Bit, 44Khz spec.

1/4" analog is my preferred, but .AU format dumps into 192K mp3 easily enough. I could read a higher bitrate but I'll live with the tradeoff of doing without some of the glass on the topend for the sake of drive space. I've DLed a couple FLACs but figured if I can't pick out the subtleties neither will the normies

The human ear can't hear frequencies higher than 20KHz. If the sample rate is high enough to accommodate frequencies up to 20KHz, then wouldn't a higher sample rate be redundant?