5 Digital Music Formats For Audiophiles

Whole-home media servers are in and CD racks are out.

A recent study from Forrester Research says media servers will be in more than 4.5 million households by 2012. The study says the growth will be sparked by the need for digital content.

That means your clients soon will be transferring their CD collections onto digital media servers, if they're not already doing so.

Will they want their audio stored in lossless format? What's more important: sound quality or storage capacity?

Here's a look at five of the more common audio formats and what each has to offer.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)

FLAC is one of several lossless codecs, meaning it reduces the file size up to 60 percent without sacrificing the quality of the music.

Lossy audio formats also compress to smaller files but do not maintain the original sound quality.

Many say FLAC works similar to ZIP files, except FLAC has better compression (2:1 ratio) because it's designed specifically for audio.

FLAC can handle pulse-code modulation (PCM) bit resolutions between 4-32 bits per sample, up to 8 channels and sampling rates up to 192 kHz.

One of FLAC's benefits is that it's non-patented and open source, meaning it works on many software applications. It is supported by music servers from both Escient and ReQuest and wireless music systems from Sonos and SqueezeBox.

It is good for just listening to music and archiving or storing music. Compressing a file size by 60 percent allows for more storage space, which, in turn, stores more songs.

FLAC is not hindered by Digital Rights Management, meaning it has fewer playback and compatibility issues. DRM hinders several other music formats and online music stores. Yahoo! recently announced it is closing its online Music Store.

FLAC files are streamable and have metadata including tags, cue sheets and seek tables. FLAC uses Vorbis comments for tagging, meaning information like the title, artist, album and track number can be added to the file.

On the downside, FLAC has limited support for MP3 players, including the iPod. And last I checked, nearly everyone on the planet uses the iPod, iPhone or some other Apple product as their main music source. An iPod needs Rockbox firmware to support FLAC files.

Apple Lossless

Apple Lossless is an audio format developed by Apple that has similar compression to FLAC.

This format is also called Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) and Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE).

It was introduced in 2004 with iTunes 4.5 and supports 16-bit and 24-bit audio and 5.1 surround.

Apple Lossless compresses files to about half the original size of the uncompressed data. ALAC files are stored as .m4a files and use the same tagging format as QuickTime and iTunes.

Apple Lossless works with more current iPods, Apple's AirPort Express, Sonos systems and is supported by Apple TV. It is not compatible with the iPod Shuffle due to the Shuffle's limited memory.

Only two Windows programs encode and rip music to Apple Lossless: iTunes (through QuickTime) and Bpoweramp Music Converter.

Apple Lossless lacks DRM, which, again, makes for fewer complications with compatibility.

WAV (Waveform)

WAV, short for Waveform, is an audio format compatible with both Windows and MAC operating systems.

WAV, another lossless format, has files usually larger than FLAC, Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless. Since WAV files are usually larger, the format is more difficult to transfer and share.

However, WAV is still a good format for archiving and listening. So if your client has unlimited storage, WAV could be an easy solution.

WAV, often referred to as the standard audio format for PCs, has fast decoding and can be played by nearly every Windows application that supports audio.

WAV files are still used throughout the recording industry and for many A/V applications. The most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in PCM format, the standard format for CDs at 44,100 samples per second and 16 bits per sample.