Well, many of you are familiar with my EAC + LAME guide, which described how to generate very high quality VBR MP3 files.
I still feel that MP3 is a completely viable format and is still competitive with modern lossy codecs at high bitrates. However, times have changed. Support for the AAC codec is much more widespread than it was a couple years ago. Hard drive space has increased a whole lot. So I have moved on from MP3 to both the AAC lossy format and TAK lossless format.
Until recently, it wasn't an easy choice to decide to adopt the AAC format. The two main AAC encoders are iTunes and Nero. Nero was the superior encoder in most respects, especially because it supported AAC-HE. However AAC files encoded with the Nero encoder did not work in iTunes or on the iPod unless you stripped the AAC audio stream out of its MP4 container and then reapplied the MP4 container with a special tool. Tagging was also an issue as there was no standard tag defined and iTunes used its own tag that nothing else supported, and everything else that could create AAC files could not apply iTunes tags so if you imported the file into iTunes (if you even could), you would have to manually tag each file one-by-one.
But now the Nero AAC files in iTunes issue does not exist anymore after a new iTunes version and the tag compatibility problems have likewise vanished: everything supports iTunes tags now. The only real remaining issue is that iTunes does not support AAC-HE; it cannot play the HE part. So that means that a very low bitrate AAC file encoded with Nero that sounds great normally in other players will sound not so great in iTunes or on the iPod, though it will still sound a shit-ton better than a low-bitrate MP3. Basically all this means is that if you use iTunes and/or the iPod as your primary players, don't encode at very low bitrates.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that AAC has come a long way in the past couple of years and I now endorse it, specifically the Nero encoder although iTunes is okay.
I still use EAC, though now it's up to version 0.99pb3. I also decided that since I store all my music on my file server and I have a 500 GB drive with only like 50 GB used that I would start using AAC at a lower bitrate like ~128kbps VBR and start archiving my music. That is to say keep a losslessly compressed copy, so that I can restore to the original WAV file if a future lossy codec comes out that blows AAC out of the water or something.
There is a new promising lossless codec called TAK that seems to be gaining some steam. FLAC is the most popular lossless codec, but it actually isn't very good at compression. I think it generally only compresses to about 75% of the original size. There are other lossless formats like Wavepak and Monkey's Audio that can compress a file to around 50% - 60% of the original size. FLACs advantage is that it compresses and especially decompresses quickly, making it well suited as a playable format. Well TAK is like a combination of Monkey's Audio and FLAC. It compresses well and also compresses and decompresses quickly.
Well if you've ever worked with just about any ripper/encoder combo there is, you might be thinking that encoding the same tracks to two formats is kind of time and labor intensive since you'd have to set up the ripper/encoder for one type of encoding, rip it, then set it up for the other type and rip it again. Well, I have located a command line program called Mareo that solves this problem entirely.
Basically I set up Mareo as the encoder for EAC. Then I set up the Mareo config file to tell it what I want to happen when it receives the WAV file and track information from EAC (in my case, I told it to encode using the Nero AAC encoder, tag the resulting file, then encode again to TAK and apply a APEv2 tag to it). You only rip once, and then Mareo handles passing all the relevant parameters and track information to the two encoders.
It's some pretty cool stuff. Maybe sometime soon I'll come up with some sort of guide for this (I had to go to like 10 websites to figure it all out). In the meantime if it's something that interests you, let me know and I'll get you going.
