How do you incode your digital media?


Looking at my options here. Has anyone experienced any problems with the "lossless" forms of media storage? Any differences in fidelity that only us audiophiles may be bothered by? I am looking to incode everything in Apple Lossless, as it seems to be the most recognized and should integrate with a Squeezebox 3 nicely.

Let me know if you have any thoughts!

Ben
bearotti
Drubin,

I use AIFF wirelessly to an Airport Express and only rarely experience dropouts... iteresting enough, it is usually when first starting up the server. I can't find a reason why it happens, but once it has played for a few minutes, it's OK.

As far as bandwith, if the SB is 80211.g (which I beleive it is) their should be no issue with bandwidth..

CD's 44.1 Khz
80211.G 54 (some 108) Mbs

You have plenty of bandwidth, you might have a weak signal to your SB, try moving it around a little... my one computer's wireless signal can go from excellent (5 bars) to poor (2 bars) simply by moving the tower 2 inches on the desk.... I suspect there is a stub right behind it and it blocks the signal... something similar may be happening to you.
If you are planning to use the Squeezebox wirelessly, lossless may present some problems. At least that has been my experience. I use Apple Lossless and WiFi to the SB appears to require too much bandwidth. Despite buffering, I get annoying interruptions. Wired works flawlessly. However, I'm just guessing that I'd have better performance with lossy compression; I haven't tried it.
I use Apple Lossless and think it works great. Like Jax2, as good as a dedicated CD transport.
Ben - when played through the same DAC I have not been able to distinguish between Apple Lossless, WAV, and my transport playing the original CD. Knowing this I chose to rip my CD's in lossless rather than WAV and fit almost twice the number of CD's into the same amount of space. YMMV, but it's easy enough for you to test out yourself if you already have the gear to play the files. Or, if not, you may want to try comparing lossless to WAV files which are uncompressed, or EAD files if you are using that software. My bet is you won't be able to hear any differences.

Marco