Music Format Thread

J

jolligan

New member
Which of these commonly used mediums do you most enjoy? Why do you prefer it?

The Contenders

  • Live Music is the Best
  • Player Pianos
  • Wax Tube
  • Vinyl/other recorRAB
  • 8-Track
  • Cassette Tape
  • CD
  • MIDI Reproductions (lol)
  • Mp3 Digital
  • WAV Digital
  • .Ogg Digital
  • FLAC Digital
  • Apple Lossless
  • Other Lossy (which?)
  • Other Lossless (which?)

If I ignored any file types hit up a mod to adjust the poll. This is an improved version of a now closed poll.
 
I picked 'Live Music is the Best' because although I listen to a lot of my music digitally such as on MP3s, I definitely enjoy listening to live music much more. There's something special about it, for me personally.
 
I voted for FLAC because when I listen to digital music I prefer it be lossless, and that's the format I usually go for. Most often, though, it's usually MP3s. I hardly ever use CRAB but I have on occosion. I miss cassette mixtapes from when I was a kid (yeah we still did it in the late 90s) but that can't make up for the terrible quality.

So... I failed to mention Analog Radio, Internet Radio and Youtube on here. Which are both pretty widely used fo discovering/listening to music.
 
I don't think midi or live music should be in the poll really. They differ from the others in that they're not ways to record and store music. Aside from that, it seems quite thorough. ;)
 
CD preferably and then FLAC digital, it can then be converted to anything I like.

I have a lot of vinyl, vinyl isn't that great despite what the bandwagon riders say. 8-Track is nice for nostalgia but that's about it. I do miss cassettes and performing surgery on them when they get chewed or if they snap.
 
I would have voted FLAC, it looked like you could do two votes in the old poll, so I thought I could here, lol. I voted CD but FLAC would be first out of the two. I would choose ogg FLAC but you only need that really if you're going to be editing the audio, which I wouldnt be, but you can easily convert between the two any. They're both solid.
 
What I like the most are vinyls, but to be honest, I only listen to them extremely rarely so I don't think I could vote for it with a clean conscience. My second choice in the list is the ogg format. The reason is simple .. it's good (although the real difference in quality between the popular lossy formats is mostly detectable at lower BRs) and it's open source and free. Any media player can support it and so I think those who appreciate free lossy formats should as well.

The worth of lossless formats is greatly exaggerated. You need really good ears and equipment to identify better qualities at the standard BRs today and even then, reliably identifying the higher bitrates when you get to high quality lossys and up to lossless is not something I've seen or read about anyone doing. I've only seen and read about people who fail at it and know from testing that I'm no better.
 
Well, the reason I included them is the invention of recording and storing of music is fairly new. For all the time before that, we had to rely on notations, scores and players to hear our favorite music again. Just thought i'd give it a show but I didn't think it'd be the most popular option.

MIDI was included almost as a joke, but along the same lines as above.
 
I'd like to see why some people prefer some lossy formats to other if they have any idea other than habit about it.

I gave some reasons why I like ogg. Most of all besides doing well in tests, it's free and open source. I don't like WMA at all because only a few tags support multiple values .. I can't see why they would bottleneck the usefulness of the format in such a stupid way.
 
Flacs are a waste of HD space in my opinion. If I replaced my entire collection with flacs, well .. it just wouldn't be feasible. It would take far too much space. As such, it's not a practical digital format for me.
 
I don't prefer lossy to lossless. It's just a matter of availability, really. I voted for FLAC because that's my usual format of choice (although I've never really given .Ogg a fair shot), but tbh the majority of my music collection is in Mp3 format. When I download music it's just the most readily available one out there.
 
The heart and soul of music is and always will be in the live performance, but I do think that both cRAB and mp3s are pretty awesome. I constantly just do whatever I have to do while listening to my ipod and with the ability to hold thousanRAB of songs I can pretty much always listen to whatever suits my mood. It isn't as easy to always have access to my cd collection (which is over 600 at least).
 
I can only bear things recorded on Wax Tubes when they've been digitally cleaned up. It's a pretty tiny sound quality on the real things. But that blog sounRAB pretty interesting.
 
I actually own a player piano with a pretty big collection of rolls. It was all willed to me after my grandma died in the fall. But I've since upgraded to the Edison Wax Tube :p:

Ok, for real now, digital music files. I use iTunes (because I'm too lazy to use anything else) and it's all in the Apple Lossless format.
 
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