Continued from musicstorage [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7]
In the days of 33.6KB dial-up and 20GB hard drives on personal computers, the mp3 lossy-compression music format solved a problem: how to store and transmit a reasonable amount of digital audio and still preserve an acceptable level of sound quality. The use of lossy-compression is a trade-off: audio quality is sacrificed for the sake of smaller data size. Today, this data size problem still exists on portable music players that have limited capacities, such as 512MB flash players and the 4GB iPod mini.
However, with today's ubiquitous broadband access and hard drives exceeding 200GB, we've reached an interesting milestone on PCs: there is now no need to use lossy-compression for music on a PC. That means that there is no need to sacrifice sound quality to store and listen to music on a PC. To take this further (thinking along the lines of Moore's Law), by this time next year or so, there will be no need for lossy-compression on portable audio devices either. Every music-playing device will have plenty of capacity to store lots of digital audio that is either uncompressed or stored in a lossless-compression format (a format that preserves the original digital audio perfectly bit-for-bit). Excellent!
Unfortunately, there is an issue: there are several uncompressed and lossless-compression file formats, and none are as universally supported as lossy mp3. So if you want to store your music collection in a bit-perfect format, and use it on a variety of playback devices, what file format should you use? I'll document my thoughts as I investigate the options.
