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Which audio format do you use with Rockbox?

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Mach-X:
Vorbis q5. Maintained by the same folks as flac. And smaller filesize at recommended transparent settings than lame ie v2.

Julian67:
I use Ogg Vorbis for my music collection, both on PC and on Rockboxed players.  If I download podcasts or similar and they are mp3 or m4a or any lossy format Rockbox can play I don't transcode as it seems (at best) pointless; anything that plays is OK with me.  I notice that in recent Rockbox versions decoding the popular formats is so efficient that there's little or no difference in battery life between several different codecs.

Using Ogg Vorbis -q 7 I've not, in several years, encountered an artefact I can identify even with notorious killer samples such as trumpet or eig.  I've not tried musepack with killer samples but I have compared LAME, Vorbis, Nero AAC and WavPack Hybrid and remain content that Ogg Vorbis is as good as or better than other lossy codecs in terms of audio quality (i.e is, as far as I can tell, transparent at same or lower bitrate) and is also for me the most convenient.

Good links for killer samples: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=95552&mode=linear

btw killer samples are sections of audio that present real difficulty for lossy encoders, resulting in obvious artefacts, easily apparent even to the untrained ear, sometimes even at very high bitrates.  If you want to know how awful a lossy encoder can be then do a series of tests with trumpet and eig....it's horrible enough that you might join the Neil Young fan club.  On the other hand you'll also find that even the most challenging samples can be encoded to sound identical to the originals but it may require higher bitrates than commonly used.

mpc -q 10 (~ 350kbps) looks like overkill to me.  I think if you do some real abx tests you'll find Ogg Vorbis or LAME are transparent at substantially lower bitrates than 350, even with the most difficult samples.  Once you are aware of a variety of lossy codecs which meet your audio needs then you can make an informed choice based on all the other stuff that matters: gapless support, metadata handling, device/software compatibility, encode/decode speed, CPU useage etc.  Experience suggests that any modern lossy codec which uses a psychoacoustic model is going to achieve transparency well below 350 kbps.  This excludes WavPack Hybrid because it doesn't use a psychoacoustic model and can have audible artefacts at high bitrates, and it excludes faac because it's a long time since it was modern....LAME and Ogg Vorbis really make a lot of sense and there are good reasons why they well liked by interested people as well as by casual listeners/consumers.


--- Quote from: prankstare on April 01, 2012, 05:45:59 PM ---then I'd rather ask ourselves why we prefer original CD's or any other lossless format rather than CBR320kbps or -V 2 LAME MP3 for instance.

--- End quote ---

Your "why we prefer.." is not the universal fact that it purports to be: it's an unfounded assumption, a personal preference, a mere assertion.  As a source for transcoding then I prefer losslesss and don't care if it's on CD or flac or some other lossless file.  As far as listening goes then if I can't distinguish one source from another then, in terms of sound quality, the format or medium isn't important.

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