EAC Lossless Guide pt1

Introduction To Lossless Compression

Lossless compression is a way to compress your digital audio, without any loss of quality. This is not like MP3, which uses lossy compression; this means you'll never get your original audio back. The downside to using lossless compression is that you won't get compression rates similar to MP3. Roughly speaking, MP3 achieves compression ratios of approximately 80% whilst lossless will only achieve approximately 55%. Generally, for classical music you will achieve better compression ratios and for rock they will tend to not be as good.

Is EAC Configured Correctly?

The configuration guide found on the following pages assume you have a correctly configured EAC for secure mode extraction. If this isn't the case, please see the EAC configuration guides found on the following pages: Audio Tutorials.

Lossless Compressors

There are a lot of options available today with regards to lossless audio codecs. Here are some of your choices:

Monkeys Audio
Flac
WavPack
OptimFrog
Apple Lossless
TTA
Shorten
LA
LPac
WMA 10

The purposes of these pages are not to tell which you should be using, but make you aware of your choices. There are advantages and disadvantages in using one lossless codec over another. The factors worth considering are compression ratio, encoding speed, decoding speed, OS support (including playback options) and hardware support. To help with your decision, here are the results of two sets of tests:

Speeks Lossless Comparison Test
Guruboolez's Lossless Comparison Test

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