So a while back I was deciding which lossless format to rip all my CDs in since I decided to go the lossless route (where as before I was ripping my music in 192kbs LAME MP3.

I for one am a huge fan of Mp3 and what it has done with the industry and sharing and everything. Artists that would never be known could easily spread their music across the world via the internet. I have been a dedicated fan of mp3 since I discovered it back in 1998, and with the exception of momentarily pushing into TwinVQ, I pretty much been focused on mp3 and mp3 alone, the only problem was how many bits per second to archive :)

This day an age, with hard drive space becoming cheaper than a night out, I decided to step it up a notch and go with lossless, offering you the same quality of a CD, DVD, or whatever, but with still some compression. the problem was that mp3 'per se' didn't have a lossless format.

Mp3 never was really made to be lossless, mainly it was to compress and send, removing a lot of stuff that isn't even heard by humans. Though if you listen closely you can hear the glassy sound in some instances.

I decided to go with FLAC as opposed to mp4/aac because mainly it was a free open codec (hence, Free Lossless Audio Codec) Now why is that important to all those non-techie people? because it is open and free to the public, where proprietary codecs have licensing fees.

So why not Mp3HD? Well, that is one reason. Another reason it is fairly new. But probably the main reason is its limitations and confusion. Confusion meaning that the extension is STILL mp3. So in your collection, the only way you can tell the difference is by the size or playing it, being you have the plug-in.

Finally, its limitations; I am a big EDM collector, thus meaning I have a lot of mixes as one music file, meaning I could have one music file ranging from 30 seconds to 3 hours (yes I have one that long). In order for mp3hd to stay backwards compatible, it apparently stores the lossless music data in the ID3v2 portion of the lossy mp3 file which is limited to 256mb, thus defeating any chances of holding music over 25 minutes or so. I even tried encoding a mix and that just caused the encoder to end. No go for me...

I guess this day and age, we don't need anymore codecs, especially ones trying to keep a popular format alive or flexible. Though the proprietary formats need to stop all together, especially those with DRM