winamp

yes, the pros include my mom bringing fresh Ogg’s every week and we recycle them. con would be the pill on top of the fridge.

I love flac – but I actually don’t listen to flacs directly very often. “Whaa!?”, you ask?

Flac is a great archival format because it is lossless – which means I can convert all my music into whatever format I currently use with whatever I perceive to be the best encoder at the moment. And when a better format/encoder comes out, I can simply reencode from the original flac. Whereas if my original file was mp3 (like the free ones Sub Pop gives me when I buy vinyl!), reencoding to the new hotness (e.g. ogg) would be converting a lossy format to a lossy format.. and at that point, you might as well save some money and replace Jack Endino with his lesser known (and arguably tone-deaf) cousin Walter Endino.

I’m a Debian GNU/Linux user – for encoding I use grip as a frontend to the aptly-named ‘flac’ encoder/decoder. When I do listen to flacs, its usually with SqueezeCenter or audacious.

I don’t use ogg containers and unless you can only be “core” if you don’t know what “core” means, then I’m probably not.

(Does this mean you might give me free flacs if I buy vinyl in the future? That’s be awesome!)

i use itunes for my flac. i had to install a plugin and whatnot, but it enables me to listen to flac on my computer or convert to apple lossless or m4a for an ipod easily.

Very similar to dannf: I use Ubuntu and rip my CDs to FLAC with grip for archiving. I listen to them with SqueezeCenter and Amarok. Currently transcoding to AAC for iPod use.

I use songbird. It’s awesome, never had a file it didn’t play and never had a problem with it

Windows XP: Foobar2000
Mac OS: Cog
Linux: Amarok

I really love FLAC, but I use iTunes so extensively that I usually transcode them to ALACs so I can bundle my nicely tagged files with all my other iTunes files. Lossless is seriously underused and is one of the major reasons that I still support cancer-causing, landfill-lovin’ compact discs. Though vinyl still rules them all. It sounds a bit strange to say that I want to hear Wolf Eyes’ crisp, audiophile recordings, doesn’t it?

But we plan on offering FLAC sales from the site as soon as we get our encoding squared away. We may have to charge more due to bandwidth costs—is it worth a couple extra bucks? I imagine it would be to not be locked into MP3 going forward. In any case, we’d make the FLAC available to folks who’ve already purchased MP3s from the site.

Offering FLAC via our vinyl download codes would be very cool, but I’d need to review our bandwidth usage and costs before we could commit to it. I think we do few enough downloads that it should work out, but we need to be careful since our vinyl costs are already pretty high.

I use Songbird for all my music, FLAC is definitely worth a few extra dollars it rules.

oh yeah and I’m on ubuntu intrepid ibex

Like dannf, I don’t actually listen to FLAC files. I use them to make 320 kbps AAC files for my iPod, then I keep the original FLAC files, should I decide to re-encode them in a different format, or burn an audio CD.

Listening: iTunes
Encoding: Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/)
System: Mac OS X Leopard

I’ve used Songbird, and while it looks like it has a lot of potential, its current incarnation seems buggy and bloated. It also doesn’t do gapless playback, which is pretty important.

For Me, FLAC = Archival Format

Like dannf, I don’t actually listen to FLAC files. I use them to make 320 kbps AAC files for my iPod, then I keep the original FLAC files, should I decide to re-encode them in a different format, or burn an audio CD.

Listening: iTunes/iPod
Encoding: Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/)
System: Mac OS X Leopard

I’ve used Songbird, and while it looks like it has a lot of potential, its current incarnation seems buggy and bloated. I find the browser component a huge waste of resources, and would much prefer that they simply offer extensions that better integrate the application with Firefox. It also doesn’t do gapless playback, which is pretty important.

Dean H: if I bought some Sub Pop vinyl, and was offered a choice between a free MP3 download, and a FLAC download for a nominal fee to cover bandwidth (say $1), I would take the FLAC download in a heart beat.

Sorry. :(

I usually encode using the base flac.exe (just flac on Linux) with the -8 flag (takes longer to convert initially, but decompression happens faster and works on lower end hardware better (read: mp3 devices, hacked iPods). EAC does this for me when ripping on windows, grip on Linux.

I’m torn on the ogg container issue – haven’t fallen on either side of the fence with that. It seems to be of greatest benefit with streaming, which I don’t do.

I DO use vorbis-comment though, and copiously tag all my stuff.

And I only listen to FLAC files. I definitely prefer the sound quality, and the ability to make transcodes nicely for when I need them (rare, but occasionally necessary).

I’m willing to pay 1-2 dollars more for vinyl + flac than I would a CD – its the best of both worlds and I realize it costs more on the backend. More than $2 and I’d probably stick with CDs most of the time though.

If I bought download-only music I’m sure I’d pay more for flac, but I’m just not that hip/green/young/whatever.

flac is such a killer, when i discovered it i ripped most of my cds to flac and gave them away. of course i kept my vinyls. for the file format: container = metadata = good thing, i really do miss the cover, credits and lyrics of the cds i sold. so the more metadata you supply the better. transcoding of lossy formats is the devil (try it three times with a medium bitrate and any give song, listen to the result), hence flac = future. i use any platform i need, os x preferred but that’s not what my job pays me for.

I would love to have flac included in the vinyl.

I play all mine in foobar/winamp.

Most people in the taping scene share in flac, because degradation of quality is the worst thing that can happen when you find a rare bootleg, or recording.

I’m not familiar with ogg to be honest.

I would definitely use the flac if suppop can afford it!

I spelled sub pop wrong on their own site. I really messed that one up…

Exact audio copy does a great job for a frontend to flac in win. It does accuracy checking against a database of other rips to determine the quality of the rip you just performed. Wouldn’t matter as much to you if you are the first ripping it, but could provide future flac encodes an official source to compare to. It also tests checksums to make sure, in the least, that your rip from your source media is as good as possible; thus, the only thing stopping it from being the perfect rip would be scratched media, etc.

ExactAudioCopy is excellent.
FlacDrop or Multi-FrontEnd also work great.

I bought 2 × 1TB hard drives and have backed up all my CDs onto those. Only $200 now!

If you want to get cool, mount your stored FLAC files as mp3-on-the-fly using this:
http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/
(requires Linux or Cygwin on Windows and a willingness to use the command line)
I can then stream all my FLAC files as mp3 at work.

-J_Tom_Moon_79

I guess I’m a little late to the party here, but I only went on to the Sub Pop web site to complain about the low quality of the mp3s offered as downloads included with vinyl when I saw this. I think it’s great that FLAC will be an option as it is easily the best digital format out there and I really hope to see it offered along with vinyl.

As for pricing, I think people would be willing to pay a small premium for FLAC, though if you make it too high and the price of the download is close to that of a CD, then I would rather just buy the CD. Beyond the fact that you are able to get instant gratification from a digital download, I really fail to understand why they should be priced so close to a physical CD when they have less cost than a physical product. As for downloads included with a vinyl purchase I think I would be willing to pay a small premium to download FLAC over mp3 (small meaning $1 to $2).

I also use FLAC for archiving purposes and convert the files to WMA Lossless to play in Windows Media Player, just since I’m so used to WMP. As for encoding, EAC is great and offers a ton of options but I found it is not too user-friendly. Instead, I use dBpoweramp which is a great program that comes with a lot of other useful utilities.

That’s what vinyl and CDs are for. :-)

And to begin with, shame on all of you for needing something beyond those two formats.

I use the flac format for streaming to my soundbridge so i can listen it on the stereo( I’ve ripped all my cd’s to flac)