# Vinyl Recording Project, WAV vs. FLAC and Software Miscellaeny



## mleuba (Feb 17, 2008)

Hi All!

So I am getting started to record my vinyl, not a huge amount, maybe 100 albums. 

I have the ION USB turntable, not happy with Audacity s/w (too complicated) or EZVinyl (too basic/unforgiving). I researched last week and decided on Roxio RecordNow Music Lab 10. I'm pretty happy with it, strikes the balance between the two other tools. Cheap! $29 USD. Still some improvement needed in the automatic tagging provided by Gracenotes I think. It will work correctly about 50-70% of the time. That market is still a work in progress, but I digress.

The RecordNow has a number of formats that it can output to. My plan has been to record to .flac, but I may reconsider, wanted the thoughts of the experienced ones. The alternative I'm thinking of is .wav. It seems to be the same compression based on a small sampling I have taken. Initially my thinking was .flac would be a good greatest-common-denominator, not tied to a particular proprietary market player (like MS or Apple). But then I'm thinking, you know the future surely will include tools to convert from the popular lossless formats, no matter which I pick. (BTW I added a WMP extension to allow it to recognize ("filter") .flac, works like a charm. 

So, what are the points to consider when deciding which lossless format to use as your baseline, assuming that I will need to export to Ipod on occasion, but primarily planning to stream using a future HTPC I hope to build...

Thanks! Also, I think that a new forum on HTPC subjects may be in order to specialize in this type of thing, not sure where it fits otherwise...

Appreciate hearing your thoughts and views.

Mark
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## sparky77 (Feb 22, 2008)

Have you come across this program yet?
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/audiostudio

I use an older version of Sound Forge with the vinyl pluggin, and the noise reduction pluggins, worked really well leaving in wav format and burning to cd's, which you can then later rip them to whatever compression format you decide on.


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## Otto (May 18, 2006)

One of my main reasons for using FLAC is that it supports the mp3 style tags for artist, song, album, etc. wav does not support it (at least not natively). You can easily convert FLAC to mp3 (and maintain tags), as well as to wav, etc.


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## bobgpsr (Apr 20, 2006)

I used to use FLAC with the Exact Audio Copy (EAC) gui frontend. But nowadays I tend to use WMA lossless with Windows Media Player on 64 bit VISTA -- mainly because it is simple, reliable, and takes a bit less space than FLAC.

WAV takes more than twice the storage space and no TAGS as Otto points out.


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## brucek (Apr 11, 2006)

Yeah, I use WMA-lossless. It's recognized by most players, it allows tagging, and it reduces to a decent size. I wouldn't consider WAV because of the tagging issue. FLAC doesn't have a very high recognition.

burcek


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