Geeky question: audio codecs

Ssaliss

I've recently copied a couple of albums to my phone to listen to during those long, boring hours of work (and before anyone asks, yes, that's perfectly legal over here). Of course, with phones not having an endless amount of memory, I'd rather compress things as much as possible while retaining the audible quality of the files (I don't really have amazing headphones, so odds are it can be reduced a fair bit without it being noticable). I'll be using ffmpeg to do that, but I'm not really much of an audiophile so: which codec should I choose? I'm feeling kinda lost with ~150 codecs to play with...

Altrea

Most of the time, you'll really be fine with MP3@320, but that is a lossy codec. If you're going for compressed lossless, you really can't beat FLAC.

EDIT: Command line stuff for you since you're using FFMPEG -

ffmpeg -i audio.xxx -c:a flac audio.flac

EDIT2: Side note, this mainly depends on ffmpeg being compiled with support for FLAC, which it might not (I think the OSX Homebrew and Ubuntu/Debian Apt versions don't actually have it compiled in, but I might be wrong). If that's the case, MP3 really isn't that bad with a high enough bitrate.

Ssaliss

While I'm sure FLAC is awesome in all its lossless glory, it also inflates the filesize by roughly 500%.

Altrea

Ssaliss said:

While I'm sure FLAC is awesome in all its lossless glory, it also inflates the filesize by roughly 500%.

... What the bloody crap are you converting from? FLAC is fairly average for lossless at 40-60% compression. Unless you're converting from a highly compressed lossy format already, in which case it's probably where you want it with this question anyway and you should just encode as MP3, you should see a drop, not a 500% increase.

EDIT: Seriously though, as much flak as it gets, MP3 isn't that bad for loss unless you just reencode it over and over and over.

ffmpeg -i input.xxx -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 320k output.mp3

Ssaliss

My process was: Put in CD, press copy, success. Odds are it was encoded as MP3, yeah, and the quality is fine (it's not as if I'm expected to hear a realistic orchestra in a headset connected to a phone though); it's just a question of finding a better one. But if MP3 is the way to go, then yeah, it's where I already want it, I guess.

Orventa

In the past, I've burned flac with toast to cd, that was mostly for gift cds to old friends of mine. mp3@320 is fine too.