Lossless Music Files

[Terminal Frost]

I have been downloading Pink Floyd bootlegs and RoIOs for a while now in mp3 format, but I now have people (on other forums) saying that I should use lossless (.flac or .shn) as they are much better.

I have no idea how to use these lossless files, if you go to the Echoes Hub (http://www.echoeshub.com) you can see that I need to download some software to download their lossless RoIOs & VoIOs.
I don't think I have any software which will allow me to play .flac or .shn files.

I need some help!

[Soapie]

Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/)

[Bail]

Or download high quality MP3's at 320k/bits

[Terminal Frost]

It doesn't matter what the bit-rating of an mp3 is because I can covert it to 320kbps easily, and bootlegs tend to be at 128-192kbps to keep the file sizes down.

[wyrd_fish]

converting a 192 kbps mp3 file to a 320 kbps mp3 file doesn't equal better quality

it needs to be ripped at higher quality from the origional source


mp3 is a lossy compresion method, this means that some of the quality/detail is lost and can not be recovered


similarly, converting your mp3s to flacs will not improve their quality, they too need to be ripped from the origional medium

[Terminal Frost]

I dont want to convert mp3 to lossless, I want to download lossless.

[ForgetNorway]

There are WinAmp plugins for SHN and FLAC, or you can use a player such as Foobar2000 mentioned earlier.

If you're going to burn CDs then Nero supports FLAC directly, or you can get plenty of software from http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html

SHN is more of a faff, but still fairly simple - see http://www.etree.org/shncom.html for the necessary software.