Universal Media Server | Forum

In AVS Forum I asked what is the best lossless compression and this is the answer I received. AVS is an excellent place for audio and home video info. Many vendors there.

Lossless formats all sound exactly the same. I recommend FLAC, but sonically there is no difference. The exact lossless format mostly depends on your ecosystem. FLAC is vendor neutral so you're not tied into Apple, Microsoft or Google's product.

One nice new piece of information, FLAC is now supported natively in the latest Windows 10 preview. I guess Microsoft finally realized that WMA Lossless, as good as it might be, was a dead end. I wonder if Apple will ever figure that out and drop their proprietary formats?

Rip to FLAC, and then convert to lossy if needed (for instance to play on a phone listening to ear-buds). But always rip in the best format possible (so you don't have to do it all again when you realize you want lossless).

Yeah FLAC is great, been using it for many years. Vinyl often gets ripped to 24-bit FLAC too, and some bands even do 24-bit FLAC releases themselves (like NIN)

I use FLAC 24bit for nearly all my audio libary, for the exact reason you mention nickm11 it's not proprietary and across all platforms. Only thing is it's BIG in size. When i got most of my audio converted from using mp3 320kbps (I had to re-rip or download it all over again, as i found it didn't sound as good going straight from mp3 320kpbs to FLAC) to 24bit FLAC my collection size almost tripled/quadrupled, but storage is cheap these days

I've ripped to FLAC, several albums and am very happy with the results. Some sound really great and others a bit rough, so I think I'd like to suggest adding an audio equalizer to UMS, if that's possible?

I'm glad the FLAC is working for you The equalizer might be possible to do but I doubt it will get done, since most renderers have their own equalizers so I don't think it would be worth the effort.