Lossless encoding

As I have already mentioned, lossless encoders are great because they compress the audio tracks and yet manage to keep it identical to the original, when played back.

I have decided to introduce you to Monkey's Audio and FLAC. Why 2 when they both do the same thing?

Well, the first has a very good compression and it's a very good idea to use it for archival purposes but it has poor seek abilities, meaning when you jump in different places in a file, usually everything pauses for about 2-3 seconds. FLAC has no problem with this but its compression is also a bit lower, usually a 100 MB FLAC file can be compressed in 92-95 MB using the Monkey's audio encoder.

Both codecs are very easy to install, they have a setup wizard. Monkey's Audio even asks you during setup if you wish to install a plugin that allows Winamp to play the encoded files. FLAC also has a plugin for Winamp but it must be downloaded separately.

Monkey's Audio can be downloaded from Monkey's Audio site , the download section.

FLAC can also be downloaded from the downloads section on their site, the one you are looking for is called FLAC 1.1.2 for Windows with installer at the time I am writing this tutorial.

A good FLAC Winamp plugin can be downloaded from Winamp's site

Once you install the codecs, you can open them from the Programs menu.

Let's start with Monke's Audio.

As you see the interface is very easy, adding files or folders can be achieved by clicking on the Add Files icon or the Add Folder icon. The level of compression can be set by clicking on the second icon in the toolbar. The fastest (and lowest) compression is the Fast option and the slowest (and strongest) compression is called Insane. When everything is set up, all you have to do is to click on the Compress icon. If you wish to decompress some ape files (the Monkey's Audio file extension), simply add the files and click on the arrow near the Compress icon and choose Decompress. The encoded or decoded files will be saved in the same folder where the originals are.

The FLAC encoder has a similar approach :

You can add files by clicking on the Add Files button, set the level of compression from the Level slider (0 means fast, less compression and 8 means slow, maximum compression) and specify where encoded or decoded files will be saved by clicking on the button on the bottom right part of the window and selecting the output folder. If you don't have a lot of free space on the drive, you can check the option to automatically Delete input files as soon as a track is encoded. You may have guessed already, click Encode to encode an audio track or Decode to decode it.

This page was viewed by 518 people. It belongs to the Ripping and Encoding Audio CD's tutorial, listed in the audio category. Print this tutorial.