By Lou Dolinar
Seventh in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

There are only two kinds of digital music you can count on using universally - uncompressed WAV files and MP3s, the original music sharing format from the heyday of Napster, which typically compresses sound files by a 10-to-1 ratio.

Anything else, well, you pay your money, you take your chances. It is quite feasible to spend a week creating a library of music on one device that won't work on another. Why? Every format requires a software codec to play back. In some cases - the iPod, for example - preferred codecs aren't freely licensed to other vendors. Some, like the Musicmatch folks whose software player runs under Windows, don't bother with more than a handful of formats and don't open their software to aftermarket plug-in software. And older hardware doesn't always keep up with current standards.

Unless you want to spend endless hours re-ripping albums and converting files from one music format to another, you need a strategy for your music. In general, as we noted in previous weeks, that's going to mean storing your music in two forms: one compressed, for portability, the other without compression for playback on high quality car and home audio systems. This week we're going to look at some of the specific codecs you can use.

In essence, computers can store music files in their original form, without loss of quality, while most portable players are going to require some form of compression.

So which specific codecs and software should you use?

Apple's iTunes and the iPod give a near-universal solution with Apple's lossless compression and Apple's AAC compression standard. iTunes music thus will run on a Mac, a PC or on an iPod, and can be shared among all three. In iTunes, you can convert lossless files to lossy with a single click, even as you retain the original high- quality version. The lossless files, meanwhile, can be burned to a standard CD that you should be able to play in a normal car audio system and sound as good as the original. If you're an iTunes/iPod junkie and don't learn anything else in this article, at the very least rip your files in Apple lossless and covert them to lossy only when you need more room on your iPod.

You'll have to convert these files to non-Apple formats, however, if you prefer another software player or buy any non-Apple hardware. Some programs can deal with this internally, or you can use free software such as dBpowerAMP Converter (dbpoweramp.com).

Musicmatch Jukebox, which runs under Windows, supports WAV, MP3, WMA (but not, alas, WMA lossless) and MP3Pro, meaning no lossless formats except for WAV. There is, however, a built-in converter that will take batches of WAV files and convert them to MP3s, which was how I filled out my iTunes library while maintaining bit-perfect copies for my home system. That's the best approach for Musicmatch. The program also supports the downloading of unprotected songs to the iPod, but you can't play or buy iPod compatible copy-protected files with it.

Winamp is the oldest mainstream music player. Its internal coding is freely available, so gazillions of programmers are willing to write add-on programs called plug-ins. The good news is that these plug-ins make it far and away the most flexible player; the bad news is that the quality of the plug-ins can be spotty, and installing them can be a pain.

This weakness shows up in how its Apple codecs behave. Most mainstream Windows codec plug-ins - several MP3 versions, for example, as well as lossless formats like FLAC and APE - are bulletproof. Apple's are another matter. Some users rave about support for the iPod, including the ability to read copy-protected iTunes files, while others have had problems with the technology.

The usual strategy with Winamp is to use FLAC, or free lossless audio encoder, to save high quality files, and MP3 for compression. You can add plug-ins to read Apple files, or to convert from one format to another in batches.

Next column, more software, plus reader questions.

Compression and capacity