What is the highest-quality audio file format? Like what is the best for the best sound quality?

Question

And if my songs are in a lower quality format, can i just convert them to the highter quality format, or do i have to import them all again?

Answer 1

Arguably, it's either FLAC or AAC

You can convert them, but they'd still be low-quality, just in a hi-quality container. Re-rip them to enjoy higher quality.

Think of it this way: when you "rip" the CD, you're "condensing" the content into a "bottle" (MP3 format, for instance). If you just convert MP3 to, say, AAC, you pretty much just swapped bottles, the quality of the "content" did not change. If you re-rip the CD into AAC directly, you did not go through a low-er quality step, and thus you'd enjoy the higher quality to start with. Get it?

EDIT: Quite a few people seem to think Ogg Vorbis is lossless. Wrong. It's a LOSSY format like MP3. Hearing tests shows it being quite good, but doesn't beat HE-AAC or FLAC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_vorbis

Answer 2

1. Vorbis is a lossless audio format that is open source.
http://www.vorbis.com/

2. The sound quality will *NOT* improve by going to a higher quality format. What you start with is what you've got. Sorry.

3. If you have the songs in a higher quality format then you can reimport them and the sound quality will improve.

Answer 3

No you can't just upconvert them, you'd have to re encode all your music from the source, I think the highest is .ogg, it's something like that, .ogg it isn't all that common. I encode music with .mp3 at 320kbps.

Answer 4

.ogg is the best, but it doesn't play on itunes; I would get something else.

Answer 5

realtek