Am I correct that the only "lossless" i.e. perfect CD quality, download format is WAV?

If not, please briefly explain how to get the highest quality (for archive and final playback over high-end home audio system).

Thanks

WAV is uncomressed data, so there should be a minimum loss in quality (none if you used the proper setup).

However, these files are usually quite big and therefore hardly found on the internet.

If you want high quality compressed files, you could do a search on OGG Vorbis or MP3Pro, I blieve those are good formats to preserve high quality and have a high compression.

Do you mean I should search this forum for info on those formats, or when I download I should search for files in those formats?

Do you have suggestions about clients and/or sites and/or searches where I will find a good inventory of very high quality music files to download?

Thanks again!

I meant that you could do a search in this forum on these formats (search string) adn learn more about it (how it works, other user's experiences etc.)

I do not know any sites where you can legally download music and as for illegal sites, those are not allowed on this forum, not even requesting such, so I assume you are after legal downloads and for that I hope someone else has an answer.

KaZaA, Morpheus, LimeWire, WinMX to name just a few.
Try to search for mp3 @download.com

Using CDex, Nero Wave Editor, Sound Forge you'll be able to convert your mp3s or whatever to WAVs, if you want to.

Use Google search to find things

No.

There are several lossless compression formats out there for audio. My personal favorite is Monkey's Audio, which uses the .APE extension. I use it to smoosh 24/96 vinyl rips to about 50-60% of their original size.

It's a shame that there is no hardware playback support for lossless, since you would be able to fit 100 minutes or more (depending on the style of the music) on an 80 minute disc with no loss in quality. Failing that, you can easily gain the benefits of storing audio as data with full-blown EDC/ECC without losing disc capacity.

Links to Monkey's and others can be found here:
http://home.pi.be/~mk442837/

When you decompress a file that has been losslessly compressed with one of these utilities (or play a compressed file in Winamp by means of a third-party plugin), you get exactly the same .WAV data out that was originally put in. Essentially they do for audio what Winzip and WinRAR do for data files.

About file sharing: Something that I have seen done is that people decompress their MP3 collection into WAV so that they meet shared GB requirements on certain file-sharing networks. So I don't bother wasting the time downloading that stuff.

I've grown tired of the quality roller coaster that is file sharing so I only download from official, legal MP3/OGG/whatever sites.

What for ?

Recording an AM radio on a 24/96 digital recorder won't give you 24/96 digital sound quality...

BTW, the best lossy encoder is MusePack (MPC).

I prefer Vorbis, since I usually use bitrates like 96/128 kbps.

All this 192 kbps stuff is too rich for my taste!

Coming Soon
MusePack.org is still very new, this page is under construction.
Check back soon.

This sounds very promissing

From http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/links.p...iewslink&sid=6 ,