[Katsunami]

I've been reading some music forums to see if there are better/specialized databases for ripping classical music, and all the usual debates are still around.

I think I'm going to kill the next person who states that WAV 'still' sounds better than FLAC, or that APE has 'better overtones' than other (lossless) formats. How can people *still* debate stuff like that, after almost 15 years?

For the uninitiated: WAV, FLAC, APE (and others) are lossless music file formats. They don't suffer quality loss like an MP3 does. WAV is not compressed, and FLAC/APE are compressed (a bit like ZIP for audio). Even if you go WAV -> FLAC -> APE -> WAV, the WAV file in the end result should be exactly the same as the one you started out with, and thus there should be no difference in sound quality.

In theory, you *could* have a FLAC that sounds worse than the original WAV, if the decoder is somehow bad or buggy, but I've never experienced that.

add:
And yes, I hereby state that FLAC is the best lossless audio format, because it hasn't changed since 2007 (and older versions are trivial to convert to newer), and because it's completely open source, has the best support on non-computer devices, and basically is the de-facto standard. The only competitor would be ALAC, if, and only if you use an Apple device. APE, with only one developer, is rummaging in the margins, and other formats are used even less.