Lossless Audio Compression : Ben on Shorten

I sent this over to IP but it didn't get posted so here it is:
The subject of lossless encoding is important and gains increasing relevance with a move towards broadband where a faster connection means you would download a 20MB song.
Although MP3 and related formats such as OGG Vorbis compress sound files incredibly well, the loss of fidelity is still discernible.

FLAC and to a certain extent Shorten fill the market niche between lossy audio playback and uncompressed streams.

See the etree page where FLAC is discussed as superior format:
http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FLAC
Here's some of the bullet points.
# Less restrictive licensing (FLAC and associated plugins are released under the GPL)
# Better compression (between 5 and 15% better than Shorten)
# Support for 24 bit audio (and beyond!)
# The ability to embed ID3-style tags within the audio file (useful for storing important information such as artist, song, source, recordist, etc.)
# Integrated checksums (no more .md5 files necessary but, they sure don't hurt to have.)

The support for 24 bit audio is important.

Also FLAC was recently moved into the Xiph.Org Foundation's efforts:
http://xiph.org/ogg/flac.html

Since September of 1998, when Fraunhofer IIS sent out 'letters of infringement' to several MPEG audio layer 3 development projects, and focus quickly changed to develop an alternative to mp3. The Ogg Vorbis project was born.

While we were busy working on our own stuff, several projects popped up to embrace different aspects of open and free multimedia. One of the most impressive was FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC does what Squish was supposed to do. More importantly, with version 1.1.0 now released to the universe, it's a more-than-capable full-featured codec that's ready for prime-time.
[...]
Today, The FLAC project joins the Xiph.Org Foundation. FLAC's mailing lists and website will be moved over to Xiph's servers in the next few days, and our collaboration will be celebrated throughout the land.

Which is great news for the free and open format enthusiasts.

Contrast this with Microsoft with Windows Media 9 (compressed format) which according to way.nu throws the whole issue of Digital Rights Management into the mix. With some very serious repercussions for the customer who plays back files in this format.

The good: Microsoft has done a lot to try to make DRM transparent (an absolute requirement for any kind of success)
The bad: the DRM solution allows the publisher complete control over rights and reuse, drastically reducing fair use and delivering no consistency of rights across publishers and media; what end-users are able to do with their media will vary greatly, creating unacceptable confusion for users.
The ugly: Content you purchase may be locked to specific playback devices, requiring you to purchase the same content for each PC and/or portable device you wish to use.