As storage space becomes cheaper, there's a growing trend to save digital music files in a lossless format. Such lossless formats provide an exact replication of the audio quality found in the original content, usually on CD. The resulting files are also much larger, when compared to MP3 or AAC at 128kbps or 256kpbs.

While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server.

"I recently decided to begin ripping all of my newly purchased CDs into FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec. Music files in FLAC format sound better than those using lossy compression formats such as MP3--plus, FLAC is an open standard. The only downside is that my 80GB Apple iPod doesn't play FLAC files. Happily, we can fix that..." with free software!

Most portable audio players can play music encoded in the MP3 audio format, but some consumers also have music in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, or even WMA files. How do you change from one format to another when you need to? Here are some of the best audio conversion tools available in Linux.

One of the problems we were running into in our home was the distribution of media files, specifically music... I want my music in places other than the room my desktop is in, other than the apartment my computer is in, and I don't have an mp3 player large enough for all of my files.

Listening to the music played back from original audio CDs on a home computer creates clear discomfort — the CD drive is being blocked and the CDs have to be changed again and again (unless you have a home jukebox). Now it’s time we learn to rip (grab) our own audio collection and save it to a hard disk in the form of .mp3, .ogg, or .flac files.

The application I am referring to, is called KLook. That is “look” prefixed with a “K.” What KLook does, is give you the ability to view images, text files (.txt), listen to audio and play video files from one application in a slideshow fashion.

EasyTag is a graphical utility to edit the descriptive ID3 tags for your music files. One will think primarily of MP3 files, but it also does other formats, such as Ogg, FLAC, MP4/AAC, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio files and WavPack files (APE tag).

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.

Sonata is a GTK+ music client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD).

Click the read more link for step-by-step setup instructions for both MPD and Sonata