BEST GNU Audio Format ?

[action_owl]

I am looking to convert my entire .mp3 collection
over to something more GNU friendly, any suggestions?
What are my options?

[Silpheed2K]

MP4 is proprietary isn't it? (don't exactly know much about some of the others listed)
There's no need to convert MP3s if you can just play them.
FLAC is good if you're ripping off of CDs and want lossless quality.. it usually reduces the size of the file by 20% if you compare it to an uncompressed version.
MP3 isn't CD quality of course and is a lossy format. Decompressing a MP3 file to WAV still isn't CD quality because the quality was lost when you compressed it to MP3. (for those who don't know)
Yeah, lately I've been experimenting a little with audio formats. If you can play the MP3s then I suggest you keep them because you don't want to lose more quality recompressing them.

[tch]

http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg

[RupertPupkin]

Missing option: .snd

[stevea]

flac is lossless - a required feature for storing audio.
Ogg gets excellent subjective fidelity for the bandwidth - needed for broadcast.
Isn't mp4 more of a 'container' method for various encodings ?
I'm fairly unaware of the advantages of the rest.

[Vector]

MP4 is a container, which, according to mp4 standards, can encompass one of two codecs: Mp3 or AAC. AAC is the successor to the mp3 standard. AAC has the best sound-per-byte quality, and is not proprietary.

Don't use ogg; almost nothing supports it in the real world (devices/hardware).
Don't use FLAC; you don't need it.

Ogg and flac are specialty codecs made for a specific type of purpose, neither of which is your purpose. Go with AAC. Some mp3 players support AAC. Oh, and by the way, i still recommend using MP3 over aac for portability reasons. Slipheed has a good point also about not converting them for reasons that they are already lossy.

There is a sound converter that you can use to convert entire directories all at once. Try:

yum -y install soundconverter

And while we are at it: h264 video is the successor to divx/xvid; so that is the video codec you would want to use if you ever do video projects.