AAC / MPEG4:
- Audiocoding Home of Faac and Faad.
- Fraunhofer AAC page. Creators of part of the AAC specs. Has some info on the format.
- Nero, home of Nero Burning Rom and its AAC/HE AAC/PS AAC encoder.
- Apple iTunes high quality and free AAC encoder, ripper and player.
MP3:
- LAME MP3 encoder home page.
- HydrogenAudio's list of recommended LAME settings to produce best quality encodes at several bitrates.
- MP3-Tech MP3 and other audio compression schemes information site.
- Fraunhofer MP3 page. Lots of info, and some programs, from the creators of the format.
- MPG123 One of the best MP3 decoders, also works as a player. Open source and LGPLd.
- MAD: MPEG Audio Decoder. a great MP3 decoder, open source and GPLd
- MP3 decoders comparisons - lots of quality tests with popular MP3 decoders.
Ogg Vorbis:
- The Xiph.Org Foundation The developers of Ogg, Vorbis, and other multimedia formats.
- Ogg Vorbis oriented site. News and info on the format
- Icecast is an audio broadcasting system that streams music in the Ogg Vorbis format.
- Sjeng - home of Garf`s tuned Ogg Vorbis encoder (GT3), Vorbis gain, GT2, and Floggy (4kbps Vorbis encoder)
Lossless Compression:
- Wavpack lossless compression scheme home site
- Monkey's Audio lossless compression scheme home site
- Flac lossless compression scheme home site
- OptimFrog lossless compression scheme home site
- First Principles' lossless compression schemes comparison.
- A lossless comparision focusing more on features than compression and speed.
Other:
- Winamp the most popular multimedia player. Plays all these audio formats and many more through plugins.
- foobar2000: High quality advanced media player by former Winamp plugin dev, Peter Pawlowski.
- XMMS best audio player for Linux
- Shibatch audio tools great pieces of audio-related software.
- CD-rw.org: One of the largest CD-R and audio compression related websites.
- Nero Plugins by Mausau - a huge collection of audio plugins for Nero Burning Rom.
- Exact Audio Copy Best CD ripper, has an advanced error detection scheme.
- Oldversion.com "Because newer is not always better..."
