Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sapnho]

Matt recently wrote that given the lower CPU load and the almost negligible difference in compression, he would recommend to encode APE files in "normal" (at least that's what I understood you saying, Matt ). I am running my audio jukebox on a relatively slow EPIA system and was wondering if it was worthwhile to re-encode the files from "high" to "normal". Have any issues doing that been encountered?

[GHammer]

I haven't noticed a huge difference in size using 'Normal'.
In fact, I recompressed some 3.97 High to 3.99 Normal and on average, the files gain around 5-10 Mb.

There is a different thread floating around about a possible problem in recompressing from one level to another. Personally I have not seen the problem.

I never noticed a big CPU hit to begin with while playing APEs, so for me that alone would not have been worth the effort.

Is it worth it for you? Don't know. I just like to stay current and did a few at a time until all my old version APEs were in 3.99 Normal.

[sapnho]

The thing is that I needed to verify all my APEs (~23k) and that takes about a week on my machine running non stop. So after some cleaning up of filenames, I thought what the heck, I might as well bring them all up to 3.99 and convert them from "high" to "normal" in order to further reduce system resources (scarce asset on my EPIA board ).

As I understood it, the thread with the reported problems had something to do with an external tagging utility being used which wasn't 100% compatible and screwed things up. I have only used MC and MA with APEs, so there is no risk of contamination there.

The only APE problems that I had were related to files which had a few seconds of complete silence in it. These files showed as corrupted in MA verify and I believe they are the result of some negligent homebrewing on my part where I mistakenly used a 40 instead of an 80 cable on two IDE drives. Althought the system should have picked that up, about 1% of the files ended up being corrupted. The good side of it is that I keep two sets of external backups so restoring was easy.

I also noticed that during the APE2APE conversion process all the tags from MC are completely maintained! I do hope that there are no other side effects of the conversion process that I may have overlooked. If there is anything I should watch out for, please let me know. Thanks!

[Alex B]

Just update your backups first.

I don't think MC will make any kind of hidden corruption to your files if you are afraid that you will later discover something unexpected.

However, you could first make a few test files and find out if there is any practical difference in the CPU usage.

[sapnho]

Just update your backups first.

Well, no. That's exactly the trick. I did that once before and what happened was (pre MC and MA days) that I backed up a corrupted file system. So I ended up with a corrupted back-up of a corrupted system. Great!

I now have two sets of backup which I update about every 3-6 months, so time enough to find out if my orginal files are playing correctly or not. There are so many things that can go wrong  (and I have seen a good share of it) that it makes a lot of sense to carefully think through your back-up strategy.

I have in excess of 23k files and safeguarding them is much for more important for me than having to re-rip the last 50 albums if that should ever happen.

Been there, done it!