Print

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

[jazzrome]

Looking at all the compress types and my question why compress audio files that have to be uncompressed on the fly to play. I can see in the past with the cost of hard drives but hard drive are dirt cheep now is there a real reason to compress the files now. I do not see a way to make a direct one to one copy of a CD unless I am burning it to a other CD and keep the meta data.

[Matt]

Lossless compression offers data integrity checking and tagging.  Not to mention it saves half the space.

[BernhardS]

I think ripping with uncompressed wave encoder should be a one to one copy?

[glynor]

Lossless compression offers data integrity checking and tagging.  Not to mention it saves half the space.

+1

No downside, all upside.

[fauxfreshness]

Looking at all the compress types and my question why compress audio files that have to be uncompressed on the fly to play. I can see in the past with the cost of hard drives but hard drive are dirt cheep now is there a real reason to compress the files now. I do not see a way to make a direct one to one copy of a CD unless I am burning it to a other CD and keep the meta data.

A couple things on this.  First, the CPU time and RAM used to decompress files on the fly can be countered by all the I/O required to play the continuous 1.4 Mbps stereo stream of 16-bit/44.1 kHz in WAV or AIFF.  Second, WAV tagging support is terrible at best across different applications and devices (I tag a lot for samples and DJ stuff) so you end up with AIFF which may not even have direct support on portable devices you would want to use.  Now, I use AIFF because of DJ/mixing and audio production applications, and it was how I ended up with the JRiver application to begin with a week or two ago.  LOL  But because of how stupid Android can get with AIFF files (no native support, but there are applications that will support it and chew up even more CPU time in the process) I decided to read a bit on FLAC.  I went with that since it is natively supported, and it's supposed to reconstruct the compressed data into the original source.  I also figured there's more chance of that getting support in high end car stereos I'm more likely to get, and it works fine at all the sample rates and bit depths I'm concerned with for now.  I still use AIFF, but that's just going to stay in a different location on my main system so I can drag and drop those files (while retaining the tagging) without going to Audacity or something and having tags get mangled or dropped.  I imagine a lot of these applications will support FLAC soon enough anyway...

[Peter Engrav]

I'm another big fan of lossless compression. I use FLAC with the following command line: --best --verify --replay-gain --padding=8188 --totally-silent. It's true that hard disk space seems to get cheaper and cheaper but IO (especially when it's wireless or internet) can still be dear. I've a feeling that if my Sonos players were throwing around 2x the data (I'm hand-waving and assuming that I get 50% compression) they do today I'd be getting a decent amount of glitching. And when I started trying copy music and books on tape over the internet to the PC in my parent's basement (my kids are (foolishly, on my part) addicted to listening to books while going to sleep) (or for that matter paying attention to how long Carbonite was taking to back everything up) I very much wished that some miracle could compress (losslessly) even further.

[Vincent Kars]

I can see in the past with the cost of hard drives but hard drive are dirt cheep now is there a real reason to compress the files now.

Even if we apply a factor of 3 (files, backup 1, backup 2) the cost of storage remains low.
I do think this a valid argument

I do not see a way to make a direct one to one copy of a CD unless I am burning it to a other CD and keep the meta data.

This one I don't understand.
A CD contains 2 channel audio with a 16 bit word and a 44.1 kHz sample rate.
If you rip it to WAV, FLAC or any other lossless format you have 2 ch 16/44.1 kHz audio.

As others pointed out, tagging WAV is a problem.
The WAV tagging standard is missing a couple of crucial tags like Album and Cover Art.
A lot of media players don't support this standard or only partial.
The moment you switch to another application, you might hit problems.

As our PCs most of the time don't have ECC memory, you might have some data rot.
FLAC at least allows you to verify (should be an option in JRiver )

[astromo]

This sort of thing comes up on a regular basis.

Some useful resources to provide thought food:
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/blogs/mitchco/flac-vs-wav-vs-mp3-vs-m4a-experiment-94/
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/blogs/mitchco/flac-vs-wav-part-2-final-results-155/
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison
http://www.audiograaf.nl/downloads.html

I opt for max compression (via FLAC but there are plenty of other workable compression formats) and set MC to play audio from memory.

In short, Matt and glynor's comment work for me:

Lossless compression offers data integrity checking and tagging.  Not to mention it saves half the space.

+1

No downside, all upside.

[JimH]

I've removed some off topic speculation about licensing and split a thread on OS support for FLAC.

[jazzrome]

Sorry Jim I got on my soapbox and got off topic. But to get back on track has anyone used lossless FLAC if so does MC support the files.

[Hendrik]

FLAC is perfectly supported in MC.

[jctcom]

I use about every type of FLAC (Stereo, 5.1, 24Bit, 48 / 96 / 192KHz, and all combinations thereof) with great success!.

Still have some pesky MP3's around that I just haven't had the chance to re-rip.  But my library for anything important is long since FLAC.

Carl.

[Vocalpoint]

Sorry Jim I got on my soapbox and got off topic. But to get back on track has anyone used lossless FLAC if so does MC support the files.

100% FLAC here...6500 albums and counting. Would not have it any other way.

Cheers,

VP