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[Matt]

From NetDog: (sent as a private message originally)

I have a question about Media Center 10 - actually a few.  I am about to pay for it, but need to know the following first.

1) I have been ripping at 1411 (uncompressed WAV).  Would I lose ANYTHING by converting the files to lossless WMA?  From those, can MC10 easily write Audio CDs (my CD players don't support WMA), and can it easily move my WMAs as MP3s to my iPod, which also doesn't support WMA (but does support MP3, MP4 and, ugh, WAV - which is really too big for a 20gb player).

2) How seamless is the above process if the sources are WAVs and if they are WMAlossless instead?

3) I assume that I can convert my library (right now it is about 100gb on a 320gb drive) in one command...true?

The program really looks great.  I just downloaded 10 (had been using an evaluation of 9 for about a week).  How solvent is JRiver?  Are you going to be here in 5 years?  Once I get the wireless media connector for my TV/Sky+/Stereo, I assume this should work quite well with that.  When I listen from my laptop, are the files kept in their original format or compressed?  How much bandwidth does a WAV require? An MPEG-2 video file?

Make me a customer!

Thomas

[Matt]

I'd recommend APE (Monkey's Audio) for lossless.  Other than the name, there is no monkey business like forced normalization, DRM, etc. that you have with WMA.

If you search here on the topic, you'll find a few useful discussions.

[netdog]

Okay, let's add APE to the above questions.  I am looking to do the above as easily as possible, while archiving something close to or the same as the original source so I can put my CDs out in the shed where they belong.  Is MC the right program to do this?  The Monkey's Audio site doesn't mention MC on there site.  How well does it integrate with your libraries?  I am also wary of adopting a format that will be orphaned one day.

[salsbst1]

Matt is the creator of the APE format -- it integrates perfectly with MC.

There's no need to worry about whether or not the APE format is going to live long and prosper.  That's the beauty of lossless... you can always convert to some other format without losing anything.  It's not "close to lossless", it is lossless.

Good luck on the solvency question!

[Matt]

You can't get orphaned with lossless because you can always convert back to the original WAV or to a different lossless format.

To answer your above questions:

1) No, you will actually gain some things -- like the ability to verify the files (since strong MD5 checking is built into APE) and the ability to tag them. (things WAV files don't do)

2) Should be seamless

3) Yes

[KingSparta]

I wonder if this NetDog works in Atlanta, With A Talk Radio Show.

[netdog]

Just so I have this straight before I pull the trigger.

You are suggesting that I convert the library to APE, and rip in APE in the future.

I can then burn Audio CDs, MP3 CDs and link my iPod via MCenter, which will then dump the APEs there as MP3s as well (or MP4s -- not much difference to me there).

How much space will I save with APE?  I am used to using SHNs for all my Grateful Dead soundboards, and might start putting them on the drive as APE too.  Does MC support SHN?

As for Atlanta, this Netdog is a Yank in London.  

[salsbst1]

MC supports shorten (I think you may have to download a plugin, but it's not a big hassle or anything).

APE is substantially more efficient spacewise than shorten.  I don't convert Dead bootlegs from shorten to APE, though, because I like to put them back out on furthurnet from time to time.

[EpF]

How much space will I save with APE?

I think APE files average at between 50% and 60% of the original file size.  In my recent ripfest I was seeing file sizes as low as 35% and as big as 70%...

[paulr]

APE is fantastic.  I get an average of about a 45% decrease in file size over WAV.

One thing I hated about using SHN files is that I never had luck searching, skippiing or fastforwarding through them (is this called indexing?).  APE does this perfectly.

[urlwolf]

Can someone post a comparative APE/FLAC?

[salsbst1]

On the speed and size issues, this is a nice analysis: http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm  (that's APE down there in yellow at the lower right on the graphs )

EDIT: I don't know what made me say the following...Note that this is compression speed, not decompression.  If you're concerned about the speed with which you'll be able to convert APE to MP3 for portable usage, these graphs won't address it.

[urlwolf]

On the speed and size issues, this is a nice analysis: http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm  (that's APE down there in yellow at the lower right on the graphs )

Note that this is compression speed, not decompression.  If you're concerned about the speed with which you'll be able to convert APE to MP3 for portable usage, these graphs won't address it.

Actually, DEcompressing is the rightmost graph, right?
This is interesting.  All the music-specific algorithms do better than rar. No surprise there. The king of compression rate is the slowest (LA), fine.

so if I'm reading this right, APE on 'h' will take as long as FLAC -q5 to encode (20x), but will reduce the filesize more (55% vs 58%). Decoding times are better for decompression (50x vs 20x). Looks like both codecs are pretty even.

However, FLAC is the one I would prefer:
" FLAC is designed to put most of the processing on the encoding side, which is only done once, whereas the adaptive codecs take as long to decode as encode. FLAC is more suited in this way for playback on low-power devices and is one of the reasons it is the only lossless codec with any kind of hardware support."

-urlWolf

[kiwi]

For getting your music onto an iPod (and my laptop, ape's take up a bit of space) I use the "Tools-->Library Tools-->Convert Format..." option to make copies to MP3.  Basically, I keep my source library as APEs, and create a second MP3 library with a bitrate between 128 and 160 for the laptop and iPod.  It seems to work really well for me.  I can do a conversion over night.  Just make sure that you don't have it deleting the original.

kiwi