Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Converting lossless to lossy (Read 16808 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #25 –
Quote from: romor on
I want to save some space on my hard disk, by encoding some of my lossless files (FLAC/TAK (cc) net releases, around 100GB) to lossy
I don't plan to backup burn DVDs, and I was thinking which codec profile should I choose while seeking for fine space and quality ratio

Basically I'm interested in this: which codec and profile would you choose if you need to convert you lossless files while losing them irreversibly

Thanks


If you're in the US you can get a 1.5 T Seagate drive at Fry's for $87 which will hold a LOT of FLAC files.

G²

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #26 –
Quote from: Notat on
Quote from: SCOTU on
Upgrading storage inside a laptop is as simple as buying an external hard drive instead and plugging it in.  Done.  Use a hybrid lossy format put the lossys on your internal like you'd be planning now, but then keep the correction files on the external so when you're desked you have lossless and have the ability to recode to a different format in the future.

Some people might not want to haul around that second drive. A system with two drives is twice as likely to have a failure. Infant mortality means new drives have higher failure rates than used ones. The rest of your response demonstrates that these other costs are real and it is not a ridiculous estimate to say they are greater than the retail cost of the raw disk space.

Record keeping is for the backups. Backups are not useful unless you know what's backed up where. A lot of work goes into designing and maintaining a robust storage system. If you're overlooking this, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise some day.


That's the thing.  You don't have to lug around an extra drive.  That's why the hybrid mode is awesome.  A system with two drives is more likely to experience a failure.  However, an older drive is more likely to fail than a newer one, so data on the newer one is less likely to be lost than just compressing your data to fit on the older one.  The time it takes to copy the files to a new drive no worse than the time to convert the files to a lossy format on the same drive, so although it can take a few hours to fill an entire hard drive, it isn't actually losing you any time.  Power consumption of a hard drive is extremely negligible, and like I said, if somehow you managed to get a hard drive to be continuously under load for 24 hours a day every day for the 5 years it's expected to live for, you can get an additional cost that ~1/2 the retail price.  Let's be realistic.  The cost at most is going to be 10% of that.  I will concede that over the lifetime of the harddrive you may average a couple dollars of extra electricity usage.

What you gain by adding an additional Hard drive: the ability to keep files in lossless, meaning that you still have the original to make backups from, convert to newer required formats, etc.  You retain the ability to keep a laptop internal's mobility with a smaller filesize in a lossy amount, while not losing the lossless.  You gain the ability to greatly expand your collection or anything else on your computer.  (If you go with an external/ internal+enclosure) You gain the ability to share your library with more than just one computer or even put it on a NAS server. 

What you gain by not adding an additional hard drive and converting to lossy: save $50-70 until you need more HDD space anyways.


as for backups, eh, it's about the same.  I don't see a significant difference.  Doesn't even matter for me, I can't afford to backup anyways.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #27 –
Quote from: SCOTU on
What you gain by adding an additional Hard drive: the ability to keep files in lossless, meaning that you still have the original to make backups from, convert to newer required formats, etc.

as for backups, eh, it's about the same.  I don't see a significant difference.  Doesn't even matter for me, I can't afford to backup anyways.
I don't want to say something horrible, because it's not fair, but I think one day you'll realise this verges on OCD: suggesting that lossless is important, yet not backing it up. It's completely irrational.


I think another way of looking at lossy is this: if you had the chance to buy a 1.5TB drive for $100, or an otherwise identical $3TB drive for $100, which would you buy? For most people, that's exactly what lossy coding does for them - it lets them store twice as much stuff. It makes no other difference to them. The "but it's not really lossless" argument is about as relevant to them as saying "but the magnetic particles inside the drive that you'll never see are a slightly different colour" - they care about whether it works, and whether they can hear the music properly.

By the time you get to the level of lossyWAV, it's more like "why wouldn't you do it?" - sensible answers being "I can't be bothered", "My music is already such a small percentage of the data I store that I wouldn't even notice the difference", and maybe "I want to be able to burn a bit-accurate copy of the original CD which I can then re-verify with AccurateRip." The more common answer is "I'm worried it might cause an audible change in some context at some point with some music" - which is fair enough, but it's also irrational: if you're that sensitive to potential faults in sound, you shouldn't be buying modern CDs or listening to the radio or watching TV because 99.9% of it will already be 10000x worse than anything lossyWAV will ever do.

Then again, we're all free to be irrational at times!

Cheers,
David.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #28 –
Quote from: Notat on
Quote from: DonP on
Seriously, these days your 100 GB amounts to $5 worth of disk space, though you have to buy in larger quantity.

This is just retail cost for the drive. The majority of the cost for storage is actually in the management of it - time, risk and other resources spent copying, backing up, record keeping, dealing with media failures; electricity to power the device and supporting equipment; support hardware for housing, controlling, powering and cooling.

For instance, to upgrade storage inside a laptop requires that you replace the drive, reinstall the OS, and copy everything to the new drive. Even if you work at McDonald's wages, that's potentially a very time-consuming, expensive and risky undertaking.


Get an external drive.  No extra cost for support hardware, no need to reinstall your OS.  No electricity when you're not using it.  Using lossy for your on-line music may make sense, esp with a laptop, but the extra hard drive removes the " irreversibly losing source" part of the original question.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #29 –
Quote from: DonP on
but the extra hard drive removes the " irreversibly losing source" part of the original question.

Yes, but what all the advocates of "just get a new HDD" seem to be missing is their own assumption of the importance of "keeping the original".

Why is the original/lossless so important?

Because a) you can encode safely to lossy - i.e. it's a safe transcode source, and b) because it's future safe - i.e. you can switch from FLAC to WavPack losslessly and c) you can't ABX the difference (because there is none)

Now, that's exactly what you get with LossyWAV --standard:
Transcode safe, future safe, and can't ABX, BUT in addition you get filesizes 30% - 50% smaller.

The only thing you don't get is that warm fuzzy feeling that your files are bit for bit identical to the CD.

So unless you are going to be "remastering" / editing / processing the CDs you've ripped I can see no benefit, whatsoever of FLAC vs. LossyFLAC --standard. END OF STORY.

Unless any of the "new HDD advocates" in this thread can give a rational benefit of Lossless vs LossyWAV --standard please let me know. Conversely, filesizes 30% - 50% smaller is a clear undisputable benefit.

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #30 –
Actually, the burden of proof is on you.  Given the starting condition of having lossless music, there needs to be sufficient reason to change this.  Given just this premise alone, combined with the fact that the user also needs more space, we can deduce the user has a need for this additional space and would like to fill it up, implying that they have more data they'd like to store.  Any modern hard drive will easily be able to fit an entire lossless music collection, and add additional storage to the user's system while keeping the system the user has been using.  This method allows them to expand as they have been.  It is up to the proponents of lossy encoding to prove that a user who has room for lossless music now and is receiving more requirement for storage would be better off choosing a non-reversible action that allows a little bit more use out of a small hard drive (50-70 GB in this case) vs keeping their music as is just increasing their storage gains by 20X that.  Since the user just wants more space, the most straight forward answer is just to get more space.  It is up to the lossy proponents to prove that scraping up a few extra GB by hitting their music collection is the more sound action than just getting more space.

Btw, the comparison of a 1.5TB for the same price of a 3TB drive is invalid.  This would imply that the person in question has 3TB of music in lossless.  That is several times the size of my collection, and even larger than my video collection.  A 1TB hard drive would be easily capable of storing almost everyone's lossless OR lossy music collection with plenty of room to spare.  Furthermore hard drive price tapers off below 1TB.  As such, the difference between your 1.5TB and 3TB hard drives in that example is non-existent.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #31 –
That's a very long-winded way of saying "I'm sorry, based on what you said, I can't give you a rational benefit of choosing Lossless vs LossyWAV --standard". 

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #32 –
Just for the record, neither myself, nor Nick C (as far as I know!) are paying carpman for his endorsement of lossyWAV!

Cheers,
David.

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #33 –
Just to make clear, it's not my profound love of LossyWAV (sorry 2Bdecided) that's been motivating my posts in this thread (though I do think it's an excellent idea/tool); rather it's my disdain for this wasteful attitude of "just get another HDD". I can afford to leave all the lights on in my house all the time, but I don't, simply because it's wasteful. Perhaps people can afford another HDD, perhaps they'd rather save some space on their existing HDD. Perhaps they'd rather spend that money on something else. Hey! perhaps they'd rather save it! But the attitude of "just get another HDD" doesn't allow for anything other than "you don't need much of a reason to buy more crap".

No one asked the OP why he/she wanted to save space, instead a number of "just buy a new HDD" posters had some weird assumption that somehow the OP hadn't thought of buying a HDD, and that the OP lives in a land where HDDs are cheap. Notice that the OP simply ignored every poster that suggested buying a new HDD and engaged with those who dealt with the OP's question directly. So why not assume that the OP is not stupid and has a valid reason for wanting to do what they want to do.

Now, most of the quoted prices I've seen in this thread are in dollars, so let's see:

- Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,788 [Just get another HDD]
- Total U.S. revolving debt (98 percent of which is made up of credit card debt): $852.6 billion, as of March 2010 (Source: Federal Reserve's G.19 report on consumer credit, March 2010) [Just get more HDDs]
- Total U.S. consumer debt: $2.45 trillion, as of March 2010 (Source: Federal Reserve's G.19 report on consumer credit, May 2010) [borrow more and get another HDD]
- U.S. credit card default rate: 13.01 percent. (Source: Fitch Ratings, April 2010) [don't worry, get another HDD]

So, when China sells its US bonds and the dollar goes through the floor, I shall be interested to see how such attitudes change.

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Converting lossless to lossy

Reply #34 –
I'm thankful to all users who helped me decide codec profile for what I asked, and very satisfied with the results: lossyFLAC with plain -q 2 switch, gained half space, at avg 370 Kb/s bitrate
Also I should mention that using foobar2000 made whole process very simple and testing pleasant
Additional ReplayGain processing was fast

As carpman noted, I didn't wanted to be involved in the separate discussions, but also don't want to leave mystery behind me: It is a laptop and not my main music library which is organized across different devices as it is. It is "wearable" unlike my desktop, so it has different treatment and music content among other things. I could have burned DVDs or simply copied to my desktop, which would slightly ruined my scheme, but I don't feel like I need to. Space is cheap, and I try to avoid redundancy as general principle - I'm not a "collector". You may not agree with it, but it's really not your decision in my case, so that's way I ignored some "buy" related posts

If now, I have a chance to choose release type between general lossy, lossyFLAC (even -q 2) or FLAC, I'd choose lossyFLAC, however ambitious it may seem