Hi everyone.
I have encoded all of my CD to MP3. The setting was what I think the best possible: "--alt-preset standard -Z". Now I have about 40GB full of high quality songs. I read very often hydrogenaudio and looking at the people reencoding at every inprovement of their favorite codec I tell myself some considerations:

I have spent about the equivalent of 2 week of work diluited in a couple of months.
I am not able to hear the differences from the original sound using such high quality.
Is there a reason why should I reencode all of my CD again when something like Lame v. 4.0 will appear or AAC will be in its "mature" stage ?
Why should I reencode if the next to be here Blue Ray DVD will be able to store all my collenction in this media ?
Why should I reencode if the total playtime is already now much more than the free time I have in a couple of years of my life ?
Why should I reencode if other online services are next to come and they price per song will lower and I will not spent 2 weeks of my life but a small amount of money an a lower amount of time ?

So I ask these questions to myself but I want to ask to you too.

Answers are welcome !

Hecatombles

why did i went through all the alt-preset story in the 1st place then, when i could use musicmatch at 128 kb/s ('cd quality') in the 1st place?

I'll address a couple...

> Is there a reason why should I reencode all of my CD again when something like Lame v. 4.0 will appear or AAC will be in its "mature" stage ?

Because you can. It will keep your mind sharp and your computer in good working order (by breaking the weak components, forcing you to replace things whose time has come)

> Why should I reencode if the next to be here Blue Ray DVD will be able to store all my collenction in this media ?

Re-encode? You'll want to decode. You'll be able to fit ~ 2.5 albums per GB and at 27 GB...that's 67.5 albums in ape or flac format.

> Why should I reencode if the total playtime is already now much more than the free time I have in a couple of years of my life ?

It's obvious you have too much time on your hands...as witnessed by your posts here. The mind tends to create unanswerable questions when bored. Shouldn't you be encoding something right now?

xen-uno

As always, trust your ears. One of the best things about this site is the ability to read excellent, if not expert, opinions about how to encode your music using the best techniques available. One of the worst things about this site is that when you realize that how you've been doing it isn't "perfect" enough, you feel like you should start over and re-rip/encode your whole music collection, even though you probably won't hear the difference after days or weeks of work. It's not really the site's fault, but probably our own insecurity. In a way, it's just another instance of "keeping up with the Joneses".

Perhaps rather mundane questions but maybe you can tell us;

1) Why are you encoding your CDs if you are worried that you will have to re-encode them someday? If it is such a big deal why don't you listen to them on the original CDs?

2) If you are worried that you will have to spend time in the future re-encoding why don't you spend the money (that you will be making in the time you would have spent re-encoding) on a larger hard-drive, CDs, DVDs,etc , and save your files in a lossless format(ape,flac,etc) so that there is no necessity to worry about a lossy encoded format?

it's easy if you have all your rips encoded losslessy.
That way if you want to reencode, all you have to do is let your computer 3 days continiously.
So my advice:
If and when you get a DVD recorder (be that +R or -R) and if and when DVD blank discs (be they DVD-R or DVD+R) are affordable for you OR
If and when you get a 200 GB hard drive (or two for redundancy).
rerip all your cd's as flac's.
If you have 40 GB now at ~180 K You will have less than 200 GB if they were all flac's.
That's one 200 GB HD or 50 DVD-R's or 50 DVD+R's.

And if you have them all losslessy you can reencode easily by putting your pc to work for a couple of days or so.
Without much maual labour.

Personally I'm looking forward to a DVD solution (when DVD*R's are ~$1) and burning it all in flac with lot's of par2 files.

This pretty much seems to me like the way to go for "archiving". I intend to do this in a couple of months (after August, when something really important for my career/life is gonna happen). Once all my CD's are stored as flacs in DVDs, and stored in a case by the door so I can get it easily if quake/fire strike my house I'll be set.

I will not care that much for my MP3s. I made those so I could listen to a lot of music on my computer, or in my car, or in my portable. Their quality is good enough for that purpose, probably for life.

Archiving...that's a whole different ballgame. To me lossless and HD or DVD based storage are the best choice. Lossy archiving, no matter how good will not give you "the warm fuzzy feeling" whenever your codec of choice is updated (which it will, oh my, believe me, it will)

Even the Musicmatch x.xx/Xing etc rips are crap compared to LAME 3.xx APS with or without -z

What rhymes with orange?

sporange

My 2 cents,

If you have the original copies & just want to make backups of your collection it would be best to go lossless. If you are thinking of high quality online audio sharing mpc is a good choice (quality/size) or if it's sharing with friends use mp3 , if you just want to have digital copies on your PC (or what ever source) for easy playback just use what ever sounds transparent or even good to your ears.



Answer: Need hardware support & find annoying artifacts in APS

Lame APS is a very good choice. I don't think you should worry about reencoding untill you see people here talking about big improvements in quality... After a while, unless you are thinking in switching to something radically different and better like MusePaCk or a lossless backup like FLAC. But if you were thinking in "just a little better mp3" i would leave it like it is. Now going from r3mix to aps would have made a little more sense, but once you are in aps realm, there is not much point in doing anything else. I'm putting my faith in MPC so i encode everything into that format, im just waiting for more improvements there to consider a reecode, but it will all depend on how big is your collection. I think Lame APS is safe though, considering the limitations of the mp3 format. AAC and Ogg Vorbis needs a lot of tuning, they are works in progress, but mp3 is nearing its limits (in the quality side), and MPC is already highly tuned, and lossless is, well, lossless (but BIIIG) So for me MPC --standard --xlevel it is

Hehe, I like how you sum up HA.org Amadablam, exactly my experience

To the original questions, in your case there is no reason to re-encode. The only people who re-encode constantly are those who want the very best all the time, either because they have great ears but not enough space for lossless, or just because they're enthusiasts

If you can't hear the difference between your mp3's and cd's.. there's no reason to encode.. the only time I would bother re-encoding everything is if I could achieve the same quality at a reasonably smaller filesize. Transparency at 60kbs is a long way off though I think

I'm also placing my bets on mpc. It's a very tuned format already and in the future it only can become better I guess. I've recently been pondering about lossless but, indeed, the files are just to big for me and mpc is transparent already.
When I hear people say : "in the future we'll have 300GB hd's so lossless won't be a problem anymore", I agree with them but my reply always is : "think of how much mpc's you can place on such a hd with essentially the same quality". When I look at the future I'd rather have the record companies selling lossy "quality" files than today's lossless "overcompressed, bad mixed, ..." garbage.

I can be very brief about the reencoding issue, I've chosen mpc because it has always focused on quality rather than filesize. I even have some files encoded with the older 1.0x encoders but with a custom commandline, hey it was common those days to tweak for yourself . (my old commandline was -insane -minSMR 0 -nmt 10 -tmn 28, I still trust these files to be quite transparent ).

Heh, it's always a tradeoff between filesize and quality. On the one extreme end you have the lossless encoders that leave the quality untouched and on the other end you have the low bitrate encoders struggling to squeez every bit of quality out of a small filesize. Somewhere in between is the area that's most popular to most people, it's the area where good quality meets good filesize. But sometimes I even think mpc is to good for some of the poorly mastered cd's nowadays.

I still have a mixture of Lame APS and Musepack (--standard --xlevel, version 1.14) and a few precious lossless files.

I mostly encode in Musepack now for better artifact-resistance, for faster encoding, smaller filesize than APS, instrinsically gapless playback, etc.

I haven't got that many albums on PC yet, but some of them are still in Lame APS (version 3.90.2) and sound really great, so I haven't got round to reripping and encoding to Musepack yet, and perhaps I never will.

However, the non-gapless issue with MP3 has made me re-encode one or two albums that suffered annoying gaps between tracks as Lame APS encodes (and this is also why I haven't bothered with AAC). I'd rather not have to rely on a gapkiller plugin like foo_dsp_nogaps.dll or Winamp's out_mp3splice.dll to guess the gaps and cause as little damage as possible to the sound and intentional silences or have to hack around with "Lame with APE & Cuesheet support" to work in near-gapless mode.

> I think Lame APS is safe though, considering the limitations of the mp3 format. AAC and Ogg Vorbis needs a lot of tuning, they are works in progress, but mp3 is nearing its limits (in the quality side), and MPC is already highly tuned, and lossless is, well, lossless (but BIIIG) So for me MPC --standard --xlevel it is

Yes, you are right, I have encoded quite everything in Alt-preset extreme -Z and I have now more than 40GB of files which sound exactly like my CD. I have even tried to decode and reencode to ABR 128 and the quality is still good for portable equipment.

When AAC or Vorbis will be in their mature Stage I'll reencode everything at lower bitrates or the same If Blue Laser DVD will be affordable and RIAA won't have already sent it's tanks to my door ;-)

Little question : why l.a.m.e. developers don't move to another standard moving all their giant experience and the community to a new project ? It's is not good to better something less than 5% (IMHO...) when you could bost something else which starts at the same level but could be improved much more ?

Heca

You basically answered your own concern to some extent. I believe that if you ever reach a point in your quest for perfect digital audio encoding where you can't hear the difference between (lossy) encoded and original, then you've reached the end of your quest for lossy audio quality. After that you're only waiting for dramatic bitrate reductions with new codecs while maintaining the exact same (or better) quality. Until an encoder comes along that provides, say, at least a 50% reduction in file sizes, then stick with what you've got.



Only if it meets the criteria in my previous comment, equal or greater quality with dramatically lower file sizes. Let's use the example of MPC. It can encode with moderately better quality at the same bitrate as high-CBR MP3, or with with slightly lower bitrates for equal quality. Not enough of a difference to start another two-week encoding trek. Now, when MPC, or AAC, or whichever, can give you (for example) the quality of MP3 --alt-preset insane, but at an average bitrate of 128kbps or less, THEN re-encode.



If you'll be perfectly happy with you're current encoding until Blue Ray or any other comparable technology arrives, then wait for it. If you get impatient in the meantime, then re-encode.



40 GB, at an average encode rate for --abs (which I measured on about ten of my files, anyway) of 1.72 MB per minute of audio, gives you some 23,256 minutes of music, or 388 hours, or just over 16 days at 24 hours per day, without repeating a song. If your average song is 4 minutes long, then you have about 5814 songs on 40 GB. Listening to 20 songs per day (1 hr 20 mins) would provide about 291 days (almost 10 months) of music without hearing the same song twice. Still a considerable amount, and more of a reason to set your "re-encode" requirements very strictly before jumping into the "next-big-thing".



If you mean the time involved in only listening to streaming audio and not even worrying about encoding, then it would be a matter of whether you are happy with the sound quality (and streaming bitrate) of the music. If so, and if the price is right, then you've found a re-encoding alternative.

If you mean that you'll be able to download songs rather than buying and encoding CDs, then you'd still have to consider what to do with your existing encoded music collection. It would take quite a while, and a good bit of money even at a small amount per song, to replace ~5814 songs.

So, any route you take, you're back to considering whether re-encoding is worth it for you, based on (1) the sound quality of what you already have encoded, and (2) the file size of what you've encoded. This is something that is very subjective, and each of us can only decide for ourselves. Not that you shouldn't ask these questions here because it's giving others insight as well. Digital audio encoding is all about the trade off between sound quality high enough and filesizes small enough.

In fact, I'm working on a mathematical equation to help people possibly determine when it's time for them to re-encode. All I need is another hour or so...

Guess what I'm doing right now in this second! I'm reencoding my CDs in MPC-standard.

"Storange", as in "offline storange".

Regards,
Madrigal