My band will be recording some stuff soon, and I would like to include compressed audio on the data portion of the CD to save people the trouble and unreliability of ripping, but I'm trying to figure out what to include. I would like to include FLACs and a batch script to decode them to wav files for the non-techies, but I'm worried about the amount of room. Tests with an early demo (which had a lot of hard-to-encode electronic noises that probably won't be in our new stuff) gave about 25% compression, which means at most a 40 minute album. I'm not sure how long our CD is gonna be, but 40 minutes seems really short, even for an indie release.

Second option is including lossy compressed audio. Since there's more room for compressed stuff, I was thinking Vorbis Q5, LAME --preset standard, and LAME --preset abr 128 for portable use. That would leave enough room, based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, for about a 55 minute album, which is more reasonable.


What are your thoughts?

I'm not sure if I understand the need.. Even non-techies know how to use iTunes/WMP to rip a CD. Probably many more than would know how to access the data portion of the CD and copy over the files.

It's a neat idea though.. I would say lossless is overkill. I would say go with one set of --aps mp3s for maximum compatibility.

The main thing is that CD ripping is unreliable, especially with a scratched CD. Data on CDs, however, has many more safeguards against data corruption, so even if a CD is scratched beyond pristine playability/rippability in audio, it would still be possible to copy the audio over from the compressed files on the CD.

Buying a CD I'd prefer to see high bitrate (like preset standard) mp3 with it.
It would work immediately on my portable player, while Vorbis would not.

I also think that if someone wants some lossless compressed audio on his computer, he probably has a technical profile enough to be able to accurately rip it himself used the right tools (like EAC).

I think maybe you should put the album in two different bitrates - MP3@128 and MP3@320. The former for absolute compatibility and ease of transfer and the latter for maximum quality.

i would use vorbis just to keep things simple licence-wise + ppl that will actually discover the data part of the cd will more likely use vorbis than some unknown-quality encoded mp3 (or maybe you plan to advertize preset-standard? )

good point.. analogy, you might want to look into any potential legal issues you might get from selling a disc with mp3s..

I've thought about one thing : many people using a PC for listening to music will read the compressed files only.
With Winamp, you must use a special trick (right-click / Play audio CD) to access the audio session of such a CD. By default, you can only access the compressed files.
With Foobar2000, I didn't find a way to read the audio part of an audio+data CD.

I'm not sure about the legal issues, but depending on how hassle-free you want to make it for your average listener, for lossy I'd go MP3 then AAC, before hitting Vorbis. MP3 playback is obviously pretty much everywhere. Most users have Real or Quicktime (for PC/Mac) or XMMS (Linux) on their machines already for AAC. Ogg playback isn't common for Mac users, older Windows installs, etc.