Hi everybody,

I need some help with making lossless archive of my music. I realise that this is propably the most frequently asked question here but I have 2 reasons to ask this again

1. most threads I found on this forum answering that problem are even 2 years old so I think that makes them obsolete
2. I simply dont have enough time to help myself by reading/finding more (I've never done any lossless compressions) - in next 22 days I have to finish writing my master thesis, pack all my stuff and move to other country on the opposite end of the world. And BEFORE all that I need to archive my 300+ vinyl collection which I can't take with me

So please dont think that I'm lazy and wasn't trying to solve my doubts myself. I've been searching this forum for few days but stil don't understand a lot

So what exactly do I need? First of all I have to decide which lossless codec to use? I understand that there is no one valid answer to this and that it depend of what I want to do with the encoded files. Well, I'm not 100% sure because I don't know all the options/possibilities that lossless codeck give. For sure I want to:

1. keep it as smal as possible (but reading this and seeing compression rates I don't think that's important - I mean 3-5% is irrelevant for me)
2. be it well hardware supported
3. be able to use it in the future
4. use it on different platforms

I guess ther are more things I should demand but can't really think about them now (mabye someone can point out them for me).

So at that moment I would like to ask you to advise me which codec shoul I use. I don't want to start the war "which codec is the best" but simply need one that will do the job easily - maybe by just saying the name and giving reason why/why not. From what I've been reading here I think it could be FLAC but it would be much better to have some experts comment on this.

I will appreciate all the help. And please try to understand my situation - I can not help myself any more that's why I'm writing all this. Have in mind also that english is not my first language so please keep the answers as simple as it's possible.

thank you in advance

zxc

I'm pretty sure there are at least two fairly recent topics floating around, although they're not relevant to lossless compression


If you're in a hurry, I would advise for the time being using .tta, since it's certainly a lot faster than .flac, .shn or .ape (I have no experience of others. EDIT: from the table, maybe wavpak is comparable too.). Compression ratios are all much of a muchness, .flac has the best hardware support (I would actually advise using .flac in the long term), but the beauty of lossless codecs is you can simply enough change them all later once you have them on the computer - the only real issue of time is the first one since when you have them in digital form you can leave a conversion running overnight with no input to change them to any format you'd like (probably .flac, as I said). The same applies to 3 and 4 really. Unless anyone has a faster codec to offer, .tta is probably your best bet for an initial rip. Or, if you have the space, there's no need to compress them at all - it's going to take probably more than 150 hours to transfer your vinyls even without compressing them, and I definitely wouldn't recommend running a compression while you're ripping.

thank you very much for replying

1. rips (in *.wav) are already on my HDD so it's encoding only
2. encoding time it's no problem - computer can work 24h

so if .TTA advantage over FLAC is speed only I think FLAC would be better.

waiting for more comments

zxc

Ohhh, sure, go for FLAC then - it's by far the most supported (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=34401&hl=flac).

support is not my only concern. is FLAC the best choice (in my situation) in general?

zxc

In general, I would say FLAC is the best choice (disclaimer: I have ~300 hours of FLAC encodings and it is my primary music format.)

1.) Ok so size isn't a huge issue for you so really any modern lossless codec will do.

2.) Hardware support isn't your biggest concern, but as far as I know FLAC has the best/most hardware support of any lossless codec.

3.) Well as it stands right now, FLAC is open source and the source code is easy to obtain. So if you have the source code and a compiler technically you could use it as long as you had hardware that executed x86 code. Also Josh Coalson the developer of FLAC has made one of the goals of FLAC to be backward compatible. So the FLAC 1.1.2 decoder can decode older FLAC streams without incident, and this will supposedly continue with future versions.

4.) Being open source FLAC is available to many platforms.

You have already seen this table. It contains this community's knowledge of the various lossless codecs. Ideally you could answer your own question with this table.

However if you want personal recommendations, I highly recommend FLAC. I have yet to have any issues with it, and any issues I did have were usually faults of my own.

Points 2, 3, and 4 are all related to support in some way or another, or at least that's what I meant by support.

well I finally decidet to use FLAC.
Since I have many folders with *.wav's (that I can't find in CDDB) I need a program I could encode all at once and also be able to make multiple/mass tags. Any suggestions? maybe foobar?

zxc

I know you've said you going to use FLAC, but compression rates can make a big difference. For example, if a FLAC file is 2mb larger then X format, and you record 1000 tracks, that's ~2GB you've just wasted.

The flac guys have an interesting matrix comparing several of the different encoders:

Flac Comparison Page

Note that there's more to it than filesize: the time to decompress can be quite significant.

Mark

That's a good point but mabye for the future. In my present situation I simply don't have time to learn about new codec. I've already encoded to flac and made tags, all using foobar2000 but I don't think tags are 100% what I wanted. Well, maybe next time...



yes, I've seen this page and that was one of the reasons I've choosen flac. thx

thank you everybody for all the help

cheers

zxc

ps. is there any way to cheeck what level was used while encoding flac? I'm not sure if my

used in foobar2000 was correct

'Not sure about the Microsoft World, but under Linux I use a program called "EasyTag" to change tags and even filenames just about any way I want to. I'd bet my sweet bippy there's something nice that does the same thing for Windows. Of course, time is always the most precious commodity making large scale re-tagging of files non-trivial.

Mark

that's 100% right I know how to modify tags just have problem with doin' it all at once, especially when the folders/files structure is not homogeneous

zxc

Quick question. What soundcard are you going to be using for recording?

(oops, didn't read carefully enough, ignore)

If we're talking desktop computer, that 2 GB is only $1 worth of disk for those 1000 tracks. Double that for a backup.

If you want lossless on a portable then disk space is more of a concern, but then Flac is the only game in town anyway.

Too late to ask that.. he started out with the wavs.

On tagging, I found tag&rename to work pretty intuitively for tagging based on directory structure.

"The Godfather" is not as intuitive, but it is free and has good support for tagging from freedb. What's available on freedb will mostly be albums which were also released on CD and you have to at least check that the track order is the same.

freedb is not a good answer because most of the vinyls are bootlegs but I will keep those names in mind for the future.

And what about this encode level check?