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I have a large mp3 music collection that I've ripped from the countless CD's that I have, and I've been wondering maybe it's time to move to lossless. About 99% of my collection has been ripped wth EAC and Lame with -aps. So I know that they dound exactly like the source. However I know that I can't re-encode them to the latest super format in the next 10 years, without quality loss. So I though If I re-rip everything to FLAC I'm good.

Then I though what is the point of lossless. The point of lossless is to have audio that hass no quality loss, (unlike LAME that has no AUDIBLE loss) and can be used in the long term. (unlike my mp3's, which will become extinct in the next 10 years) So lossless sounds good, but I"m not sure if i should put all of my time and effort into this.

</rant>

Any ways. I was wondering, what are all of the benefits of lossless, and should I move my large music collection to lossless?

For those of you that jumped from lossy to lossless, what were the benefits that u got?

I did it mostly for peace of mind. Like the points you bring up: I can re-encode to any format without worrying about the effects. Low bitrate for the portable, APS for the car. Try out new formats and see how they perform without re-ripping. Every CD I own could get scratched to hell or stolen and I wouldn't be too upset. Except my rare Ace Of Base album. That I would be upset about.

I gave up on storing lossy a LONG time ago. I do now what I refer as "situational encoding from flac archives". I have three redundant copies of my LP flac rips, everything else backed up twice, cause I can re-rip cds if needed. If I ever get a portable DAP, I can create whatever lossy format I need from my flac files.

For these purposes, i wouldnt worry about. If "in 10 years" those mp3 become unlistenable, i would just rip all my files again. If you lose the real cd(pressed cd), having a wav or mp3 backup is the same to me, so is not a valid argument to move lossy->lossless. Its always just a copy.

You cant reencode your mp3's to the latest format in the next 10 years without loss, but you can encode your real cds if you want. And a "better format in the future" is vague as an argument to reencode all yous stuff in my opinion, especially if you CANT hear any difference even in decent equipment. So, you are just buying more hard disk space to some you dont know its really going to happen.

I'm happy with my mp3, i still have my original cds, i CANT hear any difference... so why bother for something in the future that may never actually happen?

There's nothing wrong with lossy. In fact I use Vorbis on my H120 and H140. But I keep WavPack encodes stored and backed up so I can have a perfect archive, peace of mind, and be able to reencode to whatever one day (like a magical day when they get Vorbis IV transparent at 80kbps )

Storage space is pretty cheap nowadays so when I put it all together I started going to lossless and haven't looked back.

To me the most important thing about lossless is not quality (because most lossy codecs achieve 99,99% transparency at some bitrate), but rather, as Jud pointed out, peace of mind. You rip, encode and tag your CD's once and for all.
Drawbacks : size, transcoding to lossy for mobile devices, compatibility with other software
Edit : oh, don't worry, in 10 years mp3 will still be *the* musical standard

My music archive has been lossless for almost three years, ~250 Gb.

It feels really good (peace of mind).

That's exactly the same for me too. I don't think I would ever recognise a flac from an mp3. I'm fine with lossy.

I guess for now I won't goto lossless, since mp3 meets my needs for now. I was wondering though, for those of you that have large lopssless collections, how do you store and manage the thing? RAID?

I'm not sure how this maps to your issue, but I occasionally use lossless in my photography for a different reason - I edit the pictures, tweaking this and that, quite a bit. If they are in a lossy format (generally jpeg here), each load-edit-save causes a small degradation. After enough of these cycles, visible artifacts can begin to show up (I've never tested it, so I don't know when) and they image is, for all intents and purposes, ruined. So, I just buy 1gb CF cards for my camera and live with fewer pix per card.

If you start doing any manipulation of your audio files, (say, for example, you decided you really wanted to make each CD into a single file with a cue sheet), you may start to hear audible artifacts.

I guess I'm trying to say that, if you're sure you'll never manipulate the file, lossy is probably fine. The pix on my web site (dev-null.cc, in case you wanna see my kids ) are all lossy jpeg or png just as the files I transfer to my portable are all lossy mp3 or ogg.

Mark

My collection resides on a server with RAID5.
Weekly backups to another server with RAID5.
Secondary backup to DVD-R. 10% par2 on different set of DVD-Rs. DVD-Rs stored off-site.

I feel safe :)

Flacs moved from HD to DVD+RW's (2 sets from 2 different mfr's)