Hi,

let's say at once I have already ripped some albums I dont own into lossless BUT I don't and can't backup those rips due to the large amount of those cds

... so in case of a drive crash, the solution seems to be a double LOSSY backup : A & B

(A) for hi-fi listenings and mind tranquility and (B) for minimum size (portable for instance)



A) my hesitations for lossy backups are between mp3 320, wavpack lossy 400, and ogg (?kbps)

B) i already opted for -v4 or -v5 with lame 3.97b


What do you think of that? is that nonsense?

It's an option.

Personally I don't see how anyone can say that they can't possibly back up lossless copies. A good DVD burner is only around £35, and you can get good discs for 30p each (sorry, I only work in GBP). Is that really too much to ask to spend on such a valuable resource?

I have no idea how WavPack 400Kbps files compare in size to LAME 320Kbps; however, if you can spare the space, I think it may be your best option as a lossy archive. It appears to transcode better than other lossy formats {link} {link} (in case you ever need to re-rip the -V4/-V5 copies).

Psychologicallywise, I can't spend hours (or I don't want to) burning thousands of dvds, sorting what stuff has already been burned and what stuff has to be burned.
I usually rip from 5 to 10 cds a week and will stop rip lossless till my 300HD is full (soon). Too many hours wasted behind the screen...

I have another 250 gb with lossy stuff and another 160 gb to backup (copy and paste, very convenient) lossy music.

If we consider lossless has 2 major advantages :
-> perfect sound (which can/might be achieved with lossy)
-> ability to transcode for ever

but a major one that is size of 250-450 mo per disc...

So I try to look for the best way to have :
- a decent audio quality, fully compatible AND smallest size for portable devices
- a hi-fi quality (or so-called), transparent or almost transparent on a good system

In that way, I think (and hope) I won't need encoding and transcoding since I have the smallest size for portable devices and the best quality lossy version.

...

How many CDs do you have?! I store PAR2 data as well as WavPack images on the disc, and I get 12-14 albums on one DVD I think (never actually counted). I currently have 35 DVDs in a 48 disc holder. I know my collection isn't the biggest, but a pack of 50 discs will go a long long way, especially if you don't use PAR2 as well.

That said, I think your logic essentially makes sense though; I'm sure a 400Kbps Wavpack version will be perfectly adequate as an archive. Not perfect, but perfectly adequate.

I just can't help thinking that, if you are spending so much resource (time) ripping to lossless, you may end up regretting not keeping those files.

I don't know how much, I would say 500 are my own ones while 600 others are ripped.
But the point is I'm keen on every genre...and I can borrow temporarily almost what I want (without being sure the cds won't be scratched and ripless next time I want to get them)

I'm not really sure that you should be discussing ripping CDs that you don't own in this forum. That said, considering this thread, ripping CDs you do own may soon be just as frowned upon.

On a purely technical note (legality aside): The fact that the source may become damaged is the main reason for going lossless, so that you have a perfect copy and don't have to rely on the integrity of the source any longer. I think I'll shut up about lossless now though. Good luck with your (legal) ripping.

To me, the main reason for going lossless is first being able to encode whenever I need.
As a cd lover/collector, I think i'll buy another copy if possible.

The cds I can't listen now are the ones I played when teenager at parties : filthy fingers, drops of alcohol, ... I'm more responsible now.

Here's what I would do (and plan on doing):

Since you don't want to store lossless...

Rip to high bitrate MP3 or AAC, ie. --alt-preset standard (or whatever -Vx setting that is, I haven't been keeping up) or the AAC equivalent. You get both quality (not ABX-able from original) and portability.

The point is that high bitrate lossy is good enough by a large margin and having two sets of lossy files is impractical and inefficient. You can get 30 and 60 GB DAPs, and that holds weeks of music. When you're tired of what you've got on your DAP, change it.

I don't have (anymore) DAP but these files from Category B could be essentials on some occasions.

There are 2 ways of listening music (Clint Eastwood mode ):
- I choose the rightest CD for a particular occasion/moment*
- I want to hear/re-discover some good forgotten music** (random mode)

(*) Careful listening
(**) The more you have songs, the more you enjoy

Personally, I would not consider lossy formats for backup purposes. However, that may just be because I'll feel insecure if I know that the full audio quality is not there; you may be content with transparency.

Well, as mentioned before, the WavPack lossy mode is a good way to go, especially since you can transcode to other formats later on with good results. I suggest using 384kbps (or 400, 16kbps diff isn't that much. but it's up to you), it should be transparent on most everything.

IMHO, I really don't think there is an existing excuse for not having a lossless backup. I also have about 650 audio CDs (and I own all of them, mind you) and I recently started backing them all up into FLAC -8. If you have a good CD-reader (in my case, NEC DVD +/- RW 2510, not the best money can buy, but it does it's job very well) and a fast processor (in my case, AthlonXP 2800+, again not the best money can buy but does what it's supposed to), and if you use EAC and MAREO, the job isn't very boring or time-consuming. Yes, it does take some time, but I believe you should be done with it in a month (maybe even less).
As for burning "thousands of DVDs", that's not a problem really. You can invest in an external HDD drive and use that for your backup, or really burn all those DVDs. You can then use something like WhereIsIt to catalogize them.

And Firon, don't you think it would be better - if you're already going lossy - to use Ogg Vorbis at this bitrate? I mean, WavPack is nice for it's hybrid feature and all that, but if you don't use foobar2000 or rockbox it's actually quite an unsupported codec which should be transcoded for anything else, while Ogg Vorbis is going up in it's hardware support (God bless Cowon), and also has more advanced algorithms for lossy encoding.

Cheerz =]

edit: typos and some more words

Well, I only suggest WavPack hybrid because it's specifically designed for transcoding. Ogg vorbis isn't, though I'm sure at that bitrate it would do just fine on most samples. Wavpack hybrid would be a fair choice if you lose the source (or don't want to get it out) and need to transcode again.
If you have no plans to transcode again, then Ogg vorbis is probably a better choice, but considering he said "lossy backup", I think his intent is to use them to transcode again in the future in case he loses his stuff.

I used DVDs in my example as this solution is the cheapest, and I was trying to demonstrate that creating a lossless archive is extremely cheap in relative terms. My 250GB external hard drive cost me ~£120. A DVD burner and 50 discs (235GB) will cost around £45. A hard drive is definately the easier option though.

I feel I need to respond to this as well, as I was the first to mention it.

As Firon says, the suggestion is purely based on the fact that the high bitrate version would be used to encode to MP3 or some other lower bitrate lossy file in the future, and it seems WavPack is very good for that purpose. I guess my basic assumption is that WavPack would transcode better, while Ogg may allow zorba to use a lower bitrate and save some space, at the cost of an unknown value of quality (possibly negligable). As with most situations when using lossy, it's a case of weighing up the pros and cons of each format and finding the best tradeoff between filesize and quality.

Edit: Argh! "lossless archive is extremely cheap", not "lossy archive..."!

If you really can't go for lossless (what I really suggest you if you want to definitely get your peace of mind about playback quality and transcoding efficiency), I'd suggest:

B) LAME -V5 --vbr-new for portable playback. Average filesize is really decent (album bitrate on my classical music library is comprise between 90 to 150 kbps and reaches an average of 130 kbps). If you listen a lot of quiet music (by quiet I mean low volume tracks), it may be interesting to use -V4 instead of -V5, in order to prevent ringing while listening your music at high volume (often necessery on nomad conditions). But -V5 should be more than correct (I'm rarely disappointing by it).

A) I can't recommand anything here truly reliable. Keep in mind that for simple playback, all formats should be OK at ~400 kbps. Not only MPC, Vorbis, WavPack, but also MP3, WMA, atrac... Unless you're a critical listener with a good experience in artifacts hunting, your choice should be based on what appear to be the most conveniant format for you. For transcoding, there's a general consensus about the superiority of formats like WavPack lossy or DualStream (=OptimFROG lossy). The latter is better at the same bitrate, but is significantly slower on decoding (thus transcoding or re-encoding process). But I can't tell you if the consensus is valid or not: there are few listening tests on this subject. Anyway, if I really had to make the same choices as you, I'd probably use one of these unusual formats at high bitrate.

But are you really saving disk space with (130 + 400 = 530 kbps) this dual solution over lossless coding? When I was looking for an excellent, transparent lossy format, I always felt anxious and worried and therefore often changed my settings, encoding and encoding again the same disks with different formats or different encoders with different settings. These bad feelings were gone when I switched to lossless. Now I'm perfectly happy (but I must say that lossless is more friendly for classical music lovers: average bitrate is ~600 kbps).
Lossy encodings at ~250 kbps are maybe more interesting in the perspective of saving space. With high bitrate MP3 encodings, you should have high quality encodings compatible with most digital players (flash, CD, DVD, HDD...) and perfectly suitable at home with good equipment. It's probably what I would do in your case. MP3 even at high bitrate isn't absolutely perfect, but it opens so many doors (all portable players, most DVD players, all softwares are compatible with it) that I feel alternative solutions like Vorbis or AAC (slightly better quality for experienced listeners) as much more unconveniant.

Buy a second hard drive, copy the stuff to it, and then put it somewhere safe (friend/relative's house). It'll set you back $100 and take maybe an hour.

I understand.
I will probably never use such high bitrates for lossy, because I feel it's much better to add 100-200 kbps and go for lossless.
And I will probably never understand why people hate doing things like this so much (going for lossless, I mean).

edit: my last sentence was awfully formed

I would say MPC at its highest setting...

Thats all I will say

I have now, over 400 albums in Lossless..

I will also say, despite some possible damage to my right ear (Not going to see an audiologist because I know what will happen, nothing)

I cant stress how much I enjoy listening to lossless music as opposed to lossy anything

MP3/lame or MPC though, compares and competes very well

I also have to agree with all of the lossless suggestions. I regret not ripping some of CD's to lossless originally, as some are now unrippable due to cd rot or a minor scratch mysteriously getting bigger. I have loads of lossless music. While I don't have a DAP, if I did I could transcode easily to any format/quality it needs. For a backup, IMO, lossless is the best/only way to go. And while there is no reason for it, I just feel better when I listen to lossless music, even if it doesn't sound better than the lossy equivelant. It's satisfying to know it's at it's maximum quality. Could always use WavPacks hybrid mode with lossy + correction file. It is a pain to maintain nearly 1TB of audio, especially when it would require 1/4 that if it were lossy. But if I ever wanted too I could make them all lossy, although that will never happen. Lossy=uncertain future. Lossless=peace of mind.

EDIT: If lossless were completely out of the question I'd recommend vorbis though, as it's open source & high quality, but other people know more about lossy codecs than I do.

I am now ripping only wavpack hybrid lossless. Takes 10-15 minutes in EAC on my old Piii PC, then everything is replaygained and burned to DVDs - this is my lossless 1:1 backup. I then delete the correction files from my hard drive and I have lossy, tagged and replaygained files. At 320k using a slightly modified commanline, most samples are transparent for me and transcoding to lower bitrate lossy-of-the-day is pretty much flawless.

I've already ripped my collection several times and am not gonna do it again. For the first time I am satisfied.

thank you all for replying,

I want to mention another time that I rip LOSSLESS.

The question was about a second backup : If I decide to backup my lossless rips, I'll need tones of DVD or a 4th drive. I claimed burning only 12 albums onto dvds is absolutely while buying a new HD is out of the question for now.

I do think lossless allows 3 major things : choice of lossy format + quality + transcoding for smaller size

So, I started to think of the consequences of my lossless rips drive crash: if it happens, I won't have good quality audio files, nor the ability to transcode from the original for smaller files.


And I've come to the conclusion :

1. Choice of lossy format : mp3
- can be played everywhere (living-room, car, DAP, PC, at home, ...)

2. Quality : mp3 320
- transparent in most cases

3. Smallest size : mp3 ~165
- smaller size for portable playbacks

It seems I can save space (100 to 250 mo) for each album with 320 & -V4.

For careful listening, I always preferred to play the CD. There 's such an exciting moment when I press OPEN and insert CD into the cd player.


off topic question : some of burned DVD are not known by both dvd player and dvd burner while there are perfectly in another PC... strange, isn't it ?

another one : should a "what's your main motive for going lossless" poll be interesting ? with answers such -for perfect copy -for transcoding - for perfect playback,, etc...

In reality you are encoding three times, not backing up the lossless rips and achieve current lossless 850kbit + 320 + 165 = 1335k vs 850kbit for lossless alone. Suppose you encoded a second time at 165k - you would do 850+165 = 1015k of storage.

Worse case you loose the lossless files and are left with 320+165 encodes.

Another more efficient way might be to just use mp3 at 320k - or 190~250k, but I don't see much sense in 165+320 - unless i'm reading your post wrong.

Hmm.. I don't know. Only you can know if its worth all the time spent

btw, if we talk kb, 1335kb in mp3 is easier to store than 1700kb lossless (850kb x2) and easier to play, am I wrong?



ok, maybe i could do that but in a different way : keep the wv +wvc on HD and burn only the wv (less burning sessions)

btw, thank you for your help

Or backup .wv to another hdd if possible then retire .wvc to DVD

ok, I've just burned 28 rips WV @400 onto a dvd (without wvc)

I don't know if I used the right command lines in foobar for transcoding and EAC for ripping

They will be used as sources for transcoding later if I don't have anymore wvc, so I think I can drop the ~165 kbps