I'm in the process of burning my large CD collection onto CDR and DVDR backups. I followed the advice on this forum and used EAC to extract the data and LAME 3.97 to encode it, but I wanted some feedback on my burning method. This method seems to be working so I don't want to make changes without asking here first. My goal is to have to most reliable backups possible.

Can I improve on this? Am I making any mistakes?

CDRs (for MP3 backups):
-Media: Taiyo Yuden 52x CDRs
-Hardware: LITE-ON CDRW SOHR 5238S
-Software: Nero OEM 6.3.1.4 (bundle software)
-Write Method: Disk At Once, Finalize.
-Write Speed: 24x (should I burn at a lower speed?)

DVDRs (for WAV* and MP3 backups):
-Media: Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD+Rs
-Hardware: Philips DVD+-RW DVD8631
-Software: Nero OEM 6.3.1.4 (bundle software)
-Write Method: Disk At Once, Finalize.
-Write Speed: 8x (should I burn at a lower speed?)

* - (I am aware that FLAC, etc are better, but I prefer to have the WAV files for one step encoding or burning).

Nero and Burrrn can burn to CD with FLAC input. No need to convert them to WAV. And any half-decent transcoder (dbpoweramp and foobar2000) can transcode to any other format with FLAC input.

Agreed..your literally wasting precious DVD space using .wav. FlAC is just as easy to work with as .wav.

Do you let nero verify your burns?

Firon & spockep:

I have approximately 1450 CDs to encode, so while WAV does waste space, it will save me time. I ran several tests encoding files in FLAC and WAV and the end result was a projection of 189 DVDs for WAV vs. 123 DVDs for FLAC. I can live with that amount of waste because the project is taking a ton of time as it is because I am compressing everything to MP3 as well for my playback devices (car, mp3 player, DVD player) which don't support FLAC.

At this point I have already ripped 200 CDs to WAV buth I've only started burning DVDs, so I can change the method if it's worthwhile. Is there any advantage to FLAC other than the space?

A Man Eating Duck:

I have not been telling Nero to verify my burns. Do you recommend I should?


Thanks to everyone for the replies.

totally unrelated to the Flac vs wav thing, but wouldn't creating par2 files or using dvdisaster be a good idea (especially since the burning is for "archival" purposes)?

Moot point. They don't support WAVE either.

1. File/MD5 verification; 2. Tagging. NB: There are other lossless codecs also, many of which compress better than FLAC; WavPack for example.

As you have a Lite-On I would suggest KProbe (at least for a few discs) to detirmine how good your burns really are. If KProbe shows that your burner and disc combo are producing excellent results consistently then perhaps you could just revert to Nero verification.

Ah, but that takes time, and it seems like the OP is in a rush...

That's not totally unrelated to FLAC vs. wave. If a FLAC becomes corrupt, you'll know when you test/decode/playback the file. If a wave becomes corrupt you won't necessarily know about it, nor is there an easy way to quickly test the files. Point, FLAC.

As far as par2 files go that would be taking things a step further, allowing not only the detection of corruption but also the likely ability to recover from it. Whether the original poster wants to go that far is up to him, but using FLAC or some other kind of lossless compression is clearly a good idea.

If you are concerned about the time taken for converting the WAV files to FLAC, you may try WavPack. Encoding and decoding is appreciably faster than FLAC, at least on my machine (AthlonXP, WinXP).

audiomars

You really need to qualify this with compression settings. AFAIK FLAC will generally decode faster than WavPack. At their fastest setting (-0 vs -f) it will also encode faster. Admittedly, it can rarely attain the same compression rate as WavPack; if it could WavPack would no doubt be many times faster to encode. Here are my figures.

Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a FLAC vs WavPack thread, but similarly we must remain objective.

I would never hurt to have it on.

I always verify every burn

I've read all the suggestions so far and I'm learning quite a bit. I'm grateful for everyone's input. I plan to use the verification softwares that have been mentioned.

I did some reading on par2 formats and I'm afraid it's beyond my skill to use, but I'm considering dropping the WAV backups in favor of FLAC or WAVPack. With that in mind, I have a few other questions:

1. As I understand it, both FLAC and WAVPack files must be encoded from ripped WAV files. Is this correct?

2. To make use of FLAC and WAVPack backups, will I have to decode them back to WAV?

My primary concern is how widely accessible my archived files will be 5-15 years from now or until such time as a new standard comes out and I can convert all my backups to that new standard.

RE: Advantages of FLAC over WAV:


3. By file verification, do you mean error correction? Do I need this if I am using EAC with all error correction settings on? I read the Wikipedia entry for MD5, but like par2, it's is beyond my understanding. I'm not concerned about tagging because I only use the MP3 files for playback and import tag data MP3Tag software.

* Add checksums to each disc (CRC32 or MD5 would be the most common), and verify after writing (instead of using Nero's "verify").

* If you're really a purist, scan each disc with CD Speed and store the results, then in the future do random checks to see if the media deteriorates.

* Finally, you may double backup everything. :)

* Not much point in writing CDs at x24. If you're concerned, do some error scanning (with CD Speed) and compare the quality at various speeds. I get excellent results at faster speeds (x40, higher is too noisy for me and doesn't save much time).

* Possibly the same for DVDs -- see if writing at x8 really makes a quality difference. Although, in the case of DVDs, you need a more consistent data flow to avoid buffer underruns (up to 22MB/sec for x16). I suspect underruns aren't too harmful nowadays, but it still may result in a somewhat lower write quality. So if you're concerned or doing something else on the computer at the same time, keep it lower.



I don't think you'd have any trouble using *any* format in the future. Physical media formats will be an issue, but not software.


No. Checksumming (CRC/MD5/etc.) is easy, and allows you to detect data corruption. It's easier than PARs, and takes very little space (a few bytes per file). It won't help with fixing it, though.

http://www.dvdisaster.com/

-brendan