I'm with Fishman0919: CD's are way too delicate to store without degradation. So I compress all CD's I got (and like) to OptimFROG or Wavpack, and use them as coasters.

And don't forget Vorbis!

I have a lossless FLAC backup of all my CDs. When a fancy new version of LAME comes out, I can just transcode in one batch to the new encoder without having to re-rip my CDs.

I don't actually ever listen to the FLACs themselves, to be honest.

I can tell you by personel experience: an MP3 file, in 320Kbps, is not even close to the sound of CD. Problem is, there a lot of issues here.

The main problem is simple: where do you listen this files? In your PC, with two simple speakers, no matter what kind of? Stereo personal system? iPod or other MP3 player? In the car?
In this scenario, you are right, an MP3 320Kbps will do the job, and more important, will do it right and with quality.

On the other hand, try the same file in a HT system? Or in 2.1 system - two speakers + subwoofer, not needing to be an professional one, Soundblaster Soundworks will serve -, which is very common this days and very affordable. And for the last, compare the sound with the original CD (in any system).
You'll see the diference very clear.
I recommend FLAC, like others say, for archiving. For ripping and playing in the every day life, I choose MP3 320Kbps.

Try this. Covert the CD to MP3 320Kbps and do the other way with the same file, convert it to CD again. Will here some fuss and defects on the file. With FLAC you can do whatever you want, and still retain the same quality of a CD. Problem is, like it said before, the file will be big - but an MP3 320Kbps will too, Iron Maiden BBC Archives, in 320 Kbps, is 340MB in size! -, but is lesser than an WAV in size.
With todays hard disks, this is not a problem anymore, so use FLAC for archiving and MP3 for playing.

The reason to use FLAC for archive, is that you can do whatever you want with the source, without losing quality. Try to use an MP3 to make an audio for DVD and you see what I mean.

[ ]'s

Suggesting that you can easily hear the difference between 320kbps and CD on any album is just nonsense. Very few people can distinguish the difference, and even then on only a few tough samples.

Please read TOS #8. If you have ABX results please post them.

Indeed, the difference only shows itself when you transcode to another lossy codec

It will do that regardless of playback setup, if it's a well-made mp3. Ever ABX'd a well-made 320 kbps mps vs .wav?

Here's a 6-second snippet from a Roger Waters solo album -- an immaculately recorded record. One file's a 320 kbps mp3, encoded with LAME 3.97. The other's the original .wav file, from a Exact Audio Copy high-security rip. The third link is to WinABX, a tool for ABXing two sound file.

Use playback software that doesn't adjust levels. Do at least 16 trials, and post the WinABX result log.

http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/mp3/Hubbard_sample.mp3
http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/mp3/Hubbard_sample.wav
http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/winabx/


(In my own ABX of this, I felt I was essentially guessing by the second or third trial. I scored 5/16. )




Problem is, that 'difference' stands a very strong chance of being a placebo effect.

I've done a fair number of ABX of mp3s in the last few years and I've never been able to tell a 190 kbps VBR LAME mp3 from source (much less 320 kbps CBR), unless I was auditioning a rare 'problem sample' identified by the good folks here. Such samples are used in the development and improvement of the LAME codec.

Btw, when I do ABX , my soundcard is an M-Audio 2496 and my headphones are good Audio-Technicas.

For people saying they back up all their cds in a loseless format, I'm curious about how much space this takes.

I was thinking about something like this, I just don't have the hard drive room right now. When blue-ray or hd-dvd burners come down in price and I can burn a 50g disc it will be alot more reasonable of a proposition.

As of right now, I have 28,163 flac files taking up 350 gigs of space, just about 1,976 folders of music, about 1000 cds. I don't consider it a burden, as HD space is pretty cheap these days. I don't do raid-I keep redundant backups of the most important stuff. My normal strategy is to buy the next bigger HD (in this case a 750 gig will replace the 500), copy all the files to the new drive, and keep the old one as a backup, but not connected to the computer. It has worked well for me for 4+ years.

I listen to the flacs, and use them to create files for our ipods.

I think the basic answer is that the price per MB is mininimal considering the benefit it provides. You're talking $0.25 an album or so. I think this is negligable, to help preserve your music collection.

Many people seem to use external hard drives for the purpose, as I do (as well as a DVD backup). See how much they cost in the US, consider that one album will take up around 350-400 MB (obviously varies quite a bit), and do the calculations.

You might be interested to know that plenty of DVDs have lossy soundtracks, since there isn't generally enough space for six channels of lossless audio as well as video.

Exactly. Going from mp3 to another lossy codec (ac3?) would degrade quality quite a bit, going lossless->lossy would give you a much better sound.

Disclaimer: I have not done an ABX test, and I do not use AC3 on a regular basis either. I however remember seeing a thread on these forums which was a listening test comparing the differences between many different lossy->lossy transcodings. The results were pretty bad all around.

Making a LCPM track from a high quality MP3, however, would make sense, if its only purpose is to be played back, since there would be no quality loss.

What do you think makes for a better compromise between space, quality and battery consumption for portables: CBR MP3, VBR MP3, Nero AAC or Vorbis aoTuVb5?

1) 172kbps = CD QUALITY 320kbps = Excellent

Your hi-fi sucks.

2) MP3 generally 1/6 that of WAV 750mb CD = 60mb HD Space

Cost of a CD is about €15. Cost of a 250GB HDD is €70.
I have a terabyte in RAID5. About 1000 albums, all bought, only eat a portion of that.
Cost of the 350 MB to store a CD in FLAC is about € 0.1
Backup to an additional USB harddrive costs the same so a grand total of € 0.2 per CD.
I don't compromise audio quality and use MP3 to save €0.15 per CD.
MP3 is for listening in the car or in the bus.
End of story.

3) Use Gain options in Winamp when playing audio(which I guess would be replay gain)
4) Winamp Free works Great

Audacious works fine on Linux. The price of your Windoze license (you paid for it ?) buys me 7 CDs.

5)Why Backup CD's If you are using them for listening on your pc or stereo just Burn a copy and Store the original.

Storing on HDDs is cheaper than on burnt CDs, and a lot more practical.
I don't own a CD player.

Bullshit.


For a 50 pack of DVD-R's $16.00, 32 cents = 4.3GB
For a 400GB hard disk $150.00, 37 cent = 1GB

For archival purposes DVD's are are much better choice because:

+ Data & reader are not married, no mechanical parts that can fail.
+ They are archival copies that will have minimal use so you don't have to worry about scratches.
+ Cheaper (always a plus)

Burn with a reliable DVD recorder, test your burnt data & keep your DVD-R media in suitable storage case & they will out last any HDD.

Should really every few years think about reburning CD and DVDs as the inks do deteriorate over time. Also good time to pick the best media a few years back it would have been CD maybe now transfer to DVD and in a few years time blu-ray or hd-dvd

I am also from the school of thought multiple copies is good in multiple locations. Possibly on different media. At home original CDs and RAID and at work an external USB with FLAC on it (or on the "secrete" server (I work in IT development so an extra computer connected goes completely unnoticed))

When not used, an HD's mechanical parts won't fail.
When used, the probability of permanent damage is way lower than with a DVD.


Ever heard of material degradation? The lifespan of pressed(!) original CDs is about 30 years under ideal conditions. Burned media literally falls apart after a few years. A hard disk, kept under the same conditions, can last decades.

Why? Because you say so?


I'll trust dyes over magnetics any day.




http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....7718&st=75#


I think it's also worth keeping in mind that the data will always stay in its original state,

DVD-R is permanent it can't be modified or deleted.

People can make up there own minds...

Lossy vs. lossless Compression

"Lossless" vs. "Lossy" Compression

Lossless vs. lossy slides

Last but not least, the interesting NY Times article "From a High-Tech System, Low-Fi Music"

Enjoy.

In absolute cost, it is true the DVD is less expensive. I pay about $20 for 100 TDK DVD's and $100 for a 400 GB drive

100 pack of DVD-R's = 430 GB @ $20 = $0.05 per GB
400 GB hard disk + USB 2 enclosure = 400 GB @ $100 + $20 = $0.24 per GB

BUT
- Hard drive back up is faster, to read, to write and to verify
- More convenient. ONE hard drive an external case on a shelf take up a lot less space than 100 DVD's

The only thing however, is that you are assuming that ripping a CD is going to be identical every time... Is there a decent piece of software to ensure that the information being read from CD is correct? In my experience CD error correction can be very inaccurate...

While your reasoning is correct, Exact Audio Copy and dBPowerAmp are capable of showing checksums of the extracted audio data and communicating with AccurateRip in order to ensure the read information is - at least - consistent.

Well it's a bit silly to call "bullshit" and then start arguing a completely different case to prove it. He said cheaper than CD not cheaper than DVD and he was correct. It is cheaper to backup lossless to HDD then it is to backup by making copies of each CD and this I believe is the point that was being made.

As far as DVD's go I agree with you, by my calc's they are about 4 times cheaper than HDD on a simple dollars per GB basis, but HDD is way more convenient. I'm also sceptical about the longevity of burnt DVD's. I got badly burnt with data loss early on with rapidly degrading DVD-R media (unreadable with CRC errors). The media I'm currently using seems much better now, 2 years so far without a failed DVD disc, but I'm still a bit nervous about DVD+/-R for archiving.

This has been a very informative thread for those of us thinking about using a lossless format for archiving. It has been especially interesting for me since I don't have a lot of HD space at the moment (about 100gb) and not a lot of money either. I plan to rip most of my CD collection to lossless, and by the time I start to run out of space I'll have money for a bigger HD. Would you say I can store about 250-300 CDs with 100gb of space?

Barely. A typical CD FLAC's down to ~350 MB using v1.4 and the highest compression.

You will need 88 GB for 250 CD's, 105 GB for 300 CD's.

NO. "MP3-player" is a faulty word promoting a bad thing. Should be portable audio player.



FLAC + LAME



You missed few things:

- MP3 is lossy, FLAC lostless
- MP3 is proprietary, FLAC free - are you going to convert MP3 to a different lossy proprietary format one day ???
- MP3 is obsolete, there is OGG Vorbis free lossy codec
- MP3 is not the center of universe
- FLAC could be obsoleted (but value of J.Coalson's work will remain intact nevertheless) one day by TAK, but never by MP3

I guess I did.

At the moment, on my hard drive, I have images ranging from 224MB to 462MB in size. Many are in the 350-400 MB range though, so I guess I'd stand by that.



MP3 obsolete? WTF?!

TAK may start taking away some of FLAC's users, but I can't see that it is going to pwn it.

Smiley faces aside, you need to be careful what you say.

With the increased HDD space comes more risk that in the event of hardware failure (it will happen) you risk loosing more than ever before. So it is crazy to store thousands of hours work on 1 drive. The real option is 2 drives or 1 drive + optical backup. This is where more difficult and expensive to implement for larger collections. Fact remains that lossless is more time consuming not to mention space consuming. You really need a good plan for archiving.

Now something else to consider in the wake of increased storage:

Use higher bitrate lossy encoding - 250 kbit Nero AAC, AoTuv or even mp3. Get a nice big HDD DAP and be happy. You have extreme high quality music that will work @ home, in the car and in your DAP. The storage and backup issues are greatly simplified and chances of sound quality issues are close to nil especially for AAC / Vorbis. The saving in storage is enormous; lossless is typicaly x 3.5 larger. This solution is also future-proof because lots of hardware devices support vorbis, aac not to mention mp3.

For every practically minded IMO this is a very appropriate way to go.
In a sense I hate having started going the paranoid way after having had specific experiences with Lame which are overcome meanwhile. Maybe the time will come when I will use wavPack or Lame very high quality again without exception and no lossless archive. Makes things so much easier with no real disadvantage worth while mentioning. I'm just not so fast switching my mind. Will take its time.

Currently I decided to use 350k wavpack on PC, store correction files on DVD and transcode to FHG or helix for my DAP. I also favour practicality over quality / compression. I stopped being paranoid and used wavpack normal mode and took advantage of the faster mp3 encoders. This method solves a bit of my dillema and it is very simple to do - encoding is done only once without scripts and I don't feel the weight of all these operations. An advance to lossless would also be easier this way.

The way I see things is that lossy compression will only become more widespread and hardware support will also increase for aac / vorbis and even mp3. Higher bitrate encodings of 192~256k will become the norm rather than 128k (look at ITunes). Lower bitrate of 24~80k will enjoy even more popularity in broadcast etc.

Final evidence

...another typical myopic HA open-source fanboy point of view.

Mp3 is not obsolete, and as far as compressed audio formats are concerned, it might not be the center of the universe, but it certainly is the center of the modern world!

What type of mp3 player do you have?

Give it a rest already!

I have an HT system that sits in my living room about 15ft from my PC. I have often thought about using the PC as my main audio source buy my wife will have nothing to do with it. She would rather play CDs in a 5 disc changer than use the PC. We have all of our discs sitting in a rack right behind the couch. So the point is, do I need to archive my music collection in lossless or keep it in MP3 for portable use and listening when I am at the computer?

One reason to go lossless would be future proofing. I re-rip all my CDs once to lossless and I am done. If MP3 is ever obsolete (which I doubt in my lifetime) I can use AAC, or Vorbis. What if one day my wife decides she is tired of going to a rack, getting a CD, and having to load it into a CD player? I am ready.

I've been thinking about making my archive with high bitrate lossy for a while now, and posts by shadowking and halb27 are enlightening and encouraging, especially your transcoding tests, shadowking. One could save a lot of space by going that route.

I can't decide between Wavpack 384 and Nero AAC ~270. What would you choose between those, as a trancodable backup format? I did see your thread about the Nero problem sample but I haven't listened to it yet. Also I don't know how their decode speeds compare -- I'll look into it later.

At those bitrates both should be near perfection. If you want to save space go with AAC. Wavpack is more interesting when used with the correction file below 400k. I'd probably give a transcoding edge to WV, but chances are you can't tell the difference unless in an abx test under effort and even then maybe not.

AAC decoding is fast like flac on my PIII (40x vs 23x)

I just tried another track : Nero 270 VBR > Nero 130 VBR - Quality is excellent. Then Nero 270 VBR > LAME V5 - quality is excellent. I used Grado headphones for listening.

Like shadowking when using wavPack lossy as the only archive medium I'd use a higher bitrate than that.
It's necessary in next to no situation but (very low) chance is that wavPack 384 provides unadequate low quality in specific spots of your music. When using wavPack right now I'd use something like 450...500 kbps (depending on mode and parameters used), and I would use a rather strong positive noise shift (use this however only with such a high bitrate). Use for instance a setting like -hb450x4s0.8mi.
David Bryant will come with a flexible noise shaping version which is a more intelligent solution than s0.8. So may be it's a good idea to wait for it in case you want to use wavPack lossy.

In case this is too high a bitrate for you you're better off using Nero.

[quote name='halb27' date='Jul 27 2007, 17:18' post='507029']
[quote name='singaiya' post='507010' date='Jul 27 2007, 07:14']
. I'd use something like 450...500 kbps (depending on mode and parameters used), and I would use a rather strong positive noise shift (use this however only with such a high bitrate). Use for instance a setting like -hb450x4s0.8mi.

In case this is too high a bitrate for you you're better off using Nero.
[/quote]

Why -hx4 ?? Slower decoding , very slow encoding and enough to put people of wavpack .. Take 400~500k -x3 .. I can get full transparency on any sample. -h modes never gave me significan improvement over plain -x3 /4. Bryant has also mentioned this.

Also, high bitrate doesn't bother me much considering that wavpack, vorbis, aac, mpc can be made transparent at some bitrate for virtually all samples. With aac / vorbis the model is already quite well tuned and they can still improve. Wavpack can also adopt some model like this new preprocessor. Mp3 is doomed in this regard: no matter what model or bitrate, lots of samples are and will be abxable @ 320k - some very easily. With some type of music entire collections are probably not transparent. When push comes to shove mp3 is out for me. Now lossless compression is also reaching its limits, loudness race is stronger than ever and most people will get lossless bitrate of 850~1100 k. There is still lots of room for HQ lossy archiving without regards to space.

I just wanted to give an example for a good very high bitrate use on a pc. My recent personal experience with very high bitrate is only with fast mode (want to use it on my DAP), and from a recent test I know -fb480x6s0.8mi is perfect for me. Fast mode however is not so much of concern for pc use which i supoose singaiya is out for. From lower bitrate use I know normal and high mode do make a difference allowing for a somewhat lower bitrate, moreover x level can be reduced to allow for faster encoding. I just extrapolated that to very high bitrate use but it's nice to hear that in the >400 kbps field high mode isn't very useful and normal mode fully sufficient. Didn't know David did mention this.

I also feel that extremely high quality lossy is an underestimated good alternative to lossless as well as to good enough quality lossy. At its best it can be directly played on DAPs without any transcoding. This means keeping just one universal version of one's musical collection.

Thanks shadowking and halb27 for the replies. It really helps me to figure out a smart way to save space and still be able to transcode to low bitrates when the need arises.



It's a very good point. Because i already have a 60 gb ipod, I'm leaning toward the AAC route now.

Do you have a link on this claim?
I have more than 100 pressed CDs which are over 20 years old. If the average lifespan was only 30 years, I should expect to see the leading edge of the bell-shaped curve in the form of a few dead discs. I have no dead CDs, and they have never been stored ideally, and only recently stored in an air-conditioned space.

I don't think I've ever seen a dead disc.

Unfortunately, I don't have a link, but about half a year ago the German music archive stated that signs of CD material degradation were detected on ~200 of the first CDs archived back in the early 80s. The lifespan of a CD may vary depending on the cover print, the material of the reflection layer and other things, so the "30 years" claim should be taken with some caution. Nevertheless I have seen burnt media becoming unreadable after two years.
What I wanted to point out was that CD-R and DVD-R are inferior to harddisks in terms of usability for a long-term backup.

That's all subjective. My Samsung T166 HDD's are build to work for aprox. 5 years. On the other hand I have some quality CD-Rs that are burned 5 years ago and still are in perfect condition...