Best Practices for a Lossless Music Archive?

Sparagmei asks: "I'm a big music fan, and I like listening to the music I own on various pieces of digital gear. Right now, my library's at about 20,000 tracks, ripped from CDs to MP3 at 256kbps (enough that I can't tell the difference on my low-end playback gear). However, with the MP3 judgement rippling through the world, I'm interested in perhaps moving to a different compression standard. Before I do that, I'd like to ask a question: what lossless format would you recommend for making a digital 'master library' that could be (relatively) easily down-sampled to a compressed format?"

Important factors would be true losslessness, filesize (smaller than PCM WAV would be nice), embedded metadata (ID3v2-like), existence of automated ripper software, and (to a lesser extent) an open-source implementation of such software. Widespread playback implementation of the lossless codec is not an issue for me; the lossless library would likely be burned to archival DVD media and stored after being down-sampling with the chosen compressor. The reason I ask is this: I've got a 20,000-track re-ripping job ahead of me. I'd like to do that just once, lossless, so that years from now, when I decide to jump from Vorbis to 'komprezzor_2039_1337' or whatever, I don't need to drag out the old plastic discs. Thanks!"

At the risk of asking a stupid question

[Dogtanian]

Bearing in mind that you're not going to save that much file size using lossless storage, and that you already have an "archive" of CDs in a box in your basement (or wherever), is it really worth the hassle of creating another lossless copy that'll take up even more space?

If you're planning on re-converting from these lossless copies, it sounds like you're going to be doing a *lot* of work based on some second-guessing of where you'll be in 5 years time; and things may have changed then.

Re:At the risk of asking a stupid question

[MMC Monster]

Well, a cabinet of CDs in the basement may just convert to a few drives in a storage area network. Network storage is getting cheaper every moment. Besides, he will have random access to his entire music collection (presumably well tagged) in lossless format, which really can't be beat.

As everyone's said, use FLAC.

[eddy]

FLAC doesn't compress the absolute best of the alternatives, but it's 'good enough' and is widely supported, even directly on some portable devices. You won't wake up one day to find out that FLAC support has all but disappeared because the original developer lost interest (since the source is out there, unlike many alternatives). You will also be able to trivially transcode FLAC to Vorbis with meta-data intact, and do it FAST. (not a unique property, but well supported with FLAC/oggenc2 [nifty.com]).

Re:At the risk of asking a stupid question

[Dogtanian]

Not much size = 50%. That may not be much to you, but it's still a reasonable amount.

Yes, but from that point-of-view alone, you're still having to do a lot of work to get it. And it's not 50%; it's 150%, unless he's binning his original CDs.

With foobar, you can take that collection - or any subset - and do a custom recode. It may take a day or two, but its totally automated.

I dunno; it kind of smacks of the geek tendency to spend a day automating a procedure that would otherwise take 15 minutes or so, and then using it 3 or 4 times before they decide they want things done differently and abandoning it. Can't beat that logic ;-) Maybe I'm wrong, of course, but I'm just getting that vibe; I know, because I've sometimes done it myself.

You've already lost, you just don't know it

[Gothmolly]

Use of the term "best practices" indicates that you've already assumed that whatever you're doing is wrong, and that whatever someone else tells you to do is right.
"Best practices" is to IT what the "zero tolerance" concept is to schools - no questioning, no thought required, simply doing whatever the current meme dictates.

Re:Hardware based FLAC players?

[DavidTC]

Anyone know of any other great sounding devices that rip, convert, and burn?

Dozens of manufacturers have a device that can do that. I believe they're called 'computers'.

what's the point?

[coaxial]

Seriously. What's the point? What are you trying to accomplish? You can't hear the difference at 256kps lossy versus lossless, so why waste you're life converting your already lossess music archive from CD form to harddrive form? It's not like you're going to be transcoding all that often, if at all. I encoded my entire CD collect 7 years ago as 320kbps constant MP3. I'm thinking about re-encoding it, because there's no point in having the files that big. 256kbps variable mp3 is would probably still be more than enough. And if you think that someday you can transcode to something higher than 320kbps, I doubt you'll be able to tell the difference if that ever happens, because your hearing naturally gets worse over time.

Futhermore, if you think Alcatel-Lucent v Microsoft is going to change anything, you're delusional. MP3 is going to stay. Just like how LZW patent did nothing to GIF. No one is going to abandon MP3, because the public isn't going to buy a device that can't play their MP3 collection. Nothing will change, and FLAC and Ogg will remain forever an asterisk.

Re:what's the point?

[Ant P.]

You can't hear the difference at 256kps lossy versus lossless, so why waste you're life converting your already lossess music archive from CD form to harddrive form

Maybe because at some point he'd like to upgrade from the low-end gear he said made the difference inaudible? Even on $30 headphones the difference between MP3 and lossless is clear as day.
Or maybe because he wants a backup copy to rebuild from in case the CDs get scratched? Not everyone has an audio CD collection made entirely of titanium and diamond discs.

Re:You've already lost, you just don't know it

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, I hope you don't brush your teeth twice a day simply because "best practice" would indicate that it would be wise for you to do. For those of us that don't have time to rederive everything under the sun/re-invent the wheel constantly, "best practices" provide a noticeable improvement in either efficiency or quality of output, while requiring a significantly smaller investment in time than rederiving the optimal solution. Sure, I had a grand time re-deriving some of the integral tables in the back of my calc books, but that's because I was interested in doing so. I DON'T have any interest in tracing circuit diagrams and computing SNR to see which audio setup is the best for my computer. I leave it to someone who really cares.

Re:Pioneer PD-F1009

[KevinKnSC]

I have an old 400 disc CD changer from Sony, and as cool as the thing was at the time, I haven't used it to listen to music in years. When you can store that much music completely uncompressed on a $150 hard drive, it just doesn't really make sense anymore.

Not to mention how you can't take it with you, like you can with an MP3 player, etc.

Re:what's the point?

[tmasssey]

Seriously. What's the point? What are you trying to accomplish? You can't hear the difference at 256kps lossy versus lossless, so why waste you're life converting your already lossess music archive from CD form to harddrive form?

There are so many thing wrong with this statement...

1) Hearing artifacts at 256kbps. I will agree that even with decent speakers you may not be able to hear them. But with good gear, it's *noticable*. I used to have a pair of B&W DM602-S3 speakers as my mains and MP3's were fine. Then I upgraded to the 704's. All of a sudden I had to throw away my entire collection of MP3's: the artifacts just slapped you in the head.

2) Why have your media on hard drive? Why *not* have your media on hard drive? And if you're going to go through the work of ripping them, why not rip them *once* (to a lossless format) and be done with it? To save a few gig of hard drive space? Let's assume 1,000 CD's. Is that enough? An audio CD holds Seeing as a 400GB hard drive is going to cost less than $200 ($400 if you mirror them), what is the point of "saving space"? Especially when you figure that those 1,000 albums cost probably $10,000 - $20,000? And what did your time cost to rip 1,000 albums? At $5/hour and 10 minutes per album, you spent over $800 just to do the ripping! So why in the world would you want to do it *twice*, just so you can save a little bit of storage?

Of course, there's also the very real possibility that IHBT... :)

Re:Ape

[omeomi]

The grandparent said it wasn't "free". He didn't specify which "free" he was talking about. Since it is "free" under at least one definition of the word free, his statement is incorrect. While one who knows a bit about FOSS could assume that they meant free as in speech, they didn't explicitly *say* that. And since the majority of the population means "free as in beer" when they're talking about whether software is free, people who insist on claiming that software isn't free if it's not free as in speech are only making a conversation more confusing in ways that have no bearing on the main point as a whole.

Re:FLAC, but consider ALAC

[Anonymous Coward]

ALAC only makes sense if you use Mac OS X and have absolutely no intent to move to another platform basically for the duration you intend to keep your music files. For everyone else, use FLAC. More devices support it natively, and more applications on more operating systems support it. It's also open and will be around for a long time to come. (Yes, iPod will only support FLAC with Rockbox.)