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!"

Me too

[Overzeetop]

I made the mistake of ripping my small collection to MP3 (some to MP3pro...please stop laughing) the first time. I made it about 1/2 way though the 300 or so CDs I have before I realized that I wan't happy with the format (could hear artifacts) and knew I wanted a lossless that I could transcode to the format du jour.

I went with FLAC, and ripped 'em all. I'm using media monkey as a filing system, and am transcoding as necessary for portable apps. I'm without media server at the moment, so I can't help with streaming and such, though I'm going to be interested to see what others are doing.

Ape

[mobby_6kl]

Since FLAC was already mentioned, I'll just suggest you try Monkey's Audio [monkeysaudio.com]. It's lossless, usually compresses better than FLAC, the source is available (not sure what license though), supports tags, and basically does everything you want. It's probably not as widespread as FLAC, but that shouldn't be a problem in your case.

Re:FLAC.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've built this kind of system for the record company i work for and our digital distribution needs.
I've used FLAC - it just works. Also I like the Application Metadata blocks you can put into the FLAC files. I use this to store the full logging information from cdparanoia. It allows me to perform a quality analysis of the rip and look for jitter, skips etc. If i find a certain pattern which leads to audible artifacts I can just go back through the archive of tracks and perform an automated analysis of anything else which mught show the same problem.

Because of the amount of metadata which we need to store for business reasons (P&C, ISRC, barcodes, etc) I have developed an XML based format for entering the info - you wouldn't need this on a personal system I don't suppose.

For work it's great because I can encode to AAC/MP3/WMA for retailers. At home i use it to export to Ogg because we have an iAudio player, but it's trivial to export to MP3 or AAC instead if we got another device.

I store all the files in a flat system - each track has a unique ID generated when it was ripped - when I export out to the encoded versions I use the tags to create a Artist/Album/Track hierachy which again can be changed at at time fairly trivially.

Periodically rsync the exports out to my gf's machine and i've got the collection whenever I want it :)

Re:FLAC.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Just one thing... FLAC does not compress to 40-50%. More like 60(rare)-70-80%. That being said, no lossless codec does better than 60% occasionally. There's no point chasing a couple percent, even when we're talking about hundreds of gigs, because if you're archiving this how much would it suck if you went to recover this years from now, Windows XP and Vista was no longer available, Monkey's Audio went out of business in 2008 and never made a Vista version, which is the last "audio path" that's compatible with Windows '84. IOW, you're fucked.

What do I do?

1. Rip twice fully with highest CDParanoia settings and drive offset corrected. Use a high-end drive like Plextor that doesn't allow unreported errors.
2. Compare rips, with diff. One bit difference, and it's discarded.
3. Same procedure with cdrdao to get the TOC. Don't rip with cdrdao, you need to edit the code to get highest paranoia settings and support drive offset. Did that once, couldn't apply my patch to the new version automatically, screw it, use both.
4. Convert TOC to CUE to add to the FLAC.
5. Encode to flac, embed the CUE (just in case, we still keep both TOC & CUE).

Actually, I started splitting my flacs with SHNsplit and putting in Vorbis tags, but if you're going to archive and never play the list is the way to go.

Re:FLAC.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've faced a similar problem deciding on how to make backups of my own CDs. I used FLAC because I wanted lossless audio. It wasn't until I realized I was doing way too much work. Why bother encoding it to anything when I can just rip the entire disc directly to ISO and leave it at that? I have found this to be the simplest solution by far. I can back up several ISOs onto a single DVD or just leave them on the HD (space is so cheap nowadays). If I need to burn a 1:1 copy of the original CD there's no need to take out the original because I already have the ISO available. Need to encode some tracks to mp3, ogg, or into some other format? Just mount the ISO and rip like a normal CD. The only drawbacks to using ISO is that it does take up more space than FLAC, but as I've said, space is cheap; you also don't have the convenience of metadata, but just make a text file with track info for each ISO or simply look on the back of your CD to see what's playing. There's no simpler way, you can count on ISO to work flawlessly on any OS and you'll never have to worry about re-ripping your entire collection if some better codec or improvements to FLAC comes along.