Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Reply #23 – 2012-12-14 16:03:12
I am planning long-term archiving of my audio files as well. I wanted to be dead-sure that the encoding process is flawless and that decoding the files in the future will work. For being more sure about this than with just using the naked flac encoder, I developed perfect-flac-encode , a completely paranoid flac encoding script. It does a lot more than encoding:1. It checks the EAC LOG to make sure that AccurateRip reported a flawless rip. 2. It uses shntool len to check for any of the following problems with the input WAV: * Data is not CD quality * Data is not cut on a sector boundary * Data is too short to be burned * Header is not canonical * Contains extra RIFF chunks * Contains an ID3v2 header * Audio data is not block‐aligned * Header is inconsistent about data size and/or file size * File is truncated * File has junk appended to it 3. It checks whether the Test and Copy CRC in the EAC LOG match. 4. It computes the EAC CRC of the input WAV image and checks whether it matches the Copy CRC in the EAC LOG. 5. It computes the AccurateRip checksums of the splitfiles which it has created and compares them with the ones from the EAC LOG. 6. It re-joins the singletrack files to an image and compares the checksum with the checksum of the original image from EAC to make sure that it would be possible to burn an identical CD again. 7. It encodes the singletracks to FLAC with very carefully chosen settings. The full manpage of FLAC was read by me when chosing the settings. 8. It runs flac --test on each singletrack which makes FLAC test the integrity of the file. 9. It decodes each singletrack to WAV again and compares the checksums with the checksums of the original WAV splitfiles. Notice that everything which would be needed to restore the original input WAV image is tested by actually doing it in temporary directories. Decompressing the FLACs, joining the singletracks to an image, etc. Further notice that it is still in the beta phase and shall not be used for production yet. But I work on it every second day and plan to finish it within the next month. I have over 40 commits in the pipeline for the next beta version. Once it is finished, I will run my existing collection of >200 WAV images through it for testing (and migrating from WavPack to FLAC).Here is the thread of perfect-flac-encode, subscribe to it for being updated about the development.