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Topic: Is FLAC right for me? (Read 4786 times) previous topic - next topic
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Is FLAC right for me?

So long story short, I'm re-doing my entire music collection because the hard drive I used to have all of my music on ended up pretty much dying.

So my set up right now is that I'm using EAC to rip the CD's and then I'm using LAME to encode straight to mp3's (-V2). Which is fine and dandy, but this time I decided I should save the WAV's instead of deleting them just in case something like that happens again so that I don't have to rip the CD's all over again or worry about losing any CD's.

However, the WAV. files obviously can't have tags on them, so I'm debating if I should just do CD-> WAV -> FLAC -> mp3. Cause if for some reason I do end up losing everything again I figure doing it from FLAC would be a ton easier since I wouldn't have to go through and tag everything all over again by hand, or find another program to do it. And I figure if I ever end up getting a better portable audio device with more space, it would always make the switch over to FLAC a lot easier if I already have the files on hand.

I mostly listen to my music on my android phone, or on my laptop, so mp3's just seemed to make sense to me for space and battery life.

Is putting the extra step of FLAC really worth the hassle for me? Or should I just stick to archiving my CD's with WAV's?

Sorry if any of this sounds noobish, I honestly barely know what I'm doing lol. Thanks for all the help anyways.

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #1
Going lossless for the ripping result and keeping the lossless tracks is what many people do (including me). With today's storage capacities this shouldn't be a problem to most people.
The main advantage is that you can convert from the lossless files to lossy ones at any time according to actual needs.
FLAC is a lossless codec which allows for very fast encoding, so I'd definitely prefer FLAC over WAV.
lame3995o -Q1.7 --lowpass 17

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #2
Is there a way to set up EAC to rip from WAV to FLAC > to mp3 without me doing anything extra lol? I'm so lazy. I just wanna get this done quick.


Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #4
BTW there is a user-space filesystem in linux mp3fs which virtually converts your flac library into mp3 (incl. tags). The actual conversion occurs at the moment of reading the file, the generated mp3 never gets stored. Very handy for keeping lossless library and copying files to external mp3 devices which often have a usb storage with slow writing speed anyways.  The mp3 quality gets defined as mount parameter, you can have multiple mounts with different quality at the same time (128kbps, 256kbps,..) since the mounting itself takes no storage, RAM, CPU, until the virtual directory gets accessed and MP3 files read.

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #5
Ripping is a time consuming task, I like to do it only once. Then it is consequent to archive the ripping results lossless. Wave is lossless, but FLAC is lossless too _and_ needs less drive space and offers the major advantage of vorbis comments. So, I go for FLAC for a couple of years now.

Ripping to FLAC is a two step process. First a wave is written and then converted to FLAC. However, usually you'll not notice that, it feels like ripping directly to FLAC.

One can rip FLAC and MP3 in parallel in a single process. I follow a different approach, because I like it (or I see a demand for that) to adjust tags (meta data) in a batch process after ripping. That means, I copy a number of CDs to my drive, load the results into foobar or MP3Tag and check all the tags that are important for me. Spelling, naming conventions, genre, style and the like. Obviously this is easier to do with a single copy of my CDs. When I'm happy with all, I can convert according to my needs (actually I listen to music at home, only. Therefore I have FLACs only, no other copy of my music).

And, SCNR, if you hard drive is dying it's regardless whether there are FLACs or MP3s on it. If you don't want to re-rip again, you'll need a backup ;-).

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #6
if for some reason I do end up losing everything again I figure doing it from FLAC would be a ton easier
If you don't keep a backup, then you're just as likely to lose the FLACs as the mp3s. If you backup the mp3s properly, you won't need the FLACs. If you back up the FLACs, you might as well back up the mp3s too (they're far smaller). Ripping to FLAC is not a substitute for a proper backup strategy,

I would rip to FLAC first, but for other reasons.

Cheers,
David.

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #7
I use dbPowerAMP both for ripping and converting my main music archive to mp3 or aac or whatrever I need. Highly recommended. I used EAC before but I've never looked back.

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #8
Thanks for all of the input.

Sorry if I wasn't being clear. I am using an external hard drive to back-up all of my audio files.

FLAC it is lol.

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #9
For storage properties and having the best rip quality in digital. go FLAC, just for storage. If you are listening to your music on you android device, don't go MP3, android can play ogg vorbis at very nice quality. Go flac for storage vorbis for playback, you can get better quality with vorbis than with mp3

 

Is FLAC right for me?

Reply #10
you can get better quality with vorbis than with mp3


I agree with your suggestion, but this point needs to be clear.. You can get better quality than mp3 with vorbis at the same bitrate, But an mp3 properly encoded at 256Kbps will be higher quality than any Vorbis at 64Kbps..

I agree he should use Vorbis on his Android device as it's natively supported and you can get away with dramatically smaller Vorbis files to achieve similar quality as a fairly larger mp3.

My personal example is I encode Vorbis at quality 2 to 3 (~96-112Kbps) and I'm HARD pressed to find quality issues in the encodes. I have to encode mp3 anywhere from V4 to V2 (~160Kbps to 192Kbps) to get the same level of transparency. (this is my experience, YMMV)..

Given that in the same limited space I can store essentially double the number of Vorbis files at about 96Kbps vs mp3 at 192Kbps, I always go Vorbis if there is an option on the player.