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Topic: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean? (Read 4892 times) previous topic - next topic
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CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Now that 10 Terabyte hard drives sell for pocket change, I find myself ripping CD's to wave files. When I play them in my player du jour, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean? Does a "wav" file have a bitrate?

Thanks. Just curious.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #1 –
Standard CD audio is 16 bits per sample, 2 channels, at a sample rate of 44100 samples per second.

16 bits per sample * 44100 samples per second = 705600 bits per second (for 1 channel).

Since you have 2 channels that doubles to 1411200 bps. Divide by 1000 to convert to kbps - 1411.2 kbps or just 1411 kbps.

Even though the hard drives are cheap you're probably better off encoding to FLAC, WavPack, etc than storing as WAV. In addition to getting to store more audio data, you can store much richer metadata as well (album art, detailed track info, cue sheets, etc).

It's technically possible to store metadata in WAV but there's multiple ways of doing it, different players support different metadata methods. I guess as long as your players support however the metadata is being stored you're OK but, again you can really increase how much audio you get to store by using lossless codecs.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #2 –
Thanks JP. I figured, (no pun intended), that the answer was simple.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #3 –
Also, FLAC and WavPack are checksummed and can detect errors. Use -m when encoding to WavPack to get a "visible" MD5 checksum, although practically every error can detected even without it. So you should use that even if you were not to save any HD space. (Heck, if you are adamant about it, you can actually hack FLAC not to compress.)

ALAC does not have this kind of protection. Avoid if you can.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #4 –
Why do I want to do FLAC, when I can do wav? Storage space is not a problem.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Artie on
Why do I want to do FLAC, when I can do wav? Storage space is not a problem.
Err... have you read the answers? They've just told you, metadata and error detection.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Artie on
Now that 10 Terabyte hard drives sell for pocket change
Really?  Not in my world!
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: Artie on
Why do I want to do FLAC, when I can do wav? Storage space is not a problem.

Curious why you wouldn't want to do FLAC. Default encoding settings are super fast, it saves space, rich metadata, and error detection.

The proposed alternative is to have a format that uses more space, has less metadata / worse metadata support, no error detection, and to spend more money buying more hard drives.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #8 –
... rich enough to know everything(*) beforehand, starts the day posting anti-vaxx "do your own research" to Facebook?

(*) with the possible exception of ninth-circle esoteric magick, like "how to multiply 44.1 by 16 by 2" (with the aid of a calculator)

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Porcus on
... rich enough to know everything(*) beforehand, starts the day posting anti-vaxx "do your own research" to Facebook?

(*) with the possible exception of ninth-circle esoteric magick, like "how to multiply 44.1 by 16 by 2" (with the aid of a calculator)

Interesting narrative you are showing here.
Please remove my account from this forum.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #10 –
The reason I don't do FLAC, is because it still isn't universally supported. Neither my SanDisk or Honda (car) support it. However, I do want to play around with it. I'll rip a CD to FLAC on my computer just to see how it works.

Thanks all. The metadata is a good point. Wav's don't do "tags."

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #11 –
Quote
The reason I don't do FLAC, is because it still isn't universally supported.
True.    WAV and MP3 are the most widely supported, with AAC close-behind if not equal to MP3.

Eventually, we'll all be using our phones and Bluetooth for our cars, and it will just be a matter of having the software to play your preferred format, or we'll be using whatever we get from the streaming service.   I'm still using a docked iPod Classic in my vehicles until something breaks...

A lot of people keep a FLAC archive and then they can make MP3s or AACs for portable use, or burn a CD, etc.  

Quote
Wav's don't do "tags."
They do, but it's not well-standardized or widely supported.   It works in Windows Media Player.    But, all of the other popular formats are better!     Note that the different audio formats use different tagging standards.    MP3 uses ID3 tags and FLAC uses Vorbis Comments, etc.    There are differences and sometimes when you convert a file you lose some fields/tags or the data fields get "trimmed", etc.

Quote
Now that 10 Terabyte hard drives sell for pocket change,
My iPod Classic's 160GB hard drive is almost full with about 18,000 MP3s.     I forget how big the SD card is in my phone but it's not a terabyte.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #12 –
The question regarding the original topic has already been answered in the first reply with a bitrate calculation formula so it is already ended. The continuation of the thread looks like soliciting, so I'll take the bait...

I don't listen on mobile devices or specific hardware like streamers, I am an old school PC user and my 4TB HDD, 2TB NVMe SSD and 256GB SATA SSD are more than enough for my collections. The thing is HDDs are slow, like 150-200MB/s if not fragmented, and much slower if fragmented, so HDDs will take more time when doing transfers or backups. I don't know how "real" the issue of SSD data retention is so I'd just believe what are being mentioned by some popular sources for now.

It is common sense that all physical storage media are destructible and re-ripping is time consuming, and I also have personal recording which are not available online and not in 16/44 with 1411.2kbps uncompressed, so compressed lossless formats allow me to do more backup copies with the same storage capacity, and provide more convenience for error checking. Also, wav don't officially support >4GB per file, but formats like flac and WavPack can, it is not about "you" don't need these features, because others may need them.

It is all about individual preference and choice, the files are yours and the money to buy storage are yours, do whatever you like.

As a side note, recently I have a lot of posts about flac compression size vs speed benchmarks, not because I want to shrink several hundred megabytes from my existing collection, but because I am interested about the compression algorithms.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #13 –
I prefer WAV mainly because I'm used to it, and foobar2000 seems to have no problem adding metadata to it. Worst comes to worst, I can always use external tags. I use FLAC sometimes and consider it to be just as lossless, but it can be a bit annoying how long it takes to load. I don't rip CDs often; I just kinda get whatever I can off the internet in the best quality I can find, and make random video game-related stuff in LMMS whenever I feel like it. Sorry for still being off-topic, anyway.
Sincerely, LegoLoco7

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #14 –
Speaking of loading speed, I have a habit to store 24-bit PCM as 32-bit float WavPack:
Quote from: bennetng on
Anything <= 24-bit should be pretty easy to check and I am keeping these files in my own projects as well: the oldish Audition I use opens float files much faster than 24-bit.

Keeping non-audio data or not of course is a case-by-case and user specific choice. It would be disastrous if for example, DAW projects lose all loop points and regions when importing samples.
foobar's external tag is not compatible with other DAWs. Also, I tend to not rely too much on a single piece of software, especially after kode54's retirement. That's why I also learn to use Audacity, Reaper and alternative OSes, as long as they are free/inexpensive and fairly popular.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #15 –
For those who actually want their .wav metadata, WavPack will store and restore them. Which is one reason to use WavPack for DAW plugins. Another is of course the support for float.

CDs don't use .wav internally. Must mention that, otherwise people will start crying over not having preserved the ".wav files" they think were on the CDs - an audio CD doesn't have files at all.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
I use FLAC sometimes and consider it to be just as lossless, but it can be a bit annoying how long it takes to load.

Load where?
Error 404; signature server not available.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Artie on
The reason I don't do FLAC, is because it still isn't universally supported. Neither my SanDisk or Honda (car) support it. However, I do want to play around with it. I'll rip a CD to FLAC on my computer just to see how it works.

Funny enough, I used to use a SanDisk media player (I think the clip? I forget what each model is now) and drive a Honda Fit.

My solution was to rip to FLAC for my PC's HDD, to keep it lossless while maximizing how much I can store, and convert to whatever-works-best for the portable players. I think I just did high-bitrate MP3 on a flash drive for my Honda, can't remember what I did for the SanDisk but I probably just used the same files that I put on the Honda's flash drive.

I assume the SanDisk and Honda can play WAV files but I figured, since I'm listening to those in noisy environments, a high-bitrate MP3 made with a good encoder is good enough. So it may be worth considering that option - store as FLAC for metadata/archival purposes, convert to MP3 for the portable players.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: itisljar on
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
I use FLAC sometimes and consider it to be just as lossless, but it can be a bit annoying how long it takes to load.

Load where?
In foobar2000, which I use all the time for music. It depends on the compression level, but if it's lower, then you might as well use WAV, unless the metadata is that complex.
Sincerely, LegoLoco7

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #20 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
depends on the compression level
Sounds unreasonable - a player doesn't have to decode the file to load it.




Agree.  And often folks are confused about encoding speed vs decoding speed.  Yes, it takes longer to *encode* a file to a high compression FLAC (e.g. "8").  That's a one time thing. But *decoding* FLAC files for playback is effectively the same "effort" for the player, independent of compression (e.g., a FLAC at 8 will decode just as fast as a FLAC at 1).

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #21 –
Quote from: garym on
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
depends on the compression level
Sounds unreasonable - a player doesn't have to decode the file to load it.




Agree.  And often folks are confused about encoding speed vs decoding speed.  Yes, it takes longer to *encode* a file to a high compression FLAC (e.g. "8").  That's a one time thing. But *decoding* FLAC files for playback is effectively the same "effort" for the player, independent of compression (e.g., a FLAC at 8 will decode just as fast as a FLAC at 1).
foobar2000 converts it to PCM automatically, and assuming you're right, it doesn't matter what the compression level is, but because of the conversion, it takes a bit longer than WAV.
Sincerely, LegoLoco7

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
I use FLAC sometimes and consider it to be just as lossless, but it can be a bit annoying how long it takes to load. I don't rip CDs often; I just kinda get whatever I can off the internet in the best quality I can find, and make random video game-related stuff in LMMS whenever I feel like it. Sorry for still being off-topic, anyway.
Quote from: LegoLoco7 on
foobar2000 converts it to PCM automatically, and assuming you're right, it doesn't matter what the compression level is, but because of the conversion, it takes a bit longer than WAV.
Loading files in editing software like LMMS is completely different from loading files in software player like foobar2000.

Here are evidences that loading file into foobar2000 does not invoke decoding:

First post:
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,114816.msg1032465.html#msg1032465

Second post:
Quote from: bennetng on
It is pretty easy to see how foobar2000 2.0 can seemingly capable of identifying the base format is 16-bit float, but as long as I play it and run it through the integrity checker it shows error. It is based on the assumption that any type 3 format must be float rather than looking into the audio data.

As you can see, even for unsupported formats like 16-bit float .wav files, the files are still being loaded into the playlist. As long as you don't play the file or do other steps to invoke full file decoding, foobar only reads the file headers to get the files loaded into the playlist, so you are completely mistaken. So, please stop this misinformation.

Re: CD's ripped to wave files, the bitrate always shows as "1411." What does that mean?

Reply #23 –
Support for 16-bit float has been re-introduced in the meantime, but your point still stands.

(Also, user writes things like "consider it to be just as lossless" ... O'Rlyeh?)