Why not use lossy if you can..

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Why not use lossy if you can..

2005-02-12 13:35:44

I have most of my collection in .flac and its great but I was just wondering, and I am sure this question has come up time and again. Why use lossless if you can get to CD quality with a -q6 and vorbis. I'm just curious. I know the vorbis (or whatever codec) still looses some quality, but if you can't actually tell very easily, why not.

.flac is awesome, though.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #1 – 2005-02-12 13:46:33

You've answered your own question. There is no real reason why not to use a lossy codec if you can't tell the difference, unless it was some extremely rare CD. In which case, if you lost the original you still have the lossless FLAC copies you can burn.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #2 – 2005-02-12 16:03:08

There are plenty of reasons to use lossless that have nothing to do with sound quality.

An example would be to have a bit-for-bit backup of your CD's. Also, this backup can be used to encode to any lossy format, over and over again, without the need for having to re-rip.

Right now I have 892 CD's stored in lossless format. I can encode those to MP3 today. Next week I can encode them all to Vorbis, etc. It gives you a lot of flexibilty.

It really depends on what your end goals are.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #3 – 2005-02-12 17:17:43

Archiving vs. listening.

Listening = for end-use only
Archiving = Can be used for encoding, editing AND end-use

But archiving requires more space.

Conclusion: if you have enough space, then archiving gives you more flexibility and peace-of-mind.

So, its a question of diskspace.
- Lyx

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #4 – 2005-02-12 17:42:51

Also who can guarantee you that there won't be a bionic implant readily available in the near future increasing human hearing capabilities by tenfold ? If you used lossless you'll still be safe.

That said I believe generally there're far more significant losses arising from physical bottlenecks during the original recording procedure. Unless everyone uses purely digital instruments I feel safe enough with MPC Q8

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #5 – 2005-02-12 18:56:27

True, I didn't think about transcoding from lossless to lossy. I do that all the time, usually for my rio karma. Thanks for the replies.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #6 – 2005-02-12 20:18:31

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Also who can guarantee you that there won't be a bionic implant readily available in the near future increasing human hearing capabilities by tenfold ? If you used lossless you'll still be safe.

I think the probability of that happening is much less than of becoming deaf, in which case lossless would just be a bigger waste of space than lossy.
In any case, it's not unlikely that such an implant would result in turning the music experience to the worse, with all music being made for more or less normal human hearing. So, there is in fact some chance that the lossy files, filtering out things that a normal person is not supposed to hear, would actually sound better than the lossless files!
Sorry, I'm just being annoying. The idea was just so crazy I couldn't resist.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #7 – 2005-02-13 18:15:46

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An example would be to have a bit-for-bit backup of your CD's. Also, this backup can be used to encode to any lossy format, over and over again, without the need for having to re-rip.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=272866"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I used to think that myself. Back when ripping was insecure and time consuming. But nowadays I can rip a 70-minute CD in 5 minutes! (using EAC of course). So having to re-rip whenever a new format comes around does not seem like much of a pain.
And you can say: "but your CD's could die!" Well, my oldest CD (from 1990) still rips fine. And any storage solution is prone to disaster.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #8 – 2005-02-13 18:26:52

Re-ripping 1000 CD's would take 83 hours, even if you can do each one in 5 minutes.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #9 – 2005-02-15 23:04:43

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Re-ripping 1000 CD's would take 83 hours, even if you can do each one in 5 minutes.
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And it would take even longer, and be much more work, if you have to re-tag all the files.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #10 – 2005-02-16 05:12:35

I have the diskspace so I use lossless. Mainly because I can transcode as needed without the hassle of reripping or having to retag. It's convenience basically.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #11 – 2005-02-16 07:42:34

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Re-ripping 1000 CD's would take 83 hours, even if you can do each one in 5 minutes.
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And where would you keep those 1000 lossless CDs?

At 400MB average, you would need two or three of the largest hard drives available.

I cannot afford that (or yes, I can, I have 400CDs myself), but I don't see the point.

Of, and you can tag them using freedb

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #12 – 2005-02-16 15:15:53

I have my collection in ogg 1.1 at q4.... can't tell difference with cd... but as stated... when I would transcode it to mp3... it would be a waste... thats why lossless is very handy... If I would have the space I would rerip most of my cds to flac...

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #13 – 2005-02-16 16:15:39

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And it would take even longer, and be much more work, if you have to re-tag all the files.
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Does it take 5 minutes to retag a file? If you had a script that did retagging for you, it could take milliseconds per file.

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And where would you keep those 1000 lossless CDs?

At 400MB average, you would need two or three of the largest hard drives available.

I cannot afford that (or yes, I can, I have 400CDs myself), but I don't see the point.

Even in a RAID-5 setup, you're looking at 50-70 cents per gigabyte. If you keep that in a different location from your CDs (which you would no longer need, and therefore could tuck away in storage somewhere), you have a very reliable backup. That's pretty inexpensive peace of mind for thousands of dollars worth of CDs, even if you don't consider the convienience of having instant access to all your music without having to dig through books or jewel cases.

If I had a collection of particuarly rare CDs, I'd consider a lossless backup an imperative.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #14 – 2005-02-16 17:34:59

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Does it take 5 minutes to retag a file? If you had a script that did retagging for you, it could take milliseconds per file.

I wrote that indirectly in reply to AtaqueEG, who wrote "But nowadays I can rip a 70-minute CD in 5 minutes!" So we're not talking about one file, but all of the tracks from a CD. Now unless there is a way to encode to FLAC, taking the audio from WAV or AIFF files (or directly from the CD), and the tags from Vorbis files, you will have to tag all the files again. If you're manually writing the artist and title tags of a 28 track compilation CD, it will take some time. Information about all CD are not available in Internet databases, and I personally don't trust that tags taken from a database will have all the right characters capitalised.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #15 – 2005-02-16 19:35:58

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Re-ripping 1000 CD's would take 83 hours, even if you can do each one in 5 minutes.
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And where would you keep those 1000 lossless CDs?

At 400MB average, you would need two or three of the largest hard drives available.

I cannot afford that (or yes, I can, I have 400CDs myself), but I don't see the point.

Of, and you can tag them using freedb
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=274061"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I keep them on a home server. I used an old motherboard, cpu, ram, case, etc. I spent $100 on a 3ware RAID card, and $400 for 4 200GB maxtor drives. So, about $600 (misc cables, tax, shipping) investment. The drives are configured as RAID 5, so about 6ooGB usable space. The OS is Redhat Fedora.

I'm not suggesting everyone can afford this, but that was never the question to begin with. The question was why would you use lossless if you can't hear the difference. Transcoding without reripping 1000 cd's was my answer. If you don't have the disc space, then it's not an option.

Here are some pics if anyone is interested. FYI, I removed the video card with the heatsink and replaced it with one that didn't need as much power.

[a href="http://www.soundware.org/ha/side.jpg]side view[/url]

front view

Edit: I forgot. The drive trays were about $12 apiece.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #16 – 2005-02-16 19:57:16

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I keep them on a home server. I used an old motherboard, cpu, ram, case, etc. I spent $100 on a 3ware RAID card, and $400 for 4 200GB maxtor drives. So, about $600 investment. The drives are configured as RAID 5, so about 6ooGB usable space. The OS is Redhat Fedora.

Nice setup. I just had a Maxtor DiamondMax10 300GB (6BS300) almost full of music and it recently had master file table (MFT) failure. I was scared that I lost some of my music but in the end I could recover everything through the backup drive and using a recovery software on the damaged drive. So I'm not going for Maxtor again. I now have 300GB Seagate 7200.8 as my main music drive and a Western Digital backup drive.

I guess we need a separate thread for this discussion but I'm really interested in other people's experiences in how to maintain a large music database and their recovery stories. Even though RAID 5 seems like a good idea. It seems like you'll have 5 drives always active -> 5 times the probability of failure. I think if the drives are running then they have the potential to die. I am also suspicious about PAR2 recovery. Either a drive totally collapses (in which case PAR2 could not be utilized) or very rarely gets sector errors. Optical backup is not safe either b/c the media dies and you'd never know unless you verify them and replace them over time. So I tend to believe a 1-1 backup stored in a safe place is the safest which would be quite costly for a 600GB setup. Is lossless worth all this trouble and possibility to lose everything?

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #17 – 2005-02-16 20:20:00

Well yes, you have 5 drives running all the time = 5 times the failure rate. I'd like to think that I won't have 2 failures at the same time. If only one drive fails I just replace it and keep going. Of course, the RAID card could fail as well. My experience with drives is that they they break when you stop/restart them. If they keep running they last longer.

It really wasn't much trouble at all, for me anyway. It took me about two hours to build the system and probably another two hours to configure the OS. I have a lot of it backed up on DVD-R at my mothers house 80 miles away.

FYI, what prompted me to build this was a Seagate SATA drive that started having errors/corrupting data in my game/play/work PC that was holding half of my collection.

You're right, this probably would belong in a separate thread on home storage. The original question (and answer) was why you would use lossless if you can't hear the difference. After some useful reasons were given, it then turned into a "where/how do you store all of that data and does it make any sense" type discussion.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #18 – 2005-02-16 20:58:41

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...Now unless there is a way to encode to FLAC, taking the audio from WAV or AIFF files (or directly from the CD), and the tags from Vorbis files, you will have to tag all the files again.

That would be the point of the aforementioned script. It would be pretty simple to write script that will, for example, copy over tags to a directory full of flac files from a directory full of vorbis files from the same album ripped on a previous occasion by making the appropriate calls to metaflac, vorbiscomment, etc. I recognize that not everyone is a programmer, but automating tasks like that is why everyone who is comfortable with computers should know at least one good scripting language. IMHO, it's the next step toward becoming a "power user" after learning your keyboard shortcuts.

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If you're manually writing the artist and title tags of a 28 track compilation CD, it will take some time. Information about all CD are not available in Internet databases, and I personally don't trust that tags taken from a database will have all the right characters capitalised.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=274252"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

True - if you're a stickler about capitalization rules (and I am), freedb is hit-or-miss. But usually it's close enough that you only have to go through and correct two or three tracks.

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Even though RAID 5 seems like a good idea. It seems like you'll have 5 drives always active -> 5 times the probability of failure.

That's true, but the whole point of RAID is that it's a Redundant array of inexpensive drives. One drive fails, everything keeps going with zero lost data. You could even set it up so that if a drive fails, the system could unmount the raid and spin down the drives (or shut down the system) to avert the posibility that a second drive would fail (which would lose data) before the first failure is remedied.

A friend and I recently went together to set up a RAID (for general purpose backup of our primary systems), and it's been great so far. We used one of his older systems and linux software raid, so the only cost was the drives. One of the drives dropped out of the RAID one night for some reason shortly after we set it up, and things went along so smoothly that we didn't even notice until later the next day when he went to set it up to notify him when that happens. We didn't lose any data - though we would have obviously if another drive has kicked it (of course, it notifies us now when a drive drops out.)

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #19 – 2005-02-16 21:39:22

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I keep them on a home server. I used an old motherboard, cpu, ram, case, etc. I spent $100 on a 3ware RAID card, and $400 for 4 200GB maxtor drives. So, about $600 (misc cables, tax, shipping) investment. The drives are configured as RAID 5, so about 6ooGB usable space. The OS is Redhat Fedora.

Where the heck did you get a 3ware RAID card for $100?

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #20 – 2005-02-16 22:40:58

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You're right, this probably would belong in a separate thread on home storage.

Ok I started one: the link to the new thread.

Let's continue all storage related discussion about your experiences over there.

Why not use lossy if you can..

Reply #21 – 2005-02-17 00:41:39

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I keep them on a home server. I used an old motherboard, cpu, ram, case, etc. I spent $100 on a 3ware RAID card, and $400 for 4 200GB maxtor drives. So, about $600 (misc cables, tax, shipping) investment. The drives are configured as RAID 5, so about 6ooGB usable space. The OS is Redhat Fedora.

Where the heck did you get a 3ware RAID card for $100?
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See this post:

[a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=31590&view=findpost&p=274348]http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=274348[/url]

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