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Music Media Data Storage

Which Lossless Audio Codec, and Why? 131

Posted by Cliff from the preservation-of-melodic-bits dept.
deadsquid puts forth a worthy follow up question to last week's query on audio codecs: "I'm about to re-rip my entire CD collection for the fourth time. I don't want to do it again, so have decided to invest in a small(ish) array and use a lossless codec to create a reference set of my music. From the reference, I plan on transcoding to a variety of bitrates (depending on where the final product will end up) and whichever format of the week suits the device(s) the transcoded content will ultimately sit on. I don't particularly care about encoding time, but would like something that transcodes nicely to MP3, WMA, OGG, and other formats in a reasonable length of time. I would like to ensure that track metadata is maintained in the reference, and is easily transferable when transcoded. I also want something that's not proprietary to an individual's or small group's whims. I'm thinking FLAC, but was wondering if other people had better experiences with other codecs. If you were to use a lossless encoding format, which would you use, and why?"
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Which Lossless Audio Codec, and Why? More

Which Lossless Audio Codec, and Why?

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  • Again? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:24PM (#12234766) Journal
    I'm about to re-rip my entire CD collection for the fourth time.

    Thought I saw this story already this week, wierd.. But one question, why for the 4th time? I've been ripping to MP3 since my Amiga days. ;)

    And my Car stereo plays MP3s, I dont see me going to a different codec for awhile. A long while.

    • Re:Again? (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by jsimon12 ( 207119 )
      Yeah I gotta say, 4 times seems excessive. I have been doing 128k MP3 since the 90's and it is good enough (and those CD's have been in boxes collecting dust for years now. But then again I am not a audiophilem, just like my toons.

      • Re:Again? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Nasarius ( 593729 )
        128kbps MP3s? Ouch. I guess you just don't have decent audio equipment? A ~$90 pair of Sennheiser headphones is more than enough to tell the difference between 128 and 192 if you appreciate the music at all.
        • A $90 pair of headphones cost too much for most people's budget for music appreciation.

          • Re:Again? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by KDan ( 90353 )
            Those people's music appreciation is hardly worth mentioning, let's face it.

            Daniel

            • Re:Again? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by op00to ( 219949 )
              You know, I run a state-of-the-art cable conditioning service. All very high technology. I'd like to talk to you about the cables you use for your audiophile setup. With our SPECIAL TECHNOLOGY, we can make your music sound 50% better! Or something...

              Ever hear the old joke "What's the mating call of a Sorority Girl? I'm SOOOOO drunk!" That's sort of like the mating call for an idiot who is easily parted with his money: "I'm an audiophile!"

              • Re:Again? (Score:5, Interesting)

                by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid@nOspaM.yahoo.com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @02:00PM (#12236124) Homepage Journal
                Actually, if you get into signal processing and transmission line theory, you will see that cables make a difference, for the same reasons that you wouldn't use CAT3 wiring for gigabit networking or indoor extension cords outdoors in a thunderstorm. Of course, paying $50-$200 for a pair of headphones to use in a professional recording studio isn't unreasonable. Paying $2,000 for a pair of headphones to wear while jogging, on the other hand, is quite unreasonable. Sanity has a sliding scale.

                But, yeah, there is a point at which you can't justify the extra cost, and you're just throwing away your money. It's like Joe Sixpack buying vintage wine when he can't tell the difference between it and the cheap stuff.

                But, back on topic:

                My experience with flac is that it is VERY quick to encode and decode. Compression isn't an order of magnitude like MP3, of course, but you might be able to shrink files by a significant quantity (not quite a clearance rack or going-out-of-business sale, but definitely like black Friday). Since it's so damn fast, it's trivial to re-encode flac to other formats.
            • I can't stand anything less than 224 produced by bladeenc if I'm using MP3s on most of my CDs.

              Just my preference -- I know people who think their 96's sound perfect. Personally, they're deaf.

        • Re:Again? (Score:2, Funny)

          by ABaumann ( 748617 )
          If a $90 pair of headphones makes your audio sound worse then you really need to reconsider your purchases.

          • Re:Again? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by bluephone ( 200451 )
            Actually, your 128's will simultaneously sound better _and_ worse. The freq response will be better, clearer, but you also will be able to notice compression artifacts more. Enough so that when you switch to 192, you'll be able to hear much improvement, moreso than if you just went to 192 with the five dollar Sony headphones that came with your Discman.
        • Uh... the difference is obvious on my $20 Sony headphones. 128kbps just sucks.
          • I can tell the difference between 192kbps and 256kbps, over the crappy $5 headphones that came with the player.

            But then again, I can also hear dog whistles, so I take it my ears don't have the average range. (even though I have a 6db loss in one ear and a 37db loss in the other).

            MP3 is tolerable for me, but lossless is better. OGG does it a little better than MP3, but thats more likely because it tossess different information that I can't hear - and nothing out there plays ogg, and can't (because hardware
            • I have an iRiver H340 which plays ogg vorbis very well. There are also integer based ogg vorbis methods available. I don't know if the iRiver players use floating or integer codecs for ogg, but I do know that I can listen to my ogg files with no problem.
        • A troll ?? Insightful , maybe ? Even on $3 headphones you could tell the difference between 128 and 192. 192 is the bare minimum at 128 all cymbals sounds like if the drummer was playing under water or something.
          Parent is right, most people don't really listen to music, they use it as something to fill silence and don't give a flying pig about how it sounds. They don't hear the difference because they're not paying attention at all. So they mod you down because you sound elitist, seesh... train your ears,
          • I drink 10 dollar wine too and you know what, there are a lot of good wines out there between 10 and 20 bucks. I am sure a wine snob would say different and I have had some very nice more expensive bottles of wine (mmmm Lewis Ethan). But frankly it is nicer to have a decent bottle of wine regularly than an expensive one occasionally. I think the same thing applies to music, it is nicer to have more variety then a small quantity.
            • Its purely personal and psychological. I heard a great radio poll the other day actually (stolen from a book whose name I've since forgotten); would you rather attend two concerts in your lifetime, each the most incredible experiences of music ever produced by all mankind but never listen to music other than those two occasions, or listen to music your whole life, but never hear anything better than mediocre at best?

              Many people answered each way.

    • Re:Again? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:33PM (#12234892) Homepage Journal
      too much time on his hands. or maybe the music will just sound better then.

      in answer to the question though, flac is perfectly usable for that and will remain free and there will be tools that understand it.
      • My favorite portable audio player [aerodrome.us] doesn't play mp3s by default. You have to pay. It plays oggs by default. For free.

        Also, some people want to use other formats for the same reason some people want to use Linux--to get away from proprietary/patent-encumbered software.

    • Re:Again? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by OmniVector ( 569062 ) <see my homepage> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:36PM (#12234930) Homepage
      i know.. seriously people. mp3 is going to be around for a very long long time. why are you even bothering with any other format? every single device plays mp3s (except for sony's piece of shit first try at a digital music player). every OS plays mp3s. they're more than good enough for all but the most anal retentive of audiophiles. if you're really overly concerned about quality even in that case, just use VBR mp3s.
      • Because Ogg Vorbis and AAC sound better while taking up the same amount of space. Also you can't be sure that mp3's will last forever. It would be nice to play CD quality tracks off a HD through my stereo. I can sometimes hear compression, even if others can't. I'd to like to put AAC tracks on my laptop, and ogg onto my Rio Karma, so burning to a lossless format then converting to whatever makes sense for me.

      • Aye (Score:4, Funny)

        by numbski ( 515011 ) * <numbski&hksilver,net> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:59PM (#12235259) Homepage Journal
        But I have to say this:

        The audiophile with the biggest flamethrower is going to win out on this article. ;)

      • Re:Again? (Score:5, Informative)

        by mellon ( 7048 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @01:01PM (#12235294) Homepage
        You can't edit mp3s. Well, you can, but the results aren't good. You have to decompress the mp3, do your editing, and recompress, and chances are that you're going to get artifacts when you do this. So if you ever intend to use an audio file for any kind of editing, you really want it stored losslessly.

        At Diamond Mountain University, we typically record all our classes, at 16bit 44khz mono, which consumes a substantial amount of disk space. When people record directly to MP3 it's a huge hassle because I can't take the audio and do dynamic range compression on it without creating artifacts, which means that you can't listen to it on your car stereo unless you have a luxo-mobile with really good sound baffling.

        Right now I store all this stuff as AIFF files, but the idea of converting them to FLAC files is definitely attractive.
        • Rather than moving to mp3 at the end, you might look into speex. I used this for putting church sermons on the net and got a good size/quality trade off.

          I'm suprized for lectures, speex isn't used more often.

          http://www.speex.org [speex.org]
          (they're part of that whole xiph/vorbis bit)

          The folk over here [illiminable.com] make it work under windows/media-player as well!
          • The trouble with stuff like this is that you need it to be usable on an iPod or there's no point in it. Speex doesn't claim to be available on the iPod. I'm not kidding, by the way - half the people who listen to the stuff I produce do so on an iPod, so it has to be MP3 or AAC. I use MP3 because AAC only works on iPod. Sigh.
        • You are missing the point of MP3s - a compressed storage that sounds great, plays anywhere and will be around for a long long time. Its the format best matching these conditions.

          If any of these reasons doesn't work for you, choose another format:

          • If you want perfect reproducability from your CD original (or recordings), use AIFF, FLAC or WAV.
          • If you want more compression while keeping good sound, and dont mind if it wont play anywhere, try OGG or WMA.
          • If you want to edit, use AIFF or FLAC.
          • ... and so on.
          • I use MP3s for audio delivery, just not for archival storage. Dunno where I said in there that you shouldn't use MP3s for anything; just that if you want something that's archival, MP3s aren't the way to go.
      • seriously people. mp3 is going to be around for a very long long time. why are you even bothering with any other format?

        Aside from the good reasons others have mentioned, it's because there isn't just one MP3 format. Sure, anything can play most any MP3s, but there are many options for bit rate, and lots of different encoders with different encoding characteristics.

        A friend of mine does exactly this (giant array with all CDs losslessly compressed), and then encoding what he needs when he needs it. That
      • I just got a new pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD 555) and am considering lossless audio codecs... And a new sound card... But yeah, with cheap equipment it goes without saying that you won't notice the difference between an MP3 and a CD. Some of us do appreciate the extra quality, though, without being "audiophiles" or anything.

      • sony's piece of shit first try at a digital music player

        I hate to break it to you, but CDs, MiniDisc and DATs are all digital formats, and Sony make players for all three. They've all been around a lot longer than mp3s have, too.

      • Sorry, but no.
        mp3s really have issues when you listen to them on good quality speakers/amplifier, especially in the high frequencies (charlestons, cymbals etc). It's not a total crap either, but you can clearly tell the difference between the mp3 and the cd. The cd will sound much more precise in those frequencies, and it really makes a difference.
        Yes, you probably can't tell the difference if you have a basic stock hifi system because higher frequencies are literally not rendered at all by the speakers
        • I really doubt it for 99.99+% of listeners, systems, and tracks. I've done blind ABC testing between source, LAME VBR mp3 with extreme settings, OOG, and some other codecs and I can't pick out the LAME MP3's vs source for almost all tracks. I have Sennheiser HD555 headphones and tested perfectly on my hearing test at my last work physical.
    • Well, one of the reasons why I have restarted a couple of times is that in The Beginning I would just rip 'em as they were; later, I would use CDDB to insert useful info; still later I started to use CDDB/FreeDB purely as a template, editing the info to ensure consistency and correctness. Then I decided to alter my "consistency default"...
      Seems to me that once you've gotten the data off the disc, altering the data info in a structured, batchy way is nigh-on impossible.

      Compared to choosing an audio form

  • Flac for sure (Score:2, Informative)

    by LiENUS ( 207736 )
    Flac would probably be the best to use for one reason. It's open source, no fuss no mess just open source. Plus I believe there are now portable music players that support flac.

    • I 2nd the motion for FLAC. It has the added benefit of wicked fast encoding times, and light processor usage.

      In my very unscientific tests on my own machine, it has performed the best by any measure, when comapred to comparably sized and qualitied files. (compared to MP3, AAC, WMA, etc.)

    • Re:Flac for sure (Score:2, Insightful)

      by eggoeater ( 704775 )

      use a lossless codec to create a reference set of my music

      I don't particularly care about encoding time

      something that transcodes nicely to MP3, WMA, OGG, and other formats in a reasonable length of time

      I also want something that's not proprietary

      uh...why not create wave files and then compress the hell out of it with a separate data compression program. It won't be as small as MP3, but no loss-less compression will. It doesn't get any more non-proprietary or loss-less than that.

      • Re:Flac for sure (Score:4, Informative)

        by booch ( 4157 ) <slashdot2010@cra ... m ['k.c' in gap]> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @02:53PM (#12236892) Homepage
        uh...why not create wave files and then compress the hell out of it with a separate data compression program
        That's pretty much what FLAC is -- it's a specialized data compression program. To a "normal" data compression program (ZIP, gzip, etc.), audio data looks pretty random, so it wouldn't do a very good job. The important lesson here: knowing more about your data allows you to compress it better.

  • Definitely FLAC (Score:3, Informative)

    by Punboy ( 737239 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:26PM (#12234799) Homepage
    I would definitely go with FLAC. No patent/IP worries, no licensing... its opensource... and it transcodes very nicely. I use it personally for my entire collection except what I switch over to my iPod, which is when I transcode it to 192Kbps AAC. Don't use Apple's Lossless, it has licensing issues and Linux decoders are buggy at best. Don't use RAW or WAV cause um... they're too big.
    • then http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ [dbpoweramp.com] is what you want. rip to lossless FLAC with this or any other tool, and store on a big, cheap-ass IDE disk.
      then use dbpoweramp to batch-convert (maintaining folder structure etc) to format of your choice for playback on whatever device you're using.
      the advantage of this is that you rip once, and then batchconvert periodically overnight - so when you're using a small capacity MP3 player you can use 128 MP3s, and when you get an ipod you can rip to higher bit rates. all you

  • The best sound format: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Randolpho ( 628485 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:29PM (#12234838) Homepage Journal
    .MIDI 'nuff said.

    *ducks*
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:It's only Math (Score:2, Informative)

      by LSD-OBS ( 183415 )
      Considering he wants to back up his music in lossless form from a digital media source, Nyquist's theorem has nothing to do with it unless he's having to resample the CD through his audio card's input (an extra ADC->DAC step), which I would strongly advise against.

      All he wants is a lossless audio codec which will take 44100Hz 16bit stereo as input, and encode it that way. FLAC sounds perfect for the job.
  • I've been ripping and encoding my CD's (~700) and I've used FLAC so that I won't have to do it again. I'm getting anywhere from 50% to 70% compression...so you will need a LOT of disk space. At the same time, I've also been encoding into Ogg Vorbis so I can stream them using a tool that acts as an encoder but calls other encoders (the name of which escapes me at the moment:-). I must say that the RIP takes a lot longer than either encoding step.

  • Use Flac (Score:2, Informative)

    by JFitzsimmons ( 764599 )

    Flac: Opensource, nonproprietary, cross platform, and has very good integration with ogg/vorbis.

    As for metadata retention, that depends entirely on your encoder. I highly doubt you will ever find a WMA encoder that can retain the tags from a FLAC file, or mp3 for that matter. Oggenc (the vorbis encoder) does it by default:

    $ oggenc -q7 *.flac

    This will create ogg/vorbis files with the same filenames and will retain all FLAC tags.

    I have no idea about mp3 encoders, becuase I almost never use them. I c

    • Here [xiph.org] is a Perl script to batch convert flac to mp3 including preservation of id3v2 tags. As to why use WMA, well if you have a WMA player which doesn't support mp3.....

    • Cool. I'll be trying that next time I need to transcode some FLAC files to Ogg Vorbis. I did this recently but didn't know that oggenc could directly handle FLAC files (or maybe the binary I had wasn't compiled with the right flags or sommat), so I had to pipe it with the FLAC decoder and then manually re-tag the files.

      Not a problem for one album but it is the reason I don't do more things via FLAC first, 'cos for several albums at a time that would be a bind.

  • comparisons of lossless compression (Score:5, Informative)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposerNO@SPAMalum.mit.edu> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:42PM (#12235005) Homepage

    I made some comparisons of lossless compression techniques a while back. This web page [upenn.edu] contains the results of my own tests (for speech data) and links to the tests I found (for music). I use FLAC.

  • Stay Tuned for Next Week's "Ask Slashdot" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:47PM (#12235076)
    excerpt:
    "I'm ripping my entire audio collection to lossless audio files and I need a cheap large-volume storage solution...."

    • "I'm ripping my entire audio collection to lossless audio files and I need a cheap large-volume storage solution...."

      I'll be on vacation next week, so let me add one valuable reminder now.

      As a habit now, any box I build has two drives in a RAID-1 mirror set; compared with the pain of recovering from a failure, the cost of the extra drive was good insurance. And I thought RAID-1 was fine; how likely was it that two drives would fail at the same time?

      It turns out that if you buy the same model of drive at

  • Consider longevity of the codec (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rubinson ( 207525 ) <rubinson @ e m a i l.arizona.edu> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:47PM (#12235080) Homepage
    Almost certainly FLAC will be what most people recommend. And it very well may be the correct choice for your situation. But I'd also take into account longevity of the codec. The fact that FLAC is open source, patent-less, etc is only a buffer against obsolescence, not a guarantee. WAV's, for example, have been around forever and are so entrenched that you can be certain that support for them isn't going anywhere. FLAC, on the other hand, has only been around for about 4 or 5 years.
    • The nice thing about an open source codec is that you can keep a copy of the source code alongside the audio files. So at least in theory the codec will last as long as the audio does. For really long-term archiving I'd be tempted to put a minimal implementation of the decompressor at the beginning of each compressed file...
    • This isn't really an issue - the reason WAV has been around for so long is that it's just doing a direct read of the bits on the audio CD, and dumping them to a file.

      FLAC is a free method to losslessly compress those WAV files, so should be as good as any, really. The point behind ripping lossless is so that you can just transcode when something new comes along - if someone comes up with a lossless encoder that makes 10% smaller files than FLAC, then it's a simple job to write up a script that traverses

      • Re:Consider longevity of the codec (Score:5, Informative)

        by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposerNO@SPAMalum.mit.edu> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @01:11PM (#12235441) Homepage
        the reason WAV has been around for so long is that it's just doing a direct read of the bits on the audio CD, and dumping them to a file.

        Not exactly. WAV is a FILE format, not an audio representation format. The audio data can be in any of dozens of formats, many of them involving lossy compression. One of the registered audio data formats (with ID 1) is straight PCM data, that is, uncompressed audio in the usual format. WAV files often contain straight PCM data, but they don't have to. (I've got some lecture notes on audio data and file formats here [upenn.edu].)

        • Agreed...back in the day I had some kind of program that wouldn't export to MP3 unless you paid extra for it.

          So, I exported as WAVs, with MP3 as the compression scheme...then renamed to .MP3, it worked fine.

  • We Need a Listening Test (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doug Dante ( 22218 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:50PM (#12235114)
    Sorry, but I'm an avid audiophile, and just because all lossless audio codecs generate digital output streams identical to their digital input streams does not mean that they sound the same! We must verify that those bits still sound the same via our one way gold plated speaker cables!

  • General slash response... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sethadam1 ( 530629 ) * <ascheinberg&gmail,com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @12:56PM (#12235219) Homepage
    Let me sum up this entire thread so far and everything that will eventually be added for you:

    FLAC blah blah blah. Blah blah Monkey's Audio. Blah blah FLAC blah. Blah blah SHN! Blah. WAV. Blah blah OptimFROG blah blah blah. Blah blah. WMA. WMA?! Blah! Monkey's Audio blah. Blah blah FLAC.

    There you go: FLAC.
  • Write one yourself.

  • I just started doing this again myself... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @01:35PM (#12235734) Journal
    I invested in a good-sized array (5 250g drives in a RAID-5), and I'm in the middle of reripping my entire collection.

    The format I am using is BIN/CUE... I'm trying to take a perfect copy of the actual CD, so that I can recreate it when I wish. My original goal was to copy every bit on the CD.

    From what I have found, however, none of the CD image utilities out there make a bit-perfect copy of audio CDs. I have tried Alchohol, Blindwrite, and something else, and NONE of them result in bit-perfect rips with EAC from the image afterward.

    The only way I found I could get bit-perfect copies of the music was to use EAC with its AccurateRip database. EAC won't copy anything but sound, so I'm losing the 'extra' content that comes on some CDs. However, what I really care about is the music, so if I have a bit-perfect copy of that, I'm happy.

    There are two major ways to make BIN/CUES... separate wav files, or a single wav file. Both require a CUE sheet to reassemble into a CD image. I chose the single-wav format, because this makes tagging when I actually extract the data into whatever I want to use easier. The separate wav file approach would allow you to more easily access the individual files with a script. I suspect this may be a technically superior approach. But I'm using single WAVs anyway, even though it takes more work.

    My actual rip process:

    Buy a really good CD drive to rip with. I'm using a Plextor Premium.
    Install CYGWIN or find some other way to script a quick 'diff'. (I'll put my tiny script at the end).
    Install Daemon Tools to mount images.
    Run EAC (I have installed the AccurateRip database as well)
    Set EAC to rip to Track%N.wav when extracting.
    Rip CD to individual WAVS on the C drive, ensure that everything is either bit perfect or the CD is unknown. AccurateRip only understands individual tracks, so this is the only way I've found to verify that my original CD is perfect.
    Have EAC create a separate-files CUE sheet 'with leftout gaps'.
    Edit CUE sheet to remove anything but INDEX 00 lines. Remove all PREGAP and INDEX 01 lines. (This was the only way I could get bit-perfect second-generation rips.)
    Mount CD image. Rip again to a single-file BIN/CUE image. (this is very fast, 30 seconds to 1 minute on my system) (this will be what you keep)
    Mount new image. Rip AGAIN to individual files in a separate directory. (again very fast)
    Run a 'diff' between the first generation rips and the final generation. If they're exact copies, then you have a bit-perfect BIN/CUE.
    Copy BIN/CUE to server.
    Delete everything and start on the next CD.

    It would be perfectly possible to skip the second and third-generation rips, since you know you got a good copy the first time, but I prefer the single-file approach... I don't want to work with the wav files directly because I don't have tag info for them in that format. And it doesn't take very long to create the single-file image, so I go ahead and do it that way.

    Then the next step is to mount the images and rip with whatever software you want to use. I'm using iTunes. I just mount the images with Daemon Tools off the server and rip with iTunes, which always seems to recognize the CDs. I also found that if I bump iTunes' priority down to Below Normal, my rips go ENORMOUSLY faster... they jump from about 8x (dismal) to about 45x. I assume Daemon Tools isn't running at very high priority and iTunes interferes with it... by bumping iTunes down, it doesn't interfere as much and rips faster.

    Oh, iTunes also didn't like the 'Generic' label that Daemon Tools uses by default, it seems to be coded to explicitly not recognize a drive with that label. I changed mine to be a 'Pioneer' 'DVR-1X' during the Daemon Tools install, and then iTunes used it fine.

    Once you're done ripping, then script something on your server to compress your WAVs with whatever compressor you want. You won't be able to mount them without uncompressing them again, but you'll save a lot
    • Maybe I'm missing something here but what's wrong with doing: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=myrip.bin

      • Re:I just started doing this again myself... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Malor ( 3658 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:05PM (#12237784) Journal
        Truly accurate CD ripping is fairly hard, at least when the CD isn't factory fresh and totally perfect. A simple dd will indeed copy the image, but it's really designed for data, not audio. If your CD has any scratches, it is highly, highly likely that your copy will be imperfect. Audio CDs, unlike data discs, don't have much in the way of redundancy, and it's easy for errors to be missed by the OS.

        EAC, on a good drive, will see problems that dd just doesn't catch. It knows how to talk to the better drives, like the Plextors, that will report C2 error information. When it finds a problem, it will retry numerous times at different speeds, trying like mad to get a solid copy. It's surprising just how good a job it does, even on rather questionable CDs. dd offers none of this. It's not an audio ripper, it's just a data copier.

        EAC, combined with the AccurateRip database, is a way to be CERTAIN you got a perfect rip, or at least the exact same results that other people have gotten. You simply have no way to know if you extracted properly with dd.

        And don't think that just because your CDs are unscratched that they will extract perfectly. I have a couple of CDs that report errors even though their surfaces are apparently perfect. My copy of the old Lost Boys soundtrack is particularly bad. I've run it through several polishing sessions, and there are no visible scratches of any kind, but EAC has a heck of a time with it. I assume that it must be a poor-quality pressing. A couple of tracks on the disk are damaged past EAC's ability to compensate, and I need to find new copies. Had I been using dd, I wouldn't have known.

        Remember, I'm trying to archive here. I'm trying to get it PERFECT, so that I never, ever have to do it again. If you just want a casual rip to toss in your iPod, that's a rather different goal.
        • How does EAC compare with Linux tools like cdparanoia?
          • Well, they're not gonna have the AccurateRip database, which I personally find very useful, even though it's still a fairly 'young' project. It's a collection of md5sums for extracted tracks, and will tell you whether or not you got the rip right. I've found this to be extremely useful, even though it doesn't yet know some of my CDs.

            cdparanoia et al may be just as good at extracting the bits, and you might possibly be able to hack the AR database to work with those.... if you could do that, your end resu
        • Err... you can't use dd to read audio CDs.

    • Personally I use EAC or PlexTools Pro to rip to FLAC and embed the cuesheet and then have been using Nero ImageDrive to mount the image as a virtual drive and rip into iTunes, so I get all the tags in the usual way.

      I ran into the same issue you reported with iTunes not recognizing the virtual drive until I did some digging and found the following file: "C:\Program Files\iTunes\CD Configuration\gcdroem.cfg". In there you'll find a section like

      [VIRTUAL DRIVE]{RecorderType:VIRTUAL}<gcdrmmc.dll>
      VOBID In

    • From what I have found, however, none of the CD image utilities out there make a bit-perfect copy of audio CDs. I have tried Alchohol, Blindwrite, and something else, and NONE of them result in bit-perfect rips with EAC from the image afterward.

      I would suggest "cdrdao". Using it's "read-cd" option, you can make an exact copy of any CD, even with copy protection.

      I appreciate the "read-cddb" option myself, though it might not be something you want to use given your stated goals. If your CD didn't come wit

  • Okay, while we're on the audio topic - does anyone know of any car stereos that have a CompactFlash slot, or some other type of flash memory slot? I think Sony made some with MemoryStick slots, but I'm not sure they're doing that, anymore. It's hard to tell since they've ceded their car stereo section to Crutchfield's website (no kidding).

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @02:06PM (#12236194)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • True, APE does compress a bit better than FLAC, however it's important to note the following:
      1. FLAC is streamable (APE is not.)
      2. FLAC has native support for several hardware players (APE supports none, to my knowledge.)
      3. FLAC is asymmetric with a bias towards faster decoding (APE is symmetric with respect to encode and decode speeds.)
      4. FLAC is licensed under the OSI approved Xiph modification to the BSD license with supporting reference code licensed under the GPL (APE code is generally available but the lice
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • 2. FLAC has native support for several hardware players (APE supports none, to my knowledge.)

          For portable players, I'll stick with high-quality VBR MP3 files. There's just not enough storage for lossless audio on them yet. When there is, I can easily transcode from APE to whatever format they support.

          That's a good point, but I was thinking more along the lines of hardware for in-house playing of music. I have my music ripped to a lossless format in a central location in my residence and I'd like t

    • It would be shameful if Monkey's Audio's license became an OSI-approved license. It would point to a profound irony as well. Consider the situation from a business perspective and don't forget that the open source movement's chief audience is businesses.

      According to the Monkey's Audio developer site [monkeysaudio.com]: "If you're trying to make money, in any way, talk to me first.". This is a restatement of section 2 of the Monkey's Audio license ("2. The use of Monkey's Audio or the Monkey's Audio source code for any co

      • FLAC remains the easy choice primarily because it is free software. It might not compress best (but it compresses better than Shorten), but it works well enough and its inherent freedom offers a compelling case for long-term archiving.
        Any data on this? I mean. Lots of posts here. People who argue for FLAC mostly. Some who sth like i quote from you here, but: where is the actual data? I'd love to read an authentic benchmark. Not only for size, but also encoding and decoding time.

        • In short, I do it myself. I have downloaded Shorten files (and, if possible, their WAV equivalents so I don't have to run the non-free shorten program) and then recompressed the uncompressed data with FLAC. archive.org [archive.org] carries a lot of Shorten files you can use for testing.

          Every time I test this, I see that FLAC compresses more tightly than Shorten. But I'm told there are other lossless audio compressors out there that do a better job than FLAC. I've seen the results of some of them, but I don't know

  • Seriously, when I found, to my dismay, that I was off by about a factor of two in space to rip my CDs to disk, I stumbled upon the SHORTEN format and nice .wav to .shn transcoders. Whee!

    I hadn't heard of it since.

    I suppose it's time to re-rip to .flac.

    It goes without saying that I am only interested in lossless codecs.

  • Certainly FLAC... (Score:3, Funny)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:42PM (#12237487) Journal
    ... if for no other reason than the fact that it's so close to "AFLAC!!"

  • Howabout (Score:3, Funny)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:04PM (#12237770) Journal

    PCM? Then you could store it all on CD!
  • Face it, when talking about lossless codecs, they all do the same thing: enable you to recreate the music without any loss. There's nothing to compare in terms of sound performance. You could compare encoding/decoding speed, file size, etc., but I personally think it's a wash. For me, compression or speed doesn't matter when I'm storing my entire collection and converting only an album here or there.

    Your concern, then, should be how you want to manage and convert your music. If you use a Mac and like iTun
  • Ok, Flac is the guy answer, but what would he use to transcode FLAC without loosing his metadata?
  • There's just no alternative.

    It's free. It's cross-platform. It's under active development and maintenance. It's technically sound - seeking, metadata, sane encoder/decoder applications. It's supported by at least one player manufacturer (rio). It's much smaller than uncompressed audio.

    There really is no alternative; FLAC is the shit.

    L
  • Refer to the lossless codecs comparison [hydrogenaudio.org] on Hydrogen Audio.

    Personally, I'd go for Wavpack due to its excellent compression, non cpu-intensive decoding, cross-platform support, active development and open license. If the Rockbox project succeeds, I'll be able to play them on my iRiver.
  • Now what are good tools to encode large libraries of FLAC files. For windows, for linux?

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