Ripping CDs - is flac the way forward?

PolarityMan

So I lost a good chunk of my mp3 collection in an HD crash a while ago so I've decided to go back and rip everything I own to a lossless format.

I think FLAC is the best way to go *but* ipods donts support it natively. Does anyone have a decent strategy for either enabling an ipod to play FLAC or converting during sync to the ipod as id rather not have 2 copies of everything?

Also any experience with FLAC from android phones?

Danny1969

Just rip it to Wav,  drives are so big now you don't need the compression do you ?

If you do then ALEC is Apples FLAC I think

PolarityMan

Dunno ...my collection would be pretty chonging in wav

Prob around 400-500 cds.

Danny1969

A typical album is around 600mb in wav so all that would fit on a  500Gb harddrive which is pretty small by todays standards

ALAC not ALEC is Apples format 

PolarityMan

aye thats not too bad...still leaves the problem of transcoding on sync to other devices though.

Chuffola

I appear to have 1524 albums on my iPod Classic using almost all of the 160GB storage. Probably around 1400 are complete albums with 16580 individual tracks.

In FLAC format, that would be huge. In WAV, gigantic.

UnclePsychosis

Personally I just use high bit-rate mp3. I'm not anal enough to notice any differences, especially not because most of my listening gets done on headphones during a commute. 

If you really want to use FLAC then you could Rockbox your iPod. 

http://www.rockbox.org/

I've done it on my Sansa Clip and its much better than the stock firmware. 

ICBM

AIFF for quality.

128kbps mp3 for capacity.

320kbps mp3 for the best compromise.

Myranda

Wouldn't high quality MP3s do?

Android will do FLAC ... but between the quality of the DAC and Headphone amp it's surely not going to be a perfect reproduction of whatever is being played.

PolarityMan

I guess what I had in mind was a central store in FLAc on my copmuter for listening to on good sources, streaming in the house and whatnot and then when i load onto phone (android) or ipod transcoding to a smaller format so I can fit more on teh device.

It doesnt sound like other people use this approach though.

monquixote

I used to do that and I used media monkey to on the fly transcode for each device

PolarityMan

monquixote said:

I used to do that and I used media monkey to on the fly transcode for each device

How did you find it? What amde you stop?

ICBM

PolarityMan said:

I guess what I had in mind was a central store in FLAc on my copmuter for listening to on good sources, streaming in the house and whatnot and then when i load onto phone (android) or ipod transcoding to a smaller format so I can fit more on teh device.

It doesnt sound like other people use this approach though.

The reason for that is simply that for background listening, 128kbps mp3 is fine, and for serious listening I only want CD quality - so anything else falls down on either quality or not being able to get my whole library onto my iPod.

FLAC doesn't reduce the file sizes enough relative to AIFF to be useful for me. Even 320kbps doesn't... so the only solution is two formats.

monquixote

PolarityMan said:

monquixote said:

I used to do that and I used media monkey to on the fly transcode for each device

How did you find it? What amde you stop?

I can't remember how I found it. http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Gold allowed you to set a device profile which specified what media a given device could play and then when it synced with it it would transcode anything that wouldn't play into one of your choice.I had FLAC on my NAS and it transcoded to 320 Vorbis for my player and 128 MP3 for my wifes smaller player. 

I stopped using it when I moved to using Linux so I think I wrote some kind of script that worked with Amarok to do it and now I just use Spotify premium and don't bother with files at all. 

PolarityMan

@monquixote I meant how did you find it as an approach not how did you find the program lol

I dont currently have spotify but last tie i looked there were a fair few artists I liked that wernet on it...admitedly this was a while back.

Jez6345789

The name escapes me but I have an app that converts them to mp3 and adds them into iTunes ready for next sync just drag and drop. As you are proposing I keep Flac in an archive 2 tb USB drive and also on a streaming Seagate media server/nas Having lost stuff over the years due to hard drives and all the hassle of re-encoding a whole library. With storage being cheap these days I archive everything. I have an old Pc I keep wanting to convert to a raid server to do serious belts and braces back up. Having gone digital early on, as the years pass you end up with a pretty large chunk of data. If you don't manage it well it's easily lost as hard drives may be cheap but the average life is 2-3 years.

PolarityMan

Yup the destination is defintiely going to be my NAS

monquixote

PolarityMan said:

@monquixote I meant how did you find it as an approach not how did you find the program lol

I dont currently have spotify but last tie i looked there were a fair few artists I liked that wernet on it...admitedly this was a while back.

I think it worked OK. It was about 8 years ago probably so transcoding was very slow (Pentium 4 PC), but I imagine that won't be much of a problem now. 

Spotify don't have everything (Tool, AC/DC and The Beatles being the most annoying ones), but the convenience makes it worthwhile and if it's just one or two you put the MP3s on your player and Spotify will play them mixed with the streaming tracks.

TTony

I'd say that it really depends on how & where you listen to your music.

I'm quite happy with VBR quality mp3s for listening on my iPod (usually on a train, office, hotel room or similar) through reasonable (but not hi-fi) headphones / earphones.  I've got "enough" on my 160gb iPod to keep me amused.  That gives me the quantity that I want, with the quality that is sufficient.

For casual listening around the house, that's generally via a Sonos system, so again audio quality probably isn't too comprised by the MP3 format there either.  That runs from my NAS, which as well as being RAID5, is also mirrored across some other HDDs, just in case.

For "proper" listening where quality is more important, I'll use the original CD.

monquixote

I don't know what the DACs are like in Sonos players, but you might get better audio quality by ripping your CDs with EAC to FLAC and then playing them from your NAD.

TTony

monquixote said:

I don't know what the DACs are like in Sonos players, but you might get better audio quality by ripping your CDs with EAC to FLAC and then playing them from your NAD.

*might*

But I'm not about to spend a few weeks re-ripping a few thousand CDs, and then buying a few more NAS boxes and HDDs to put in them to hold the re-ripped discs ... just for casual listening around the house.  I think the limiting factor would be the quality of the Sonos speakers rather than the format of the source.