The future of your music collection?

[Daverz]

I ripped a couple dozen CDs today and already found 3 that weren't in freedb or musicbrainz.  They were in Gracenotes, though, so I ended up ripping them to Apple Lossless with iTunes.  Maybe I should use iTunes, but that would seem to stick me with only using iTunes since iTunes doesn't encode or decode FLAC.

[marvinbrown]

Marvin, on iTunes ripping to Lossless is actually the fastest way to rip because it involves the least modification/processing of the digital information!   So, NO reason to go for lower bitrates on that account. The actual ripping to Lossles takes only a few minutes.
Yet, I actually do spend ten minutes per CD, because I always want to improve the tagging, add the artwork, etc. 
I also rip the separate mvts of many works (concertos, string quartets, etc.) as one track - much easier to file and to find.

Btw I find a bitrate of 192 kbps totally unacceptable. As long as you don't mind (much) bigger files: go for Lossless. A good alternative is one of the higher bitrates, but you can always go to that by transforming a Lossless file (of course the other way around is impossible).

Q

  Que pardon my ignorance but are you saying that Apple Lossless is better (higher quality) than Apple AAC?  I have experimented in the past with itunes using my sister's ipod, but since I have not decided on which mp3 player to get if I choose to use itunes my understanding is that I have to buy an ipod, no other mp3 player will work, is this true?

  PS:  This thread is making me think seriously about the future of my music collection!
  marvin

[Que]

  Que pardon my ignorance but are you saying that Apple Lossless is better (higher quality) than Apple AAC?  I have experimented in the past with itunes using my sister's ipod, but since I have not decided on which mp3 player to get if I choose to use itunes my understanding is that I have to buy an ipod, no other mp3 player will work, is this true?

  PS:  This thread is making me think seriously about the future of my music collection!
  marvin

I'm a novice in this as well!
But yes, Lossless is higher quality, but file sizes are significantly bigger as well - in my experience about 40% larger than AAC 320 kbps (click "custom" after selecting AAC in the importing menu, which can be found under "preferences" - "advanced").
The good thing about Lossless is you can change it to a "smaller" (lower quality) format later, if you want to. See this article by McElhearn here. He has also an interesting weblog.

Q

[marvinbrown]

I'm a novice in this as well!
But yes, Lossless is higher quality, but file sizes are significantly bigger as well - in my experience about 40% larger than AAC 320 kbps (click "custom" after selecting AAC in the importing menu, which can be found under "preferences" - "advanced").
The good thing about Lossless is you can change it to a "smaller" (lower quality) format later, if you want to. See this article by McElhearn here. He has also an interesting weblog.

Q

 
  Que thank you so much for that McElhearn link, just the information I was looking for  . It is very detailed, explains a lot for newbes like me- might be worth tagging it on other threads dealing with multiple formats and downloadable music.  I have already placed this thread on my favorites .  This is going to take some work on my part but things are looking very promising.  Also as it stands right now I firmly believe that all of us should be looking into alternatives to our CD collections- digital music is definitely the immediate future for our music!!!

  marvin

[71 dB]

  Que pardon my ignorance but are you saying that Apple Lossless is better (higher quality) than Apple AAC? 

Of course. Lossless is lossless (100 % quality) and AAC is lossy.

[longears]

Marvin--If you're contemplating an iPod, get familiar with http://www.ilounge.com/--and don't forget to check out the forum.

I don't know how good your ears, headphones, PC, and other playback equipment are, but when I got an iPod one of the first things I did was make a comparative study of sound quality with various compression schemes.  You'll find lots of self-appointed experts claiming that no one needs anything superior to, say, 192kbps.  Such "experts" don't listen to opera!

I found that with lossy codecs I needed to go up to at least 256kbps to keep compression artifacts from degrading the sound of complex orchestral music--especially with vocals--even when played back through my iPod.  Ultimately I settled on the LAME codec at 320kbps.  These files are one-fifth the size of redbook CD files but the sound quality is virtually indistinguishable from lossless files when played back through my iPod.

Nowadays, with humungous hard drives going for pennies/gig, if I were going to use a server to feed my hi fi, I would probably just rip WAV files to a dedicated hard drive, and for portable digital music players like iPods or Sansas, I would convert the WAVs to LAME 320kbps. 

[marvinbrown]

Marvin--If you're contemplating an iPod, get familiar with http://www.ilounge.com/--and don't forget to check out the forum.

I don't know how good your ears, headphones, PC, and other playback equipment are, but when I got an iPod one of the first things I did was make a comparative study of sound quality with various compression schemes.  You'll find lots of self-appointed experts claiming that no one needs anything superior to, say, 192kbps.  Such "experts" don't listen to opera!

I found that with lossy codecs I needed to go up to at least 256kbps to keep compression artifacts from degrading the sound of complex orchestral music--especially with vocals--even when played back through my iPod.  Ultimately I settled on the LAME codec at 320kbps.  These files are one-fifth the size of redbook CD files but the sound quality is virtually indistinguishable from lossless files when played back through my iPod.

Nowadays, with humungous hard drives going for pennies/gig, if I were going to use a server to feed my hi fi, I would probably just rip WAV files to a dedicated hard drive, and for portable digital music players like iPods or Sansas, I would convert the WAVs to LAME 320kbps. 

  Hi longears, i haven't gotten to that stage yet in my research but i would like to get a BOSE speaker system that you can plug an mp3 player or ipod into.  As you well know my music collection is heavily vocal (especially opera)  so I appreciate your post regarding vocal quality as it relates to kpbs very much, thank you, you read my mind very well. The way things look now I am definitely going to have to go over 192kpbs for my opera collection. I downloaded itunes this afternoon and have been fiddling around with it.  It solves one problem in that i can join the tracks of my operas to avoid the gaps between tracks.  However I fear that using itunes might restrict the mp3 player I end up buying.  I wonder if someone here can enlighten me on this- if you use itunes do you have to buy an ipod or does this problem only arrise when you want to purchase from the itunes store? I am still open to other software that can be used to rip CDs although I have found itunes to be the most user freindly so far, maybe I am wrong. By the way i want to thank each and everyone of you for the advice you have given me so far....I only hope one day I can pay back the favor!

   

[Que]

Marvin, iTunes has the possibility to rip CDs to the following formats (see the "importing menu): WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC and Apple Lossless.
Only iPods support the Apple Lossless format. So if you don't use an iPod, you'll have to use one of the other formats but you can still use iTunes. However, iTunes does not support FLAC - which is the alternative lossless format, I believe?

Q

[longears]

FLAC and Monkey's Audio (ape) are the lossless compression standards.  Despite the big marketshare iPod's trendiness gave Apple, I'll be surprised if Apple's lossless doesn't ultimately become another marginalized niche product.  The great majority of Apple's iTunes customers couldn't tell the difference between a tuba and a bassoon anyway and download almost exclusively crappy 128kbps files of horribly recorded pop music.

You can use iTunes to rip to lossy codecs if you wish, but the quality sucks--one of the ways Apple makes their AAC seem better than it is is by building in the original Frauenhofer mp3  ripper.  I like mp3 because of its universality, but would never consider using any codec for it other than LAME.  The CDex program is a very easy and fast ripper.  You can program it to rip into any of numerous built-in codecs, with on the fly conversion if you wish and high quality error correction as well (unless it's been improved lately iTunes' error correction sucks).

After I've generated LAME 320kbps mp3 files, I import them to iTunes for loading onto my pod.  But if I were starting out fresh, I would go with Sansa's 8GB solid state player and drag and drop freely without the crappy iTunes interface and buggy iPod file transfer.

[DanielFullard]

I am yet to download music as at the moment Im content with my CD's. I do see the future, the not-so distant future, that Ill transfer away from CD's but as of this moment give me a CD over a download anytime. I did scout around for a good Classical Download tool but am yet to find one that tempts me away from trips into the record store

[Catison]

I am in the home stretch of ripping my 1000+ CD collection to FLAC.  In fact, looking at my statistics, I am ripping my 1000th album right now.

The simple reason I started to archive my whole collection was that I went on an internship this summer 1200 miles from my CDs.  At first, I just ripped whatever I wanted to listen to that day, so that I could put it on my music player (iAudio X5).  But as the date of my departure approached, I didn't want to be without my collection, so I set about systematically ripping my whole collection.  I have a 500 GB hard drive dedicated to music now.

For me the reason to choose FLAC was simple.  I use Linux, so I wanted something I knew would be compatible forever.  The legality of MP3 is still questionable in the US.  I originally chose Ogg Vorbis, a free MP3-like format that sounds much better in acoustic music.  I was satisfied with it for a long time.  The file size was right, and it sounded great.  Then one day, just for fun, I reripped a CD I was going to listen to later that day into FLAC.  This was Alsop's recording of Barber's first symphony.  While I was walking, relatively crappy earbuds in my ear, I heard a timpani roll at the end of the first movement I simply hadn't noticed before.  The music seemed to pop out with more life.  I realized, it was because I had been listening to ogg before.  I was sold.

So now when people as me, why FLAC?, I tell them that you may think you are hearing everything, but what you are missing is a little bit of the excitement on the edges of the music.  And plus, it makes little sense to rip into what sounds good enough for your equipment now, because later you may upgrade and then you'll have to do the job over again.  With FLAC, you can easily downgrade your music when you need to.

I am not as paranoid about the exact details of each track appearing perfect as Mark.  You just have to live with a few errors here and there.  I don't fix these or add any more information until I actually listen to the music.  It is more important for me to have the file encoded, because this is the biggest time sink.  The most important thing for me is getting the composer's name in the artist field with "firstname lastname".  I then use the composer field for "lastname, firstname".  I do this so that I can browse my music by composers' last name, but so that the artist shows up right.

I do this because I track the music I listen to with last.fm.  (This is what you see in my signature.)  last.fm has trouble finding the right artist when you use the "lastname, firstname" convention.  And I also just like to see it correctly when listening.

For my ripping purposes, I use a program called grip.  It uses cdparanoia, a program with a name that says it all.  cdparanoia doesn't allow any errors.  It usually just gives up before it allows errors.  That is comforting, because I don't want to rip anything again.  It then passes the ripped wav directly into FLAC.  The only thing I don't like about grip is that it doesn't have an option for ripping multiple tracks as one track.  It annoyed me until I put rockbox on my iaudio X5 so that I could get gapless playback.

So I have invested a lot of time and effort to get this system working well.  My task now is to find a good back up system for my FLAC files.  But with hard drives as cheap as they are now, this won't be a problem.

[Heather Harrison]

I'm still a bit old-fashioned; I like to have my music on a physical format.  My collection will likely grow much as it has, with more CDs, LPs, and 78s increasingly densely packed in the room where I store them.  Even when I happen to download something (which I rarely do), I burn it onto CD.

That said, I have been copying CDs into a Mac, and I sometimes play music from it when I don't want to dig CDs out of the back room.  I see it as a convenience and a decent backup for the music, but it isn't the primary source.  I don't have an iPod or other digital music player yet, but I might get one eventually.

Heather

[Mark]

Can I see myself ripping my entire collection to MP3, FLAC ... or better? Honestly? No.

I simply don't have sufficient time to do the job to the high standard that I know my perfectionist self would demand. It's hard enough downloading about 12-14 albums a month (as I have done for over a year) and correcting all the filenames and tags so that everything reads beautifully no matter what media player I choose. Finding and adding album art is important for me, too, and I just couldn't be arsed scanning in all my CD covers if I were to rip everything I have on disc.

Besides which, the CD is very much a product of my generation, and rightly or wrongly (and as I imagine it is for the generation before me who still adore LPs), I can't simply abandon the format. I love it too much. So I think what I've accepted is a compromise: I'll keep buying CDs for as long as they're available (I seriously think this will be for at least another 25 years), but at the same time - so as to save on storage space problems and yet continue to experience copious amounts of new recordings inexpensively - I'll go on with my commitment to downloading plenty of albums on a monthly basis. Will I still feel this way in two or three years' time? Who knows?

[johnQpublic]

The only kind of ripping I do is of the accidental kind illustrated below:

[12tone.]

After mp3 formats we're going to go back to wooden discs...you know, the kind Mozart used to record his music with.

Here's an unlabeled disc of Pleyel's Octet for oboe, 2 horns, violin, 2 violas, cello & double bass in C major, B. 215.

I'm guessing it's unlabeled because someone must have taken a bought disc and burned it to a standard disc.

You just need to buy wooden disc players.






Here's a current wooden disc (WD) player. 

[Lady Chatterley]

Yep,I laughed out loud.

[Catison]

Naxos has some new recordings to remaster from the petrified forest (that is, if the copyright has expired).

[RebLem]

CD/hybrid SACD are my default forms. I don't know what happens in the future...

Same here.  Buy or die is my motto!

[Mozart]

My whole collection is on my hard drive, but it has problems. 1 thing is the quality isn't consistent because it used to not be a big deal to me. Also with my old things, a lot of it isn't named properly, but I would be deleting half my music if I deleted all of those files. I try when I can to just put a picture of the cd in the folder, that way I will always know what it is. It is more or less organized though, I don't ever have trouble finding what I want, but just to browse it sucks.
Sometimes I discover things I didn't know I had!

Awhile ago I also did something really stupid and hundreds, maybe thousands of files were renamed...I still have nightmares of that day.

[marvinbrown]

  Hello all, I figured I'd report back with an update.  Given my lack of experience and knowledge with various softwares that rip music from CDs I have decided to take the path of least resistance for now and stick with Apple itunes.  For the past 4 days I have been ripping my CD music collection in Apple Lossless format using itunes.  I have completely ripped 50 CDs (some operas and symphonies) out of my 450 CD collection!  It is taking a long time (about 10 minutes), too long but I shall persevere.  With my operas I have decided to join the CD tracks before importing which is very time consuming but I think in the end worth it- yes I won't be able to skip tracks to my liking but better that than those dreadful gaps between tracks which would seriously ruin Verdi and Wagner's operas.  For the handful of ripped symphonies I ripped each movement separately.  Haven't quite decided what I want to do with my concerti collection (piano, violin, harpsichord etc.) nor Bach's cantatas, passions and oratorios. I am thinking of joining the tracks as I did with the operas. 
  I can't believe that I have finally and officially joined the digital technology.  Finally I have been visiting the Apple store frequently, familiarizing myself with their ipods and have decided to buy an one (I am looking at either the ipod video or the new ipod touch- the GB memory after all my music is ripped will be the determining factor). I will be going to France for Christmas and my target is to carry all my music with me in one compact player on that trip!!  Imagine no more having to carry bulky CDs, worrying about them getting scratched or damaged, I won't even need to carry a CD player anymore.  I think I have taken the right decision to safeguard the future of my music collection.  I don't know why I waited so long to do this!

  marvin