At this point I try to get everything lossless (ALAC) and preferably in high-res if I can. Storage is relatively cheap and I'd rather not have to re-rip my CD collection again. For devices that can't handle that format or have limited storage (e.g. USB flash drive for the car stereo) I'll do 256kbps AAC.
FLAC for everything I rip. I used to care about how much space it uses up until I realized I was being silly by worrying about HDD space when the actual CD's that go on any given HDD will cost vastly much more.
I almost klicked "less than 96k"
My brain autocompleted bitrate to sampling frequency for a second.
Close call. And yes, for music my dacs are set to 88.2 Khz, not 96k.
sidenote:
maximum bandwidth we need is 88.2 or 96 Khz at 20bit. No electronic equipment in the world can resolve higher than that.
My brain autocompleted bitrate to sampling frequency for a second.
Close call. And yes, for music my dacs are set to 88.2 Khz, not 96k.
sidenote:
maximum bandwidth we need is 88.2 or 96 Khz at 20bit. No electronic equipment in the world can resolve higher than that.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Yes, 20 Bits 96 Khz is enough, is 33 times the resolution of audio cd.
If you get to that point, it's time to take a hard look at your clock
My bet would rather be that in 20 years time atomic clocks will be common among audiophiles.
I'd settle for one I could wear as a watch. As it is, I have to content myself with a quartz timepiece that recalibrates itself to the WWVB signal every day after midnight. But it's hard to get data about time dilation with that! How am I supposed to get music that's compensated for blue-shift?
You don't, you use Ansible for the DSP input.
I can't even ABX LAME at V2 beyond edge cases where V0 needed, Neither can 99% of the population. Then you have highly annoying people flexing how they can only cope with V0 or 320kbps like a few on HydrogenAudio who seem to act like your broken If you pick V2 over 192k AAC or Vorbis, Because there too stupid to get not everyone the same?.
Wow, this is an old thread.
I use CUE/FLAC for my original masters, because it allows me to recreate the original CDs if I need to, and also allows me to generate any other lossless or lossy format I want.
There's literally no reason to go past 44.1KHz/16 bit for playback. Higher sampling rates produce sound that's better than human hearing. There are a few people (I used to be this way when I was a teenager) that can hear over 20KHz, but there's nothing musical up there, because mixing engineers can't hear it. Everything above 20KHz is generally whiny, nasty noise that you'd want no part of. I used to hear analog TVs ring, I think probably at around 25KHz, strongly enough that I could tell if TVs were on inside a house from outside, through the walls. But it's just an unpleasant noise, it's not music. Nothing up there is music.
The only reason to use 24-bit depth is for mixing, so the quantization errors drop out when you downmix the final cut to 16 bits.
For actual day-to-day playback, VBR MP3 at ~192KBps has always been fine for me. Because space on portables has gotten so large, I've gone to ~256Kbit Vorbis in some cases, but at least with my ears, there's really no reason to. When I'm streaming Radio Paradise, I often use their 320K AAC stream, although again, that's way overkill. They even stream in FLAC, but I don't bother with that.
I use CUE/FLAC for my original masters, because it allows me to recreate the original CDs if I need to, and also allows me to generate any other lossless or lossy format I want.
There's literally no reason to go past 44.1KHz/16 bit for playback. Higher sampling rates produce sound that's better than human hearing. There are a few people (I used to be this way when I was a teenager) that can hear over 20KHz, but there's nothing musical up there, because mixing engineers can't hear it. Everything above 20KHz is generally whiny, nasty noise that you'd want no part of. I used to hear analog TVs ring, I think probably at around 25KHz, strongly enough that I could tell if TVs were on inside a house from outside, through the walls. But it's just an unpleasant noise, it's not music. Nothing up there is music.
The only reason to use 24-bit depth is for mixing, so the quantization errors drop out when you downmix the final cut to 16 bits.
For actual day-to-day playback, VBR MP3 at ~192KBps has always been fine for me. Because space on portables has gotten so large, I've gone to ~256Kbit Vorbis in some cases, but at least with my ears, there's really no reason to. When I'm streaming Radio Paradise, I often use their 320K AAC stream, although again, that's way overkill. They even stream in FLAC, but I don't bother with that.
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In the last 3 years my flow hasn't changed a bit. Rip to FLAC -> Highest compression ratio. It takes less time to do this than it does to read the disc in the first place.
From there, for portable use I either do mp3s at V0 (Targeting around ~320kb/s nominally, much less in actual practice) or ~256kb/s Vorbis.
I'm not using Opus because not all of my stuff supports Opus.
From there, for portable use I either do mp3s at V0 (Targeting around ~320kb/s nominally, much less in actual practice) or ~256kb/s Vorbis.
I'm not using Opus because not all of my stuff supports Opus.
It usually takes my current drive about a half-hour to rip a CD, where compressing the resulting .wav to FLAC takes about ten seconds. It takes much longer to build the command line to embed the cue sheet and set album ReplayGain. Then it takes another 10 to 20 seconds to generate 10% par2 files.
I wrote a script to do that, but it's for mass conversion from CUE/WAV. I keep referring to it for doing individual albums, and making the command lines by hand. I should probably just script the single-CD case.
Still buying CDs, or Bandcamp if it's a digitial only release or the CDs are just impossible to source.
- If from CD, grab cover art using AlbumArtDownloader and resize, then rip with EAC to FLAC - Bandcamp FLAC downloads are just unzipped
- Foobar2000 to sort out any tag issues, then rename file to Artist - Album - Track No. - Track Name
- Foobar2000 to tag tracks with ReplayGain info by album, not modifying waveform data
- Foobar2000 to transcode to AAC VBR 256kbps, applying ReplayGain to waveform itself to 95db instead of the default 89db
- Drop AACs onto USB for the car, and into iTunes for the phone
It's been so long since I've dealt with any sort of optical media that my last PC build several years ago didn't even warrant an optical drive. Last time I bothered to rip anything, it was LAME -v0, but I've been basically exclusively digital for about a decade now, whether that's purchasing actual digital files via Amazon/Bandcamp/iTunes, or (for the last couple years) finally subscribing to a streaming service. Everything that I had ripped got iTunes Matched a long time ago, and now for all but the most esoteric stuff from that timeframe, whatever got matched is available to stream as much higher quality ALAC than what it got ripped as.
I don't have any impetus to faff around with rips or re-encoding now that Apple Music streams everything as lossless.
I don't have any impetus to faff around with rips or re-encoding now that Apple Music streams everything as lossless.
Indeed, I have 512 gigs of phone storage and 1 terabyte of microsd storage so 1.5 terabytes of storage.....on my phone! ALL my flac file cd's total 450 gig. I have them rated and put all my 1 star and up onto the phone and its like, 100 gig. I see no reason for mp3 at all. Hard drive space on actual computing devices is 2tb minimum on up to my desktop which is something like 20 terabytes making mp3s seem absolutely quaint so suffice it to say any computing device just has flac files.
I still use Vorbis and MP3 because I can generate those files so quickly from my FLAC masters using Foobar2000. At good bitrate, they sound the same, and take up about a quarter of the space. My library isn't massive, and I guess I don't usually use the space on phones and tablets for anything else, but I like to keep my options open.
Converting my entire library took less than two hours the last time I did it, and my computer is now a heck of a lot faster. I think the limiting factor now would probably be the hard drives in the NAS.
On the desktop, of course, I just use FLAC. There's absolutely no reason to faff about with lossy compression there.
30+ years after MP3 came out, I'd say it's entirely redundant, bandwidth and storage both vastly exceed what we need for music now. Lossless is fine for everything.
Bandwidth and storage still isn't free. Sure, for your personal collection, lossless might be fine for everything. But Spotify probably don't want the kind of bandwidth bill that "lossless everywhere" would mean. Not to mention the kinds of stream interruptions that are more likely to happen when someone's cell signal is weak for a minute. Being able to cache more audio in less space because not everyone has 1TB of storage and uncapped data in their phones matters too.
Whatever i bought it at for hi-res music, and FLAC for my CD's.
Storage is cheap, and jRMC can transcode and sling outside the network on the fly with lower bitrates if I want to listen on the move where even FLAC is irrelevant.
Wish I could rip the SACD's I do own that I don't have in hi-res, but I missed the PS3 bandwagon.
Storage is cheap, and jRMC can transcode and sling outside the network on the fly with lower bitrates if I want to listen on the move where even FLAC is irrelevant.
Wish I could rip the SACD's I do own that I don't have in hi-res, but I missed the PS3 bandwagon.
You don't need a PS3. There are other blu-ray players that can be used for it.
I use a Sony BDP-S390 with sacd-ripper (and the SACDExtractGUI front-end).
anything above ~256kps is fine. I can hear the difference between ~250 and 320, but I can't hear the difference between 320 and FLAC. I'll choose flac if its a free option, but I wouldn't pay extra for it over a 320kps mp3. And yes.. for some reason some websites charge extra for flac music files.
Hmmm
I might have to take a look
there's no like region restrictions for this capability, right?
Nope.
It's a little bit of a pain to set up the first time, but once you've jumped through those hoops it's no big deal.
SolarPatrolman
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
- I use dbpoweramp with Windows 10 for ripping (huge number of options; extensive tagging database).
- for albums I especially enjoy, I use the flac codec.
- all other albums: 320kbps CBR mp3 (dbpoweramp uses the LAME encoder, which afaik is still considered one of the best).
FYI: about 70% of my listening is in the car, while puttering around the house, making food, etc but when I want to sit down and actually listen to an entire album, I just pull out the CD & play that on my Blu-ray player via my HT system which is optimised for music. No worries whether a codec is doing what it's supposed to be doing, just plain ol' 44.1/16 pulse code modulation. Plus, it's easier to change tracks, pause, etc.
Rip my CD's to FLAC using EAC. I don't have anything that can't read FLAC at this point so I have no need to transcode. I use Plexamp to play back where I can.
I rip to FLAC, download to the highest offered. Like @Doomlord_uk said, storage available at reasonable prices allows for that just fine. My backups are safe and not really expensive.
TheMolesRevenge
Ars Centurion
I keep everything in ALAC in iTunes for Windows. I've got IKEA Airplay-compatible speakers in the house, but most of my listening is on an old iPod that's had the HDD replaced with ~584GB of uSD cards and I've never found a satisfactory way of managing an iPod without iTunes.
Have you tried using abx in foobar to prove that? I'd be amazed if anyone can 10/10 choose between those. Before investing a lot of time transcoding to a compressed format, you should test it. Especially formats besides mp3. Don't trust what you read from anyone else except what you can prove to yourself. There's very little music production these days that warrents much attention to compression anyhow, ie, it's mastered to sound 'appealing' to a mass consumer (v shaped) with a generic playback device. Of course there are exceptions, but for those 0.01% of a catalog, I'd just stick with FLAC if you're worried about it (at 50 years old, I've lost enough range in my hearing to not be able to tell)
macosandlinux
Ars Scholae Palatinae
FLAC 44.1kHz | Most are around 950-1050k, few 800k
FLAC 24bit 44.1kHz | 1750-1800k
FLAC 24bit 192kHz | 5850-6000k
FLAC 24bit 44.1kHz | 1750-1800k
FLAC 24bit 192kHz | 5850-6000k
So much this. Most people cannot reliably ABX mp3 from source starting at about 160 kbps, with full transparency for most audio by about 192 kbps.
I mean, I'd still encode my collection to FLAC anyway because lossless is lossless, and for music I'd buy it's worth a minor upcharge for the warm fuzzies for me and as a show of support. For portability though I'll use AAC around 160 kbps.
I'm curious about whether I could tell the difference between MP3 128kbps to 192kbps+ nowadays. Back when I cared about ripping CDs, I don't think I had a single audio output that was quality enough to tell.
Today I still lean towards .MP3s, as I still have albums in my itunes that do not get recognized and don't play on my android phone, and I think they're AAC.
If anything I should try to take the suggestion from earlier and get plexamp set up. I probably have a handful of older 128kbps files sitting around, but who knows if itunes's mp3 encoder at 192kbps in 2006 was as good enough.
Today I still lean towards .MP3s, as I still have albums in my itunes that do not get recognized and don't play on my android phone, and I think they're AAC.
If anything I should try to take the suggestion from earlier and get plexamp set up. I probably have a handful of older 128kbps files sitting around, but who knows if itunes's mp3 encoder at 192kbps in 2006 was as good enough.
That's unusual, unless they're old protected AAC tracks. Android has been able to natively decode AAC files for like a decade, and even has media passthrough if you have Bluetooth speakers/headphones/earbuds that support AAC.
Like... what software is the go-to on Android these days? I use a 3rd party app called Muzio Player, because it was the most sane player I found after Google Play Music went EoL. I don't play a ton of music through my phone except for 30m+ drives, which are infrequent.
We're also talking about rips from the 2006 era, so who knows if there's metadata incompatibility. All I know is I put music in the right place in folders, and the app doesn't recognize it. Or maybe it does and Google Play Games was that one that was finicky? A quick check shows that it's fine with all the .m4a files... which I didn't know was apple format until a quick google. So it's probably fine now?
I've been all streaming for a long time, but I'm not sure there's any singular go-to. I've long been a fan of Foobar2000 on desktop, so it'd probably be the first thing I try out on mobile.
Metadata shouldn't be a problem. m4a (which Apple popularized but didn't invent -- it's an MPEG-4 container with AAC audio) has had metadata standards since day one. mp3 metadata was well and figured out by 2006, with most libraries handling id3v2 tags just fine.
Files should be found anywhere in your user storage on an Android device if the media player plays nicely with the filesystem indexer. Just check for
.nomedia files in the hierarchy above it, which are sentinel files that tell the media scanner not to index that folder.
Abhi Beckert
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Apple Lossless for archival where I care about quality.
AAC 256 VBR when I care about file size (e.g. all the music on my phone is compressed, since I'm usually listening with bone conduction headphones anyway).
I can't tell the difference between the two even with a proper listening setup - but I pretty much only care about file sizes on my phone.
AAC 256 VBR when I care about file size (e.g. all the music on my phone is compressed, since I'm usually listening with bone conduction headphones anyway).
I can't tell the difference between the two even with a proper listening setup - but I pretty much only care about file sizes on my phone.