Moderator's Note: This discussion has been split from an earlier thread, which can be found here (http://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,5959.0.html).
Quote from: Alan Howe on Saturday 16 January 2016, 21:29
You can always play your CDs on a DVD player...
I fear that the DVD is headed the same way as the CD. We'll be in a world of downloads.
Tom
The Doblinger to which I referred is the retail outlet, i.e. shop, on Dorotheagasse in Vienna of the publishing firm by the same name. They have existed since the 19th century and started publishing music then. The firm of Ludwig Doblinger has been sold a number of times. Since WWII it has been the largest retail music shop in Vienna. In addition they had one of the best antiquarian departments in Europe. Wives of Viennese musicians regularly would bring their deceased husbands voluminous music collections in to Doblinger who then stored them, but did not sort them, deep under ground in a dimly lit catacomb, where one, if you knew the manager, would be allowed to go and rummage through the music and where amazing gems from the past, long out of print, could be found. Now, sadly, it is gone.
Up until around 2000, it was impossible to browse their retail collection unless you were on a "Du" basis with the manager. Rather, you had to know what you wanted and a clerk would go in the back and bring it out. This was the case in most shops in Vienna, e.g. clothing shops, toy shops etc. Browsing was not a Viennese thing. Most people only entered a shop if they had an item in mind. Like much else, this has changed. Now, at Doblingers, everything is on display and in drawers that can be examined by the public. But sadly, their stock, though still better than anything you can find in the US is less copious than before. There was a time when if Doblingers did not have it, it was unavailable. Those times are gone. There are better shops in Germany, Bauer & Hieber to name just one.
Yes, you can play CDs on a DVD player - but there aren't many DVD players that have the high-end audio quality that some of us demand. When Linn came out and said the CD is dead it really came as a shock - and that was seven years ago!
It is going to be a very slow process Martin but in my opinion it will go the way of the VHS tape. These tapes are still around and people will buy them because of the price ($.25) but the players are wearing out which I still get but 4 out of 5 are now broken. The person who has an interest is very low income and would be unwilling to pay a charge of up to a $100 to repair them. They're looking for a used unit that works for under $10.00. The same process is beginning to happen with the CD's which are now selling at $1.00 and a good quality CD player is around $20.00. Many of them are beginning to wear out and the modular CD mechanism is not repairable. This will take time but if we revisit this topic in 10 years you'll see how much closer I am.
To see how the market is going we can use my 34 year old daughter who has never owned a CD. She is all downloads for music as well as movies.
Downloads are, almost certainly, the future - I suspect.
I, personally, have stopped buying CD's and DVD's. I mostly download: no need to browse and order the disk and wait for days or weeks before being told that it is out of catalogue.
But it seems to me that the future is not even download but streaming... And this future is now. So we should struggle for better streaming companies...
There will be some who will hang on until the end (many don't own computers) but still have these small boom boxes that will play cassettes and CD's but as those units break there options will be fewer and fewer. I know that this topic is way off topic but it is one that will have an impact on what we do and deserves a small measure of attention. I can say without reservation that if you wish to continue with the CD's the Marantz CD5004 has a modest price of $400.00 and I've put thousands of hours on it.
I have an excellent TEAC - cost: around £150.
Pardon my soap box, but as a retired senior IT manager, my thoughts stray to these topics like a moth to the flame!
As with all 'IT' environments, planning for backup and recovery costs and functionality is just as important as initial costs and user convenience. Ever thought what you'd do if your cloud evaporated overnight or your 1,000-5,000 disc music storage centre was lost in a fire or malfunctioned and was not repairable>??
Also, I wonder what is the legal position if your cloud supplier ceases trading or goes into administration - is it your 'data' (whether it be music, images, video etc doesn't matter legally) or the cloud hosting service's??
Also, as everyone is jumping on the cloud hosting bandwagon for their product only, I would want all my music in one place to one standard, not some on e-music, some on i-tunes, some on amazon etc. all held in different ways.
By all means let us embrace the advantages that modern technology can offer, if that is your thing, but let us do so with open eyes as well as open minds.
just another 'thought for the day'
Cheers
Richard
Well you've scared me. I have three players, a Sony, Marantz, and Denon, and they've been trouble free for 10-12 years. So I think I'll start buying replacement units and storing them away until needed. If I can get 30 more years out of my collection, that's enough. Then the question will be, what to do with the huge collection of disks? Who's going to want them? Maybe open a retro-retail store!
As long as I continue working at the thrift store I'll be able to help fellow forum members with used units. I had my collection of CD's moved from San Diego Ca. to Minneapolis Mn. and the shipping cost was $1500 three years ago. I have roughly 3000 CD's. In 10 or 20 years no one will likely want them so they will become recycled plastic, yikes. My 90 year old father has the same situation with over 1000 VHS tapes. No one even wants them as a donation! It is all material that is available on DVD or streaming.
On the other hand, it is too bad that so many have dispensed with (factory printed) CDs because as an archival medium they are far better than a hard drive. The CDs I bought in the late 1980s all seem to still work, and that is going on 30 years of worry-free storage. The same is not the case with the hard drive. I started ripping my collection to the computer a while back but gave up because it was so time consuming. I mentally calculated how much storage it would take if I backed everything up 3 times (a good policy) and renewed those backups every 4 or 5 years. After 30 years would add up to a lot of hard drives! Not so cheap, nor as worry free as CDs sitting on a shelf. I'm afraid that we are descending into what someone called the digital dark ages, where unless we frantically continue to back things up on a regular basis, we are in serious danger of losing valuable information. A CD one buys as a download is an expensive hassle if you want to keep it for 50 years!
CD-ROMs certainly have a limited shelf-life. I've burned some cds from LPs and some of them are becoming unplayable. They are 15-20 years old. But then I have some ASV cds that have long gone bad. And my Raff 5th with Herrmann on Unicorn is bronzed beyond salvation. Thankfully copied to cd-rom.
American Record Guide used to publish lists of CDs that went bad. Turned out that the corroded ones could often be traced to certain batches at certain factories. I have had the odd one as well, but all told very few out of 10 000 or so. Am very pleased with that.
My old Danacord CD of Marshev playing the Rubinstein 3rd and 4th concertos had incredibly bad distortion starting very late in the finale of the 3rd concerto, where it was almost imperceptible, and getting so bad during the 4th that it rendered it unlistenable partway through the first movement. It quite literally sounded like a warped LP.
I've had some of the early CD's from 1984 unplayable.
My point about this is we dictate what the market will or will not do, the kids do and the CD is too bulky for them. Their phone does it all.
Tom
JimL, just wondered if the problem with your Rubinstein disc is bronzing? If so, you should be able to get a replacement from the manufacturer. If the plastic bit in the centre of the disc says PDO then this may be the issue. If you Google bronzed cds, you should find contact details. Hope this helps!
I agree that downloads are probably on the way out but I still buy physical cds and downloads and I stream via Spotify as well!
Herbert, while hard drives are a very fallible medium, SSDs are far less vulnerable since they contain no moving parts, and therefore *appear* to be ideal for archiving purposes. Unfortunately, SSDs are still fairnly expensive, and flash memory is too young to have been tested by time.
Even with CDs, the problem of archiving recorded music will persist as there will be a point at which hardware makers cease producing CD players; and that point may not be very far in the future. And the degradation of materials (particularly glues) that are used in CDs will inevitably lead to their demise; you may be lucky for a long time, but they *will* die at some point.
To avoid the 'Dark Ages' you speak about, we need mostly to think about durable data formats, which will ensure that today's FLAC or MP3 can be used in the future. That is one reason why proprietary data formats can pose such a problem.
I wonder if you tried another CD unit Jim
Ilya, the other thing about SSD memory is that it is still magnetic, as far as I understand. Although physically hardy, flash storage has its own rate of decay (which, as you point out, has not yet been established...). At least, if we use the open source formats like flac (which thankfully seems to be becoming quite standard), there will be less danger of incompatibility problems in the future. But we still will have to back up over and over.
Hi Herbert, SSDs are not magnetic like hard drives are. Rather, they consist of billions of transistors. As it looks now, decay in SSDs remains very limited so long as the number or read/write actions remains limited (a transistor is basically a switch, so repeated use will wear it out in the end). That would theoretically make them ideal for long-term archival purposes.
Thanks Ilya, that's good to know. Hopefully the medium holds promise!
A couple of my reaaly old cd's won't play and some of my tapes are chewed, but never had a problem with any of my 78's that still play like a dream after 90 years. On the downside, my beloved Gounod's Faust takes up about the same space as a washing machine.
All my digital thingies are on external hard drives, but they lack the visual effect of a leatherbound volume.
Thal
Even if SSDs are a more secure medium, I wonder
(i) how many are needed to house each 1,000 CDs in someone's collection (assuming 1 hrs music (avg) per CD)
(ii) what are the the logistics of keeping a backup, assuming quite a few SSDs are needed
(iii) a worry with all PC-based data formats in the long-term is keeping software that can read the format(s) - who can now find software to read say WORDPERFECT?!
Whilst mp3 seems to be the current music 'lingua franca' (even though I appreciate FLAC is a better technical standard), who is to say in 10yrs it won't be totally obsolete.
A pity about the bandwidth on fired clay tablets and vellum - at least they have a good track record for long-term storage!
Cheers
Richard
Space? - my maths are no better than the next man's, but if you allow 1GB per CD you'll have space to spare, so maybe 4 SSDs per 1000 CDs. Cost? - currently solid-state memory as on SSDs and SD cards comes in at about 30p per GB, so not much to add the the price of a CD if you want to copy it. But Time? - aye there's the rub. I'm never going to get around to copying all my CDs, but with so many online sources of new material I'm unlikely even to play most of them again. The increasing tendency (certainly in my small part of the globe) seems to be for recorded music to be regarded as something you experience and don't actually need to possess.
As for formats, even when the CD (or WAV) standard of 44.1kB/sec becomes obsolete along with most CD players, there's sure to be software still available to convert data held on solid-state media into other formats. This may or may not entail a degradation of sound quality, but isn't the music the most important thing?
78's are like old Singer sewing machines and Kitchen Aid mixers they just keep on working. Of course if your turntable dies you might be in trouble.
Lossless music files have a much less problem with retention than something proprietary like Wordperfect -- it's VERY easy to convert with 100% accuracy and on top of that, FLAC being open source means it's far less likely to disappear, even if the others (ALAC, APE etc) eventually do.
Incidentally a 70 minute CD takes around 300GB to 350GB when compressed, give or take, especially if it's acoustic (though it party depends on mastering and how 'busy' the sound is, and more loud popular type music will take up more...whereas a quiet piano CD can actually take up LESS space than a 320Mp3, and mono sound compresses things way down as well).
Merely copying a CD doesn't take too long, as it's easy to just run it in the background (time concerns come with how thorough and correct you want your file names and metadata). But if you usually use a CD player and want a digital backup file 'just in case' it's not a huge commitment.
TerraEpon and Richard:
WordPerfect files can still be read by LibreOffice, a free office suite that is regularly updated (we run a scientific journal and yes, there are people still submitting in WordPerfect every now and then; on a floppy, of course, which is why I have a USB floppy drive standing by).
Thing is, we've become much more aware of the need for durable data standards lately, which is why even many commercial software vendors (Microsoft, for one) have converted at least in part to non-proprietary formats and principles (XML, usually).
I wouldn't worry too much about the amount of SSDs required; prices are rapidly going down for larger-volume units, and at 1GB per 3CDs (I think TerraEpon's estimate is fair) you'd need 1TB to store everything. That is pricey today (if you want it in one unit), but will be much more affordable in a year's time.
Ilya, Terrapon and UC friends,
Tks for all the calculations and advice about storage. Working on an average of 1Gb per CD (which obviously from early ones of say 30-50 mins to later ones of 70-80 mins, I'm assuming an average of 1 hr per CD) and thus I agree 1Tb needed for a back-up copy of 1,000 CDs (at MP3 resolution - don't know about FLAC).
I think I'll get a small external HDD with USB 3.0 connectivity and of 2Tb capacity (Seagate or similar) for ease of operations for now - it gives me an 'off-line' copy, complete freedom and ease of use, PC compatibilty and buys me time. I'm assuming this HDD will be good for 5-10 yrs say (but I can always routinely re-copy it to elsewhere as an on-going check)) and by then, if I'm still here to worry about back-ups, I'll see what is around then.
An external HDD, like a flash drive, means I can always take it with me or put it in a safe place when I'm away as some sort of back-up against fire or flood, as well as 'IT' risk.
All I've then got to do is 'rip' all my CDs to disk and back-up - a pain in the !!! to do but a few a day will get it done. It will also have the hidden benefit of finding any CDs that don't play properly and then I'll know about them and decide what, if anything, to do
If I (or anyone else for that matter) go for a number of flash-drives, then the brain hurts working out what to put on which drive for ease of back-up!
Right, time to stop talking and start the action for the plan!
Cheers
Richard
I had corrupted flash drives less than 10 years old. I think I'll stick with the system I have. They are on my hard drive backed up on auxiliary hard drive and I've made a CDR of it. If this all fails then I just won't listen to that composition.
Hello Richard,
1. Before starting your work (something I am doing myself for some longer time now), I would urge you to
get familiar with the FLAC format - this is lossless and contains excatly the identical bits and bytes as your
ripper can get from your CD. Don't make your backups in mp3 format, this is lossy and you will loose some
parts of the original contents of your CDs irreversibly !
2. In order to automate the process, you could try some sort of CD autoloader as sold by Nimbie, e.g. You can
feed this machine with some 20 CDs at once and it will rip them automatically, those CDs containing errors
are sorted out and ejected to a different location than those which are OK.
3. I have got such a Nimbie unit - but if you are concerned with attaching meta data of uniform good quality
to the resulting ripped files (no matter wether mp3 or FLAC), you will end up ripping your CDs manually again
one by one. Editing this meta data will be your most time consuming task (70%) within the whole process.
In case you want to attach a CD cover as well, that can often be found from the AMG database or other repositories,
but for some 10-20% you'll have to search for or even scan it yourself.
4. Concerning the disk space needed per CD, my experience is, that in FLAC format you will need ca. 300MB on average.
5. One further point concerning reliable & durable storage: a company called Millenniata has come up recently with
so-called M-Discs, which are recordable DVDs / BluRays promising to preserve your data for some 1000 years.
So be prepared to start a task that will take you one year ore more for 1000 CDs. If you care about regular backups,
however, it will be worth the efforts.
Best wishes,
Martin
Well I know this is blasphemy, but if you're willing to settle for, say, MP3s (as some of us are), a hundred gig disc will hold thousands of compositions and you don't have to sell the farm to do it.......
J
For reasons Richard outlined earlier, I am not disposed to use on-line storage. I store all my music on external hard drives, active and back-ups (external HDs can fail - as I once found to my cost). I'm also intending to keep duplicates at my son's house in case we are burgled or go up in flames. I haven't converted my CD collection in its entirety, but that'll come in due course. Clearly, they are going the way of the LP, but I'll not be disposing of them - I'll leave that task to my children, after I've gone!
you have a valid point as far as the MP3's are concerned. Not all os us can afford the finer audio equipment to discern the difference
It would seem that in order to be able to make such fine discriminations of sound quality you need not only top-end equipment but also top-end ears. I possess the former (at least, it was top-end in the 1980's) but apparently not the latter, since I have to work very hard to persuade myself I can detect the difference between a CD and its mp3 copy when switching backwards and forwards between the two. I could blame the ageing process, but this was the case even 30 years ago. Of course, one person can never know what another experiences through superficially similar sense organs, but I've always been inclined to mistrust the claims of those "golden-eared" writers in the hi-fi press who seem to be able to detect (and find important) differences which defeat detection by sophisticated sound-analysing equipment. So mp3s will do for me too, although I wouldn't be so arrogant as to prescribe the same for everyone,
I can't tell the difference. I'd be fooled every time. But it's been downhill for a considerable time now...
I can tell the difference depending on where I am. Driving in the roadster, which has significant road noise, an mp3 sounds fine. The Nimbus set of Haydn symphonies on convenient mp3 disks is great. But at home, with a high-end set up, it's easier. Some mp3 disks are mastered quite well and it's not so obvious, but others I definitely hear the differences. In music for solo instruments, small orchestral works and such, mp3 is ok, but when you get to large orchestral works like Mahler, Wagner, Strauss, etc mp3s are less satisfactory, especially in the low end. With headphones, I find mp3 listening intolerable. I will say that as I age, sacd recordings no longer have the immediate advantage over standard redbook cds they once had. But the one listening experience that still packs a wallop are the Reference Recordings disks that have HD encoding. Just try to get a player to decode it these days!
I'm genuinely curious to know in what way Martin finds mp3s (but not CDs?) intolerable to listen to through headphones. I was involved for some years with trying to understand why some individuals with apparently normal peripheral hearing apparatus experience sounds to be distorted, presumably on account of how they are processed in the neural pathways and structures of the brain. My theory (that I was never able to prove) was that a slight jitter in the precise timing of nerve signals can cause disruption of the binaural sound image, or in the way the spectral frequencies of a complex harmonic sound such as that of a musical instrument "bind" together into a coherent whole. It seems possible that the mp3 data compression process might cause such timing information to be fractionally distorted, and that some people may be particularly sensitive to this when left and right stereo channels are played exclusively to the left and right ears.
Very interesting to me.
How to describe the mp3 sound? The bass lacks focus and resonance. Bass drum, low reeds, contrabass loses a quality of reality. Cymbals lose the sizzle they should have. Piccolo seems uneven. It depends on what level the mp3 was ripped, I suppose. On my ripping software there's high, medium, and low quality. The latter fine for things like podcasts, but not for music. Could I tell the difference with lower quality gear? I don't know. But using Sennheiser HD800 cans and Woo tube (valve) amplification, there is noticeable sound degradation converting from CD to mp3. Now, I also rip a lot of LPs to cd with mp3 encoding. Mp3 encoding is at its worst at low levels of sound, no doubt having something to do with the lower s/n ratio of LPs compared to CD.
With all this discussion, I have to say that I feel quite badly for the large number of younger listeners who have no idea how great recorded music can sound. My granddaughter listens to crappy music on an iPhone with earbuds. When I had her listen to my set up with the London Symphony playing Star Wars she was absolutely stunned at the difference in sound quality. She wanted a pair of HD800s, but it's not the cans as much as how much power is driving them.
Today I shall do some serious self-experimentation! One thing I now remember is that I was disappointed by the quality of the LAME converter supplied with Audacity software, and was much happier with a stand-alone multi-format converter called Freestudio from DVDvideosoft.com. Why that should be so I have no idea. In both cases I've only ever used the "standard" grade of 128Kbits/sec and couldn't understand why so many higher grades (of course, involving lower degrees of data compression and hence bigger files) were available. Now I think I'm beginning to get it - people really do hear things differently!
My major source of material is from Naxos who offers 320KPS files. I can hear the difference between an MP3 and a WAV file. It has a depth to it along with a greater dynamic range.
Martin et al
Tks for all the advice and info and ideas.
I started to rip my CDs a few years ago (Windows Media Player) with a view to listening from the PC but I stopped as I had to rename all the created files to get anything like the RED catalogue approach to naming works - Windows tools seem dedicated to artists and 'songs' not (multi-track) composers and works!
Anyway, if I was just using the HDD as a back-up, rather than prime listening, then whatever the 'ripping' tool called them wouldn't matter as long as I could tell one CD from another and the tracks were in the same order as the CD.
As I have maybe one third of my music now on MP3 downloads, no chance of getting everything in FLAC, even if I had better kit to listen to it. Seems the best option might be to experiment with FLAC for backing-up the physical CDs and keep to backing-up the MP3 downloads I've already got.
However, I'll need maybe to revise time and storage capacity estimates - hence the experiments!!
Cheers
Richard
PS Have you all noticed that even though we are now ell into the 4th decade of PC technology, we're further than ever from 'plug and go' - the nearest we've got is 'plug and play'!!
FLAC needs too much volume. Since years I am stroring music which is not on commercial CDs (broadcasts etc.) in the .wav format (using the 64bit version of WaveLab software), which is really excellent. From this source one can always burn excellent CDs. I even have transferred on .wav all the CDs I have conducted on an external HD, including covers, inlays and liner notes. And this, backed-up on a private cloud, which has nothing to do with those crappy Microsoft or Apple clouds.
Of course, audio on BluRay is excellent, that's why I've already (re-)bought the Solti "Ring", Karajan's 60s Beethoven, Maazel's Sibelius etc. on those splendid High Fidelity Pure Audio remasterings by DGG and Decca.
After all, who cares if one's music archive does survive 1000 years or not - unless we can take it over to some desert island? But where is this?
I think this world will not survive another century anyway, if one just follows the political, social and envioronment craze all around!
you could be right. I think that there are people who are obsessed with backup upon backup
Tests have now been conducted which prove, unscientifically but incontrovertibly, that I can't tell the difference between CD quality and mp3 encoding at 192Kbits/sec (I should say this was using medium-to-high quality equipment. 128Kbits/sec I could detect using some headphones but not others). I therefore consider myself qualified to speak on behalf the cloth-eared majority who seem to be happy to have their music files stored with this degree of compression. I gather the Codec listening tests have been extensively used to determine which forms of encoding are the most transparent, on average, but I wonder if anyone has attempted to define the degree of variation that exists between individuals? Clearly this is not a situation where one size fits all.
Some further remarks after my lengthy post some days ago:
A. The points I made there have solely been concerned with digital backup, enabling you to faithfully
reproduce the original CDs and attaching necessary metadata to it. In response to hadrianus:
FLAC typically requires about 45% of the size of ordinary stereo .wav files, containig the same information.
B. Concerning sound quality etc. of various digital formats, for me the following hierarchy of criteria is relevant:
1. Availability of at least some recording of a work (no matter what quality) - this is what we all are looking for at this forum.
2. Interpretation: I prefer having great interpretations of works, even in bad sound.
3. Mastering quality - this is a further important point, e.g. the official CD transfer of Westerberg's famous recording
of Atterbergs 3rd symphony is ways inferior to the original LP.
4. Resolution - having the choice between different file formats of some recording I normally prefer HiRes file (24 bit FLAC),
but when the original mastering is of good quality (and no large ensembles are involved, e.g. piano solo), then the
audible difference indeed can be small even with good HiFi equipment.
If there's only one thing I want everything to trust me on it is this: keep at least one off-site backup, whether that is through giving a hard drive to someone else or keeping it in some sort of cloud storage. Even if you have three redundant backups at home, if everything goes up in flames that is it.
A 1TB Dropbox account is 10$ a month at this time. It's reliable, it's fast and personally I don't see any good reason not to use it at least as a redundant system when you're serious about making sure everything is backed up properly - *even* if you have HD backups elsewhere, because, as I said, that *will* fail. And if you don't like Dropbox, there are numerous alternatives: Copy, Sync, Amazon, etc. The ones I wouldn't advise are OneDrive, which keeps a limited maximum path name length that may cause problems, or iCloud because it is somewhat idiosyncratic and Apple's track record with cloud services isn't exactly spotless.
Still don't know what to do with my x-thousand CDs. It would take years to back them up and in any case I don't have the time...
Just a(nother) thought,
I suspect - pls advise if you know better - that (nearly) all CDs which are, or have been , commercially available are almost, but not quite certainly, still available 'out there' somewhere, if not physically then as downloads. So, if another copy is needed for 'recovery' purposes, then that could be the route. That leaves things for which there is no ready recovery such as LPs (or cassettes) never commercially transcribed to CD, free-to air broadcasts or private performances.
So, if the above is a reasonable assumption and as a path of 'least resistance' (or least time and effort for all of us oldies!), if we went through our collections and simply noted items that were not commercially produced CDs, we'd probably have a far smaller set to worry about backing up. I appreciate for some of you that would still be quite extensive but I hope less than the alternative!
For the rest (i.e. the bulk of our CDs), we could simply note, if we wanted, the label/catalogue number we have (or had, if Armageddon strikes!). As I keep my catalogue as a WORD document, it would be very easy to update it and simply keep that off-site, together with any non-commercial stuff I have (most of which is UC downloads, by the way).
Would this work and would it save a lot of time and cost? I'm assuming the commercial value of lost CDs would be covered by house contents insurance, hence the emphasis on non-commercial items that (i) are not covered and (ii() not easily replaced, if at all.
What do members think?
Cheers
Richard
@ mjkFendrich
I once downloaded Martinon's "Tragédie de Salomé" fantastic EMI recording from a high quality FLAC site, and the datas of this about 30 minutes long work did not even found place on a CDR, that's how I came to my deduction.
@hadrianus
FLAC is a completely versatile digital format for lossless audio - the file size depends on the resolution:
- CDs are 44.1 kHz at 16 bit, you'll get this when ripping your standard stereo CDs, for 70 min. you'll typically need ~300-350MB
(while .wav files will occupy some 700MB)
- HiRes ("Studio Master") downloads at 88.2kHz or 96 kHz at 24 bit will need about 3x more as compared to CD quality FLACS
but may have significantly improved sound. There are also 192 kHz & 384 kHz downloads (e.g. from the Norwegian label 2L)
of even larger size.
Will a CD player in a hi-fi system play it?
Well, it's almost impossible to buy a CD player here now in any case. My last enquiry in an electrical store was met with "Sorry, mate, that's last century's technology. It's all bluetooth and Wi-Fi now!" ???
I bought my current CD-player on Amazon.
In the US they're fairly easy to get
A couple of years back I started playing CDs on an Oppo DVD player that supports SACD as well. Even though speakers make the most difference in a system upgrade, followed by the amp/preamp, with only the change to the Oppo, the improvement in sound quality with ordinary CDs has been more than noticeable. SACDs -- even with only stereo speakers -- are even better.
Given my collection of CDs, I'm thinking of getting a second Oppo because I doubt players will still be around when the current one dies.
My Sony Blu-ray player is brilliant...
One problem with mp3 that doesn't seem to have been discussed is that in works with continuous music over track boundaries, there is almost always a tiny audible gap introduced during playback. The format was never designed to cope with gapless playback. FLAC however plays back gaplessly with no problem. Given the lossy nature of mp3, the tumbling cost of storage and the increasing speed of internet connections, I can see no justification at all for using mp3 either for ripping or downloading. An mp3 rip of Eine Alpensinfonie with more than a dozen tiny breaks is likely to provide a disappointing listening experience.
To be sure, that is not an inherent flaw of MP3, but rather of the player software. (In days of old usually connected with buffering issues) ITunes has no problems with any of my MP3s, let alone AAC (also a 'lossy' format, but one I much prefer to MP3).
It IS an inherent flaw actually - I don't routinely trust Wikipedia but ...Lossy audio compression schemes that are based on overlapping time/frequency transforms add a small amount of padding silence to the beginning and end of each track. These silences increase the playtime of the compressed audio data. If not trimmed off upon playback, the two silences played consecutively over a track boundary will appear as a pause in the original audio content. Lossless formats are not prone to this problem.
This is correct.
You are right though, that some players cope with this better than others and manage to strip some if not all of the silence out.
I'd rather not take a chance on the hardware's abilities and prefer to have gapless files to begin with. Just my two penn'orth.....
Well if its too annoying, one can always load the whole piece into Audacity and snip out the "pauses" and export it in one piece. Takes a bit of time, but if one is truly annoyed....... 8) 8)
Jerry
That would take a LOT of time, though...
Oh, the fond memories of the time when in order to hear the entire first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, you were asked to tolerate a fade-out and fade-in in mid-movement as you turned the LP...
Yes, that's true.
Alternatively, discs like that can be ripped so that the whole work is in one large file. That eliminates the problem too.
I won't ever use mp3 though. A 5Tb external HDD now costs just over £100 from some UK sellers. That's enough for around 15,000 CDs in FLAC. Another way of looking at that is that you are paying 0.7 pence to store each CD. Even with a backup drive, that's only 1.4 pence per disc. CD audio compression is simply a waste of time now.
good point but I've used Wave files.
WAV files take up around twice as much space as FLAC. Although they offer no advantages over FLAC (or APE) - all are lossless - it's fine to use them as you'll still get 7,500 CDs on a 5Tb drive :D
"CD audio compression is simply a waste of time now"
It isn't when your only computing device isn't a desk-bound computer. Storage for laptops, let alone cloud storage, is still fairly expensive. For those devices, some form of compression is still a bonus.
It boggles me anyone would ever use uncompressed over losslessly compressed. There's zero benefits with wav files. You can't even add metadata without some weird trickery.
@ Ilja : Point taken.
But nothing at all prevents the connection of a huge external HDD to a laptop via USB. I admit it's not very portable, but you wouldn't want to cart your entire library from place to place anyway.
I'm not against people using mp3 at all, but for people starting to rip a large collection from scratch it's important they make informed choices. Rip a few thousand CDs to mp3 and you can't change your mind later without doing it all again!
When I first started, I needed to travel a lot and mp3 was the only way I could get all my music on one portable external drive. Today, with drives at 4TB, someone just starting out should use FLAC. Assuming 3 cds per GB, you'd get roughly 9k discs on a 4TB drive assuming 1 TB used for other stuff (say, pictures and work files). Even so, by the time you get close to filling it up, it's likely a 6TB or 8TB portable drive will become available.
QuoteQuote from: TerraEpon on Saturday 13 February 2016, 20:22
It boggles me anyone would ever use uncompressed over losslessly compressed. There's zero benefits with wav files. You can't even add metadata without some weird trickery.
What possible difference does it make if I send the file to a CD? I have an unlimited amount of blank CD's. Do the MP3's sound better?
Tom
QuoteBut nothing at all prevents the connection of a huge external HDD to a laptop via USB. I admit it's not very portable, but you wouldn't want to cart your entire library from place to place anyway.
I would. And I'm doing a fair bit of carting. But MP3 is hardly ideal, I'll admit that; most of my CDs are converted to 192Mbps AAC, and I'm damned if I can hear the difference between that and the original CD.
I'm not portable at all. If people want to listen they are welcome to come over. I've never gotten passed not being to listen to my music on 4 high quality older speakers with a high end pioneer amp and marantz CD.
Well, multiple terrabyte drives do not have to be huge. I have several Passport drives - smaller than a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes. how much more portable can we get? Hmmmm, probably alot......
Jerry
I understand there will be one terrabyte flash drives pretty soon