The future of music storage

[mjkFendrich]

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

[jerfilm]

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

[semloh]

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!

[sdtom]

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

[matesic]

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,

[Alan Howe]

I can't tell the difference. I'd be fooled every time. But it's been downhill for a considerable time now...

[MartinH]

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!

[matesic]

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.

[sdtom]

Very interesting to me.

[MartinH]

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.

[matesic]

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!

[sdtom]

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.

[Richard Moss]

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'!!

[adriano]

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!

[sdtom]

you could be right. I think that there are people who are obsessed with backup upon backup