God Lives Underwater Forum

..

I've never really gotten into this as I haven't been archiving my CD collection. Anything else I have is just mp3's I've pulled off p2p. I don't have much in the way of truly rare recordings. Besides, there's not a whole lot I can do with this ancient computer and too small hard drive.

That won't always be the case though, so this is good to know and I thank you.

nice bit of info. I was not familar with shn or flac as I mostly do snailmail CDR trades. But I agree... MP3's must die!

Very cool guide.

can SHN and FLAC be played in normal players? Can you play them on iPods and the like?

MP3's needn't die. When you encode at 128kbps, you're losing a ton of ####. I would never put anything on a cd that wasn't 256kbps or higher.

..

Currently, I back up a lot of my cds with 256kbps MP3s, simply for the ease factor.

I do listen to them like a jukebox, loading them all into iTunes and playing it on shuffle. it's great.

I'm going to give this flac and shn thing a try one of these days.

..

As somebody who does a fair amount of sound enginering here's my $.02...

Standard computer speakers and standard headphones won't let you notice the lack of quality in a high quality lossy format (MP3, AAC, OGG). As long as you rip music at 192kbit or better with a good MP3 codec (ex: Lame MP3) you're fine. If you want to play tunes in your car or stereo, you better go at least 256kbit. If you have an expensive sound system forget MP3 and go with OGG or AAC at 256kbit or better.

My advice, use an app like CDeX and rip your tunes at a VBR rate between 192 and 256. VBR is better than setting your rate to one specific level. VBR allows you to use extra quality when you need it (treble), and reduce quality when it doesn't matter (bass).

If you want to hate on MP3, then move to a better format such as OGG which offers better quality at a smalle bitrate. I'd say a 128xbit OGG is equal, maybe better, than a 192kbit MP3. AAC is a great codeg too but all the ripper are horrible. Apple's native ripper is the only good one out there, and IIRC you have to buy it.

IMHO true lossless encoding (APE, SHN, etc) are just too darn big. I guess they have 400gig HDs for a reason now, but I just can't handle an album taking 300megs.

But hey, if you're ok with lossless codecs, thats your thing. Just realize you can get very very near to CD quality without burning up your HD space.

Perhaps I should write up a tutorial os using CDeX and OGG (or Lame MP3).

First, I know or UberNode and Uberstandard, and it's a crockery of ####. They are supposed "audio evangelists" and know next to nothing on how the codec works. Even the ChrisMyden website is highly outdated and gives #### information.

Frankly, "CD Quality" is a perceptually quality. Your ears, if you are lucky, can hear in the range of 20 khz. A CD is mixed at 44.1 Khz. Now, a properly encoded lossy file will sound transperant to the user in regards to the original source. One may consider this "CD Quality." I use lossy encodes as album back ups, and I must say that for al intents and purposes, it appears to work smashingly.

Sure, you can use FLAC if you have gobs of hard drive space, and it will preserve the total fidelity of the CD, but for the majority of users, this is a bit much. I find that for lossy encoding, Musepack is simply the best. I use --xtreme -ms 15, and no ltq (threshhold) switches, for it is simply not neccesary. MP3, with it's fixed framing, makes it impossible to make gapless encodes. LAME had implemented a hack for this, but rarely is it supported by the decoder on your modern player. Also, lack of proper Replaygain makes MP3 a poor choice. I believe that one should look into Musepack if they wish to archive without using FLAC.

Finally, thanks for providing a guide that at least steers people into the proper direction to the land of audiophilia.

Travis, please DO NOT write a tutorial using CDeX....it's 2nd rate software, and you obviously have little knowledge on how to encode MP3 properly. Use ONLY alt presets.

Damn.... This #### is getting all techinical...... What happened to just buying a cd and listening to it.....

Guide go by-by (sowwy). A few points:

1) MP3 isn't transparent to my ears, played through a $30 pair of computer speakers. I have, however, gotten more critical since I got into trading live shows and the like and couldn't always pick out the difference the way I can now. And it's still more of a cumulative effect, I failed the ABX test I tried one time. But when I listen to MP3s for an extended period of time they give me a headache, even if I donn't know they are MP3 at the time (for example when someone gives me a CD-R and I'm listening to it for the first time).

2) Some genres of music compress better than others (electronic music, for example), and also different lossy codecs work better w/ different genres.

3) I have no objection to MP3 for personal use, just never ever ever burn a CD from MP3 and send it to someone without telling them it's MP3-sourced first. HUGE pet peeve of mine. Violence.

4) It'd be nice if more people cared about lossless encoding. It's mainly for archival reasons (once the quality is gone, it's gone, and so if you have something rare/important and you're the only one with it, you'll be depriving everyone else of the chance of hearing it at its original quality, not just yourself).

5) Certainly not everyone is going to bother with keeping lossless copies of stuff, but the more the merrier. And it isn't super a lot of work or anything.

5) I have no doubt the UberNode folks are total jackasses lol. I just like using their presets with Exact Audio Copy and then going back and tweaking things slightly to my liking. Makes things easy peasy.

6) External hard drives cost about $1 per GB, and I *really* recommend them to anyone who is somewhat serious about their music. I keep my CD collection around 250-350 CDs, and I have only very rarely come close to running out of room on my 120 GB hard drive (and when I do it's usually 'cause I have a ton of #### music I might as well sell).

7) If you're obsessed with open source software, CDex is okay. If you're on Windows and don't mind using closed-source software, Exact Audio Copy is utterly superior though.

This probably isn't as helpful as my guide was, and I'll probably delete this too sooner or later, but oh well :).

I fail at sequential numbering, booyeah. Oh and if anyone has any questions about this schtuff I can try to answer them. If you have thick skin www.hydrogenaudio.org is a great resource though: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php

There's tons of room to muck around with the technical aspects of encoding and whatnot, but the fact is it's not a *requirement*, it'd be pretty easy to keep FLAC backups of your CDs without really knowing what you're doing :)

I have an 80 gig external hard drive..... How much do you think 150 cd's can take up in there Blog??? I basically have all my recordings in my hard drive but fear that I might fill it up if I burn all my cd collection in there as well.... My music takes about 10-15 gigs this far since I have stopped recordings once again due to my sound card...... Any suggestions???

blogbourri, "you" cannot fail an ABX test...but an encoding can if it is not tranparent to source, so which is it? I would love to see your evalations of the transperancy of MP3.

Remember, LAME does have 2 acoustic models included in it, so one may sound transperant when the other does not....though in most instances mspsytune is superior (which is used in alt presets).

I also HATE when people burn MP3's to CD, and give it to you like it's a copy of a pressed work. This is usually easy to guard against as they don't return the UPC code in most instances, and it doesn't reference in an online CD database.

I am an HA.org member, mainly on the MPC board, so I am VERY nitpicky.