Lossless Music on Harddrive

RuSsMaN

I rip mp4's with an LC-AAC Encoder (v 1.21) at 192kbps to a Western Digital 250gig external HD - the quality is fine for loading on the shuffle, and for whole house audio. I can't imagine ripping all my cd's lossless. So far, I average about 20 albums, per gig of storage, and it sounds pretty damn good. Reference, no, but certainly listenable and enjoyable.

Cheers,
Russ

treitz3

RuSsMaN wrote:

Reference, no

So I wasn't wrong?:D

heiney9

RuSsMaN wrote:

I rip mp4's with an LC-AAC Encoder (v 1.21) at 192kbps to a Western Digital 250gig external HD - the quality is fine for loading on the shuffle, and for whole house audio. I can't imagine ripping all my cd's lossless. So far, I average about 20 albums, per gig of storage, and it sounds pretty damn good. Reference, no, but certainly listenable and enjoyable.

Cheers,
Russ

For your exact application lossy compression work fine. I use it for ther car and for my portable. Done right it does sound acceptable in those settings.

As far as lossless.........my brother bought 1.2 terabytes of drive space in a seperate computer including redundany drives. He has over 3000 cd's and it had taken him 6 months to rip and convert to FLAC (lossless) almost all of his collection. He has 3 systems in addition to an HT only setup. He uses 3 Squeeze Box units all hooked to seperate DAC's in each of his 3 systems all wireless and has music all over the house. A great (crazy) undertaking but it is cool to have all the music on the computer server and be able to call anything up anywhere in the house in the exacr same quality as the cd. He is also keeping every single cd as well as the having it on the computer server.

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showpost.php?p=412979&postcount=1

Very very cool, if a bit over the top.

H9

MillerLiteScott

wow, just wow

My iTunes is all F#$%up right now.

Sucks.

Lowell_M

I have been using Apple Lossless since I like to use I-tunes as my music manager. I haven't done too much playing around, but tonight, for what it's worth, here's what I did...

I ripped a CD with HDCD content to Itunes, then I burnt a CD from the Apple Lossless ripped tracks, played it in my CD player and walla! The H/K still says it is an HDCD. I can only blindly assume from here that all content does, in fact, stay intact in an Apple Lossless rip since HDCD containts 20 bit information rather than the standard 16 bit redbook recording.

So, if I am wrong here, please, flame away. This is mearly a hopeful observation that Apple lossless is truely lossless.

bobman1235

Yeah, iTunes doesn't handle you moving files around yourself well. It's a little late for you now, but if you ever "move" iTunes files, you basically have to do it THROUGH iTunes by copying the library, and even then it's a pain in the ****. I'd say it's the biggest drawback to iTunes... and there are quite a few.

Lowell_M

heiney9 wrote:

For your exact application lossy compression work fine. I use it for ther car and for my portable. Done right it does sound acceptable in those settings.

As far as lossless.........my brother bought 1.2 terabytes of drive space in a seperate computer including redundany drives. He has over 3000 cd's and it had taken him 6 months to rip and convert to FLAC (lossless) almost all of his collection. He has 3 systems in addition to an HT only setup. He uses 3 Squeeze Box units all hooked to seperate DAC's in each of his 3 systems all wireless and has music all over the house. A great (crazy) undertaking but it is cool to have all the music on the computer server and be able to call anything up anywhere in the house in the exacr same quality as the cd. He is also keeping every single cd as well as the having it on the computer server.

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showpost.php?p=412979&postcount=1

Very very cool, if a bit over the top.

H9

I can only hope to, someday,... somehow,... attain his level of geekdom. :rolleyes:

Really... that is pretty sweet.

ledhed

MillerLiteScott wrote:

wow, just wow

My iTunes is all F#$%up right now.

Sucks.

If you have it all in a new folder on your D drive, go to Edit>Preferences. click on the advanced tab and change your iTunes music folder location. That should clear it up.

jhw59

Traders Littler Helper is a good freeware tool for converting flac,shn, and ape files. Very easy to use. Storage is cheap and I've bought a couple IOmega externals from buy dot com.

pblanc

if you don't already know about it, www.hydrogenaudio.org is a great resource regarding compressed and losseless audio codecs. One terrabyte network-capable external hard drives are now available for a few hundred dollars. With any luck, within a year they will be down to a couple of hundred dollars or less. At that price, I think ripping all your CDs and LPs to a lossless format will become quite reasonable. Even though it doubles the storage requirements, I archive CDs and LPs as .wav files to maintain maximum flexiblility. I don't want to rip them twice. A .wav file can be converted to anything. I agree that for "casual listening" AAC files encoded at 196 mps are quite satisfactory and a very good compromise between sound quality and file size. I haven't found a ripping program that can best Exact Audio Copy.

Shizelbs

Just get a NAS hard drive like the Western Digital MyBook. No need to have a computer running at the same time. Its what I am going to do.

m00npie

Just downloaded and installed EAC. Is there an easy way to get the song information off the web or do you have to type it in yourself?

m00npie

Sona wrote:

Click on the CD icon to the left of the mailbox or click on the Database menu item and click get CD info from ... remote freedb.

If your CD isn't in the database you can easily manually enter the info. Take a glance at the info b4 you start the rip, because it isn't always accurate.

Thank you Sona, this will certainly save time...

Another question for anyone and forgive me if it has already been covered...
I know Apple has a lossless format that you can choose if you rip a CD, but what is the quality of the music you buy from them? Is the .m4p (AAC protected file format) considered lossless? Or should I just consider it a loss to try to convert them to lossless

Lowell_M

The music downloaded from itunes might be a little better in AAC format than an MP3, but is still compressed. if you burn these to CD and then rip lossless, you still have the same, compressed information.