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Best Lossless Archival Method?

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Gawd
Joined
Nov 26, 2006
Messages
554
So, I'm in the process of ripping all my CD's, and archiving all my amassed music to external hard drives. Space is not really a problem, so I've decided to go with one copy of my collection as 192kbps MP3's for use day to day on my iPod, and to keep on my notebook for playback when I'm not worried about audio quality. Then I'm going to have a second copy of this music on the external drives that I want to be lossless for when I want the sound quality.

A few questions; What is the best lossless format to archive to? Right now I'm leaning towards FLAC, but the lack of iTunes support for that is really a turn off (my main OS is Leopard, so iTunes is basically THE music playback software I'm using currently) I plan on having Windows by the summer, so if FLAC is the best bet I'd be ok with using that format seeing as through Windows I will be able to play back the FLAC files (I can in OS X, but I'd have to use VLC or something similar and I would miss having iTunes cataloguing functionality). Some of my music I've already ripped on Windows (this was a little while ago) using EAC and converted the music to WAV. Would WAV be a better bet than FLAC because then I could play it back with iTunes, or basically ANY music playback software I choose? I really only am torn between these formats because from what I've seen/read it seems FLAC is more widely chosen to archive than WAV or anything else is. Is there a reason for this? I would think WAV would be more universally playable than FLAC. Or maybe there is a plugin or way to get FLAC to play through iTunes (on OS X)?

Finally, for archiving, what would be the best ripping software for OS X? I'm using EAC on Windows, and for now am using xACT on my Mac, but if there are better options out there, I'd like to hear about them :)

Thanks for any help guys!
 
The problem with WAV is it lacks any real tag support. You can create CUE files, CD text files to use to burn to CD and modern redbook players will recognize it. The benefit of WAV is it is universal, everything will play it. Everything, but file size is larger than FLAC or another format. I would say in your situation, ALAC would be the way to go. You can rip it straight from iTunes or, last time I checked, you could use the iTunes encoder in EAC. If you are comfortable with iTunes on both your Mac and PC, you can keep all your stuff in ALAC, and convert to whatever else you want later down the road.
 
Why can't you play flac files in itunes? I'm pretty sure you can, I mean I know apple people who use flac... dunno what else htey would be doing.
 
bexamous said:
Why can't you play flac files in itunes? I'm pretty sure you can, I mean I know apple people who use flac... dunno what else htey would be doing.
Click to expand...

Nope, Apple does not support FLAC, unfortunately. However, I did find this after poking around a little to make sure I wasn't missing something after you said about Apple people you know using FLAC and found this;

http://www.simplehelp.net/2008/06/12/how-to-play-flac-files-in-itunes/

Basically, it's a bit of AppleScript that makes it possible to play FLAC files in iTunes. Thus, I think I've settled on using this for iTunes on OS X and playing my FLAC files that way, and on Windows I will just use MediaMonkey, or something similar to play them (unfortunately, Apple's amazing software is not translated well to Windows :p )

Thanks for the help, guys! Also, I didn't realize WAV had larger file sizes, but sitting here comparing the two for myself I notice that now :D Thanks again!
 
Keep in mind that it's lossless. So if you rip to ALAC or something now on your mac, and decide you want to change to FLAC later, it's easy to just write a script to run, let it run overnight, and in the morning your collection is FLAC, with tags in place, and identical sound data.

Don't fret the decision to much; you can always change later.

As for keeping a second copy of the music around, computers are really fast nowadays. You can encode an entire album from flac to 192kbps mp3 in a minute or 2. Might be better to encode on demand and keep one copy of everything. This will make tag management easier and general file management easier I think.
 
i use flac because it supports tags, works well with foobar and is supported by my cowon d2 DAP.
 
Yeah FLAC seems like the best choice. It's working good and really common nowadays. Also cross-platform and opensource.
 
R0N1 said:
Yeah FLAC seems like the best choice. It's working good and really common nowadays. Also cross-platform and opensource.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I use FLAC whenever possible. Works great with Amarok and Foobar.
 
Maybe not the most popular choice, but WMA Lossless is pretty nice, and all you need in order to make that happen is Windows Media Player.
 
Ogg quality (8 or 9 of 10=best) files are about 7mb compared to 192 mp3 3-4 mb AFAIK.
I currently convert to Ogg because command-line players in Freebsd (linux etc) widely support
it. And those 7mb are to my ears equivalent to WAV quality. And the command-line tool(s) to
convert to Ogg were easy to figure out.
 
I went back to WMA. Lossless but I can tell the slight difference between it and Wav, but Wav doesn't support Tags without effort.
 
Apple Lossless seems like the easiest method to me.

I've used that Fluke (converts FLAC for iTunes in OSX) program before and while it works it does have some annoying quirks. It converts music to some kind of Quicktime video file that iTunes will not stream across a network (which is a feature I need) and it doesn't read tags correctly. It's a stopgap solution at best.
 
EAC+ FLAC using this guide:http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

As for playback, use Foobar. Use wine to run it on linux/OSX.

Foobar is the best because it is lightweight, heavily customizable, and ends up being cross platform thanks to wine. Itunes is shit to manage a big collection of music.

As for keeping a double version of the songs in mp3 for your ipod, there is a plugin for foobar to read/write to your ipod AND encode files on the fly if incompatible with it (http://yuo.be/ipod.php )..No need to waste the space :)

The only downside is that it will take a little while to learn how to customize foobar.

That's what I have been using for the past year and I am extremely satisfied.
 
"Lossless but I can tell the slight difference between it and Wav,"

Seriously, every time I zip a word document and then unzip it... the friggin text slightly changes.

/me rolls eyes.
 
I feel VERY confident using EAC>FLAC for every rip, and using Foobar for playback. From there its easy to do whatever I want with the file-usually a LAME encoded V0 mp3 for my ipod. I've never had any second thoughts about the quality-of either the FLAC or the mp3-after countless hours ripping my collection. Having everything bit perfect from the original file is a great feeling of freedom when it comes to playing/accessing/manipulating my entire music collection. Its takes a bit of research in the beginning but the payoff is well worth the effort.
 
Tremulant said:
I feel VERY confident using EAC>FLAC for every rip, and using Foobar for playback. From there its easy to do whatever I want with the file-usually a LAME encoded V0 mp3 for my ipod. I've never had any second thoughts about the quality-of either the FLAC or the mp3-after countless hours ripping my collection. Having everything bit perfect from the original file is a great feeling of freedom when it comes to playing/accessing/manipulating my entire music collection. Its takes a bit of research in the beginning but the payoff is well worth the effort.
Click to expand...

i do pretty much the exact same thing... i use EAC to make my FLACs and playback in Foobar, then I use the "convert" option in foobar to make MP3's for whatever i want to put in my ipod and drop them in the ipod using Yami
 
bexamous said:
"Lossless but I can tell the slight difference between it and Wav,"

Seriously, every time I zip a word document and then unzip it... the friggin text slightly changes.

/me rolls eyes.
Click to expand...

Really? Me too!

I also notice that games that come zipped run a bit slower. Why can't developers provide the original without any crappy compression? :mad:
 
Lossless is useless to me. I seriously can't tell the difference between a FLAC file and MP3 @ 320 kbps. Audiophiles are too busy listening to noise rather than listening to the music.
 
And you won't notice the difference if you are in front of bad hardware. I have a pretty good setup and can hear the difference, but that's just me, not every has the "golden ear".
 
fuelvolts said:
Audiophiles are too busy listening to noise rather than listening to the music.
Click to expand...

Amazing. My words exactly. Not even that, many lamers now buy some "decent" :rolleyes: sound system and think they are instant audiophiles and start dodging mp3's and blabing about audio formats.

Is "blabing" a word? :eek: Well, now it is....:D:D:D
 
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