Post by Neon Boy on Mar 5, 2011 16:27:01 GMT -5
I have not read any posts in this thread about ARCHIVING the music. Only the original CD (or LP) will do for that.
Today there exists LOSSLESS audio formats in which to archive digital music. It only makes sense if you have the original source, which today means the audio CD or vinyl LP.
As we all know, MP3 (or AAC or any other lossy format) is, well, lossy.
That means that in order to compress digital music files to a size that is portable-player friendly (read small file size), sacrifices have to be made so that the resulting file size of a 3-minute song MP3 made of an audio CD (WAV) file which is around 30 Megabytes (MB), can be compressed to 3 MB.
This implies the loss of audio quality, which is a compromise that every one that listens to MP3s is making whether they know it or not.
There exists some LOSSLESS formats such as the Open Source (i.e. free) format named FLAC for Free Lossless Audio Codec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac).
It can take the aforementioned 30MB original WAV file derived from an audio CD (or LP) and compress it to about 1/2 of the original size (about 15MB) WITHOUT loosing any quality at all.
The best way to express this is comparing the FLAC format to the ubiquitous ZIP format.
We all know that if uncompressing a ZIP file would yield anything BUT the original *intact*, it would be completely useless. So when you uncompress a FLAC file back to WAV, it yields the exact same original bit sequence and that's what FLAC players (like Winamp) do on the fly when playing a FLAC file.
Needless to say, this a the perfect format to ARCHIVE (that is, to save 'forever') your audio CD collection. Then you can replicate the files to as many hard drives as you wish.
At any moment, you can burn an audio CD from the FLAC files that would be indistinguishable from the original audio CD (because it *is* the original audio CD). Of course you could make your own custom "mix" audio CDs but this time from the original source instead of from degraded MP3 files.
Today there exists LOSSLESS audio formats in which to archive digital music. It only makes sense if you have the original source, which today means the audio CD or vinyl LP.
As we all know, MP3 (or AAC or any other lossy format) is, well, lossy.
That means that in order to compress digital music files to a size that is portable-player friendly (read small file size), sacrifices have to be made so that the resulting file size of a 3-minute song MP3 made of an audio CD (WAV) file which is around 30 Megabytes (MB), can be compressed to 3 MB.
This implies the loss of audio quality, which is a compromise that every one that listens to MP3s is making whether they know it or not.
There exists some LOSSLESS formats such as the Open Source (i.e. free) format named FLAC for Free Lossless Audio Codec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac).
It can take the aforementioned 30MB original WAV file derived from an audio CD (or LP) and compress it to about 1/2 of the original size (about 15MB) WITHOUT loosing any quality at all.
The best way to express this is comparing the FLAC format to the ubiquitous ZIP format.
We all know that if uncompressing a ZIP file would yield anything BUT the original *intact*, it would be completely useless. So when you uncompress a FLAC file back to WAV, it yields the exact same original bit sequence and that's what FLAC players (like Winamp) do on the fly when playing a FLAC file.
Needless to say, this a the perfect format to ARCHIVE (that is, to save 'forever') your audio CD collection. Then you can replicate the files to as many hard drives as you wish.
At any moment, you can burn an audio CD from the FLAC files that would be indistinguishable from the original audio CD (because it *is* the original audio CD). Of course you could make your own custom "mix" audio CDs but this time from the original source instead of from degraded MP3 files.