[Rainbow Randy]

I'd like to know how additionally taxing lossless music is on a computer over lossy. I've avoided encoding in lossless up until recently due to having slow, weak computers, but now I have a new Core 2 Duo 27" iMac. I'm fairly ignorant about computer matters, but I've avoided lossless because I thought it would negatively affect my computers by doing the following: take up additional hard drive space (typically several times over lossy), clutter hard disk and slow data retrieval, consume additional RAM, and take up additional CPU processing.

Are my concerns well-founded? And please, I'd love any tips on how to minimize any issues and what to look for in a computer in the future to best handle lossless. I do not know what I am talking about, so please inform me.

 

[DanD]

Lossless will take up more space at least twice over 320k MP3. As big as it is, your hdd wouldn't break a sweat handling it. If you put everything in a album into one single large file and load it up all into RAM, it will consume what ever the size of the file. Say if it is 400 MB it'll take up that much on your RAM. But most players will only load a portion of the file into memory and buffer it unless you configure it to load up everything. The data rate for music is very low. I mean you can play music from CD, your PC hdd and memory has far greater bandwidth than any CD players. As far as CPU Core 2 Duo shouldn't break a sweat handling FLAC even on the highest compression ratio. You would worry about CPU on portable player not on desktop.

CPU is more of a concern if you're doing upsampling or other heavy processing stuff like that. You spent good money on that iMac, should make it work hard.

 

[leeperry]

the highest level of compression in Monkey's Audio is quite a CPU hog, but FLAC should be fine.

 

[fjrabon]

The only real issue a 2 core iMac would have is HD space. If I had my entire music collection in lossless, it would take up something like 900GB. Typically lossless takes up 8 times as much space as 128 kbps, 4 times as much as 256 kbps and 3 times as much as 320 kbps.

What I think the best, most reasonable approach is to pick and choose. Have a few favorites with great sound quality n the recording in lossless and most of your occasional listening/low sound quality stuff in 128-320 kbps .mp3.

I have Gomez and Dire Straits albums in lossless, but for my occasional britney spears kick, I don't need her music to take up more than 128 kbps.

Additionally, and this may get me flamed, but I have done the test a lot and I've never seen ANYBODY that can pass double blind testing with 320 kbps v. lossless.

If you're using iTunes, just rip a mix CD that is representative of what you listen to, to apple lossless and then just rip it again to 320 kbps .mp3 (or AAC). Then create a playlist and dump both of these into it. For the playlist you just created, make sure you click to not show bitrate. Listen to the entire playlist and write down if you think it's .mp3 or lossless. Then, when you're done, click the option to show the bitrate and see how accurate you were. If you're not well above 60%, you're really doing no better than guessing. With more than 20 tracks, I've never seen anybody get above 65% on this test and statistically, you'd expect SOMEBODY to eventually get lucky enough to nail 65%. Of course the one person who got 65% believed this to show that he can hear the difference between lossless and .mp3.

 

[zmd]

Go for highest-quality VBR mp3s, I'd say, unless you know for sure that you can hear the differences and it bugs you. The only thing you should consider is file size vs. perceived audio quality, and VBR is a nice balance, IMHO, both for desktop and portable use.

 

[Mochan]

Your concerns are totally unfounded. Lossless has no noticeable effect on ram and processing on any modern PC. The only significant effect is on hard disk space.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mochan /img/forum/go_quote.gif Your concerns are totally unfounded. Lossless has no noticeable effect on ram and processing on any modern PC. The only significant effect is on hard disk space.

This isn't always 100% true. For some reason, some Power Macs have trouble with compressed lossless.

 

[TheMarchingMule]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif This isn't always 100% true. For some reason, some Power Macs have trouble with compressed lossless.

That's pretty bad. My Lenovo S10-2 can play "normal" (at least level 5) FLAC files without a hitch.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheMarchingMule /img/forum/go_quote.gif That's pretty bad. My Lenovo S10-2 can play "normal" (at least level 5) FLAC files without a hitch.

I remember reading about it on appleinsider a while back, and I don't really remember the details. So I could be off, but I know that it was an apple computer that had CPU issues with music playback.

 

[fjrabon]

AppleInsider | Nehalem Mac Pro systems suffer audio-based performance issues

 

[haloxt]

Mp3 players buffer as much dsp'ed music as they can into ram and play off that while trying to keep the hard drive and processor idle as long as possible to save battery. I asked rockbox if they could rockbox computers for their more efficient use of hardware but they declined

.

 

[krmathis]

The point about larger files sizes is valid, but the other ones is pretty much a non-issue with todays computers. CPU processing power, RAM consumption should not be a problem at all on your brand new iMac.

As an example - I have been using Apple Lossless for 6 years, of which the first 3 years on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 (PowerPC), with no issues so far.

So I just say -> Go lossless!

 

[carledwards]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif ...Additionally, and this may get me flamed, but I have done the test a lot and I've never seen ANYBODY that can pass double blind testing with 320 kbps v. lossless...

Pretty much the conclusion I've reached, too.

 

[morphon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif AppleInsider | Nehalem Mac Pro systems suffer audio-based performance issues

I'm a former IT support guy myself - that article refers to an issue that was fixed. It ONLY hurt Core i7 towers. Absolutely no problem for the Core2 iMacs, laptops, or towers.

The way buffering works, lossless does not even use significant more RAM than lossy. CPU use is tiny either way.

I rip most things in FLAC because, after having CDs stolen on more than one occasion, the computer copy is as much of a backup as it is for personal listening. Also, it gives me the freedom to transcode to other formats without loss of quality. I can go FLAC -> Vorbis for my Fuze, FLAC -> WMA for my wife's Zune, FLAC -> AAC for my iPod, etc... If my main copy is lossy, I can't convert it without unacceptable quality loss.

Like fjrabon, I have an enormous music library. Having everything on the desktop in lossy seems like false economy to me. Having only 320kbs MP3 on my portable is inefficient (lossless for the jazz, Q5 Vorbis for pop, etc...)

Another way to think about it - if you rip in lossless, you will never have to re-rip into another format since you can go lossless -> lossless with no quality drop at all. It's future-proof in a way.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphon /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm a former IT support guy myself - that article refers to an issue that was fixed. It ONLY hurt Core i7 towers. Absolutely no problem for the Core2 iMacs, laptops, or towers. The way buffering works, lossless does not even use significant more RAM than lossy. CPU use is tiny either way. I rip most things in FLAC because, after having CDs stolen on more than one occasion, the computer copy is as much of a backup as it is for personal listening. Also, it gives me the freedom to transcode to other formats without loss of quality. I can go FLAC -> Vorbis for my Fuze, FLAC -> WMA for my wife's Zune, FLAC -> AAC for my iPod, etc... If my main copy is lossy, I can't convert it without unacceptable quality loss. Like fjrabon, I have an enormous music library. Having everything on the desktop in lossy seems like false economy to me. Having only 320kbs MP3 on my portable is inefficient (lossless for the jazz, Q5 Vorbis for pop, etc...) Another way to think about it - if you rip in lossless, you will never have to re-rip into another format since you can go lossless -> lossless with no quality drop at all. It's future-proof in a way.

The problem then becomes you need a backup. Having 2 1.5TB drives is still pretty expensive, and that would be the bare minimum to store my music and have it backed up, as my collection stands right now if I went totally lossless. If they were to drop in Price I'd probably just have two 3 TB drives, put everything in lossless duplicates on them and then just have lossy on my actual computer. I think it's going to be a few years before my music collection doubles again.

However, right now to buy two 3 TB external Hard drives it would cost about $3000. I'd much rather have a lossy backup at a reasonable price than either dropping $3000 on external hard drives or not having a backup at all, as external HD's are known to fail every now and again.