Archiving my CD collection: Lossless or Uncompressed

[pbirkett]

I want to make a permanent archive of my CD collection, which will be backed up onto DVD discs. I want no loss of quality whatsoever, the purpose of which will be so I can easily encode in whatever format I like for storage on the hard drive (most likely, MPC).

The question is, would it be best to keep these as WAV files or would it be better to encode losslessly to get extra albums on my DVD discs. Thinking from a point of view of future support (will these lossless formats still be around in a few years etc), what would you do? And if you opt for lossless, what is the best option? FLAC? Monkey Audio?

 

[minya]

Lossless. By far the best idea.

Monkey's Audio has the best compression ratio, but if you're really paranoid about compatibility, go with FLAC, an open source format which will no doubt be around (or at least be easily decoded) for years and years to come.

- Chris

 

[10068]

I'm keeping mine in Wav. I don't trust the software end of encoding/decoding my music losslessly, because of things like bugs, updates, etc. If you want to TRULY lose NO information, you have no choice but to EAC it "Uncompressed" into Wav and leave it that way. FWIW

 

[noir]

i think FLAC can be trusted for lossless archivating... i use it myself all the time ^_^

it's more a question of using EAC to rip things the right way... like configurating your drive's offset, using cuesheets, and gap-detection, etc.

APE and FLAC both come with integrity checking features too, so you can be sure that your tracks are without fault.
Also, the tags are a nice addition imo. I personally listen mostly over my computer, using lossless, and transfering the music digitially to the DAC, where it connects through the rest of the stereo,

As for now, i only made good experiences with the lossless formats... altho they tend to eat lots of space

 

[10068]

Quote:

it's more a question of using EAC to rip things the right way... like configurating your drive's offset, using cuesheets, and gap-detection, etc.

HMmm... up until recently (finally got a good drive) I haven't messed with offsets. How should I go about getting those set up? I was under the impression having no offset was fine unless your equipment "needed" it for some reason.

Also, is it bad to remove gaps? If so, should I append them to the end or beginning of tracks? Bah. It's been too long since I messed around with EAC

 

[noir]

for offset setups you check a website like this one and check for the options and offset your drive supports.

Actually the offset isn't THAT important... its kinda to correct the few milliseconds that the drive misses ripping, because it starts too soon or too late ripping... that's offset correction. As for gaps, i usually append them to the end of the track (i don't want to hear a gap when i start listening to a track ^_^)

cue-sheets are more important, imo. They allow you to recreate the CD you copied accurately bit-per-bit. For once, i use Nero with an APE plug-in to burn mine off. Loading the Cue-sheet is enough to make an accurate Audio-CD.
Another important option during ripping would be the testing... ALWAYS activate testing when ripping. It's the only way to know if your rip was accurate, and if there was no anti-copy mechanism (which disses sectors, and makes the rip inaccurate)

 

[jefemeister]

I'd say you have a better chance of a wav playing on a DVD-type player than something more esoteric like ape. If you don't care then there's no reason to not compress it. It's like a zip file.

 

[Wodgy]

It doesn't matter what lossless format you choose because you can always convert ("transcode" in the lingo) all your files to another format later if you find it necessary. That's the beauty of lossless. WAV is a poor choice because it doesn't support tags well (there are a handful of programs that can tag WAVs, but they're not always compatible with one another and you can't use arbitrary tags like with all the other formats). Any of the other lossless formats is a good choice though. Whatever you pick you won't go wrong.

 

[tortie]

I would go with the uncompressed WAV.

 

[zachary80]

I went with WAV, but I have thought about switching to lossless for the tagging

 

[Distroyed]

I think you overestimate the quality of cd/dvd media these days. Most are pretty crappy and I wouldnt expect it to last over a decade (which is why I'm going the raid array route... never have to worry about copying crap from endless numbers of dvd's back onto a harddrive, simply replace the hd's as they die). That being said, I wouldnt worry about lossless compressors disappearing in that time. Not to mention you'll probably end up recopying everything to much better formats before then anyway. Go lossless, save yourself some money... dvd media is expensive.

 

[lan]

Yeah I wouldn't consider media to last as long as you'd think.

Problem with RAID is that you aren't safe from user or program errors. If you say "delete" everything will be gone. It's best to have offline media and online storage. Price wise harddrive space and fast DVD media is about the same in cost.

 

[pbirkett]

OK, thanks guys, I will probably go the lossless route to archive my media (maybe FLAC). I am not too worried about the longevity of media, because if you pick good media, there should be no theoretical reason why it should not last as long as the original (IMHO), but even if it does not, it will surely be superseded before it has a chance to die...

 

[zachary80]

If you are so worried about a format dieing, why don't you just copy exactly what you used to rip the songs onto one of the DVD's?

 

[noir]

DVDs are way cheaper than HDs. around 1/4th the price.
I use DVDs for my music backup for now, but i plan moving onto a small 3 HD IDE in RAID5.
Way more expensive, but at least it's secure