[aphex944]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nspindel But for someone who's spent thousands and thousands of dollars on rigs and computer equipment and a large disc collection, the price difference between storing lossy and storing lossless is half a penny on the dollar. That is an indisputable fact. It's not something for you to take offense to. It just is.

Agreed.. if you're going to go to the trouble of properly archiving thousands of CDs, it only makes sense to go with lossless regardless of there being an audible quality gain or not. You retain the unaltered original with no quality loss. If a new lossy codec comes out in the future that outperforms the ones today, there's no need to re-rip. Simply transcode, and you're good to go!

Since I have limited disk space, I have a few CDs which I don't really listen to that much encoded with MPC, and have most of my others in lossless. This way I still save a bit of disk space.

 

[K2Grey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skylab In spite of the generally aggressive nature of this post, I will reply: http://ff123.net/training/training.html This will help anyone spot what happens. Check out the sample devoted to stereo collapse.

These samples all seem to be encoded using substandard encoders (non-LAME) at substandard bitrates. As such, I don't think it's anything close to clear indication of audible problems with high bitrate LAME. In addition, some of these samples, like castanets, are the known "killer" samples which pose special problems for lossy encoding, but are not common in actual music.

Out of curiosity, if I or someone else were to take the lossless samples on that page, transcode them into highest quality LAME mp3 and ogg, and post the lossless and the two lossy versions transcoded back into lossless on some website, would you be willing to accept the challenge of identifying, out of the 3 files, which file was the original lossless, and which two are the lossy files transcoded back into lossless?

 

[nspindel]

In ten years, when my hard disk crashes, I will be able to buy 250 gigs new for $20 by then.

It's an issue of percentages. If $200 is really something that someone is moaning about then they probably don't own 2000 cd's. And if they have 2000 cd's worth of music and are still moaning over $200 to back it up, then chances are that they didn't spend $12 per cd, more likely they obtained the music by "other means" e.g. downloading for free. In that case, I really couldn't care less about their moaning.

My point is very simple. If someone can afford 2000 cd's, then they can afford to spend $200 more on hard drive space, and still be able to afford 12 more cd's if they want them.

The economics are simple - buy a cd, $12. Archive it losslessly on hard drive, 13 cents. Is this really worth arguing over?

And as for your point about the hard drive crashing.... That's why I back up my flac archive onto a duplicate hard drive. So now I've spend a whopping 26 cents instead of 13 to have my music on a hard drive. With what I've spent on equipment, the hard drives are a fraction of a percent of the cost.

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by K2Grey These samples all seem to be encoded using substandard encoders (non-LAME) at substandard bitrates. As such, I don't think it's anything close to clear indication of audible problems with high bitrate LAME. In addition, some of these samples, like castanets, are the known "killer" samples which pose special problems for lossy encoding, but are not common in actual music. Out of curiosity, if I or someone else were to take the lossless samples on that page, transcode them into highest quality LAME mp3 and ogg, and post the lossless and the two lossy versions transcoded back into lossless on some website, would you be willing to accept the challenge of identifying, out of the 3 files, which file was the original lossless, and which two are the lossy files transcoded back into lossless?

Certainly. It would be my pleasure.

 

[K2Grey]

Ok, when I have some time I will do that and see if I can host it on my university's server (although I will probably go to HydrogenAudio and ask for advice on encoding first, to make sure they are of highest possible quality).

Or if someone else is more experienced and wants to do it I would happy too.

 

[spaceconvoy]

Who's keeping 500 cds (and spending full price for them)??? Especially if you're already archiving them into flac, why not just sell them after you rip. For me, I'd say half my collection was burnt from friend's cds, a quarter bought new and a quarter bought used. Now that I've riped everything to flac, I'll probably sell the real cds when I get around to it. Therefore:

250 burnt cds x $0.25 = $62.50
125 new cds x $12 = $1,500
125 used cds x $8 = $1,000

minus 250 cds sold x $5 = $1,250

Total = $1,312.50

Let's say that's over the course of a decade, so that's ~$130 per year. Pretty reasonable.

Also, I think a lot of those defending lossless are making a lot of assumptions about my computer. It is assumed that I have a desktop, that I am around it most of the time, and am fairly immobile. I have a laptop. I use it at school and home. I can't really upgrade the sound card or add an extra hard drive with out spending a lot or sacrificing portability. Plus, it's assumed that I'm not doing that much on my computer. Sometimes I have CAD, photoshop, and Indesign running at the same time, which is already recipe enough for disaster. So I never listen to music on my computer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fatality_ The point was why not have perfection if you can

Nice try, but way to miss the point. You can never have perfection. And even when the day comes where I can afford to pay my man-servant to push around a cart containing a generator, electrostatic amp, Orpheus and 100 harddrives containing flac copies of every piece of music ever recorded. I'd still be moaning about how the set up isn't perfect, and what I really need to do is get an army of scientists to clone Jimi Hendrix for me so I can just cart him around everywhere I go.

But the biggest thing I don't understand about this argument is why people are advocating harddrives over DVDs. You can easily get a spindle of 100 for $35 nowdays. Compared to the cost of an equivalent 400GB harddrive, they're 10 times cheaper. And after the initial pain of burning everything (no worse than ripping your 2000 theoretical Cds), they're much much better for archiving.

 

[Riku540]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spaceconvoy Nice try, but way to miss the point. You can never have perfection. And even when the day comes where I can afford to pay my man-servant to push around a cart containing a generator, electrostatic amp, Orpheus and 100 harddrives containing flac copies of every piece of music ever recorded. I'd still be moaning about how the set up isn't perfect, and what I really need to do is get an army of scientists to clone Jimi Hendrix for me so I can just cart him around everywhere I go.

Sorry, but I don't think you win here. You're straying off into philosophy. Though, technically absolute perfection is unobtainable in your view, we are only seeking the next best thing to perfection. We're not asking for copies of studio masters or our own personal music-slave clones of the original artists, just the best of what's available to us. For now, it's unaltered CD quality or other common formats. Maybe the next generation will be Blu-ray. We realize the world is not perfect. We just want the best out of what we have.
Quote:

Originally Posted by spaceconvoy But the biggest thing I don't understand about this argument is why people are advocating harddrives over DVDs. You can easily get a spindle of 100 for $35 nowdays. Compared to the cost of an equivalent 400GB harddrive, they're 10 times cheaper. And after the initial pain of burning everything (no worse than ripping your 2000 theoretical Cds), they're much much better for archiving.

I agree with you on many levels here, although I personally wouldn't put one over the other. DVD's are less convenient but more reliable in the sense that they won't burn out or crash. They can however, be damaged or lost much easier than a hard drive can. Plus, hard drives are easier to transfer from one to another as where DVD's will take the same amount of time as it did to back them up. This is yet another preference to what is most practical and convenient to the user.

 

[brian183]

Just to put in my two cents...I'm making plans on purchasing a DVD burner (yeah I know I don't have one yet) and storing all of my flacs onto DVD data discs. I will never ever trust a hard drive for long term storage and I never will.

Also, I have about 300 CDs currently stored on my hard drive and it takes up about 93 gigs. Whenever I listen to my stored CDs I always listen to the FLACs than the MP3's. The way I see it, MP3 for my X5 and FLACs for my EMU->HF1. I'm going to build a barebones system so I don't have to listen to my tornado of a computer when I'm listening to my FLACs. Also, I recently discovered a slightly older comp I have that has the ability to run up to 8 drives going through the motherboard. I'm prolly going to set that up as a net storage unit and put it in the other room and then just stream everything to my mini-ATX box.

 

[nspindel]

That's exactly what I do. I have two servers in the basement, loaded with fans, loud as hell. They're stacked with hard drives with flac archives, dvd archives, and I run Sage which is a pc-based tivo-like client/server application. All my data sits on these servers and streams throughout the house over a 100mb network over cat5e. Works like a charm. Also have a WAP, so I can stream it all wirelessly to the laptops. Pretty cool watching live (though timeshifted) HBO on a laptop wirelessly.....

 

[spaceconvoy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riku540 We realize the world is not perfect. We just want the best out of what we have.

Completely agree with you. I think the difference is that for some people, pure sound quality is their only consideration, while others factor in things like size, convenience, compatibility, etc. (of course, money is a factor for almost everyone). I only disagree when it comes to people saying some incredibly idiotic things, like 'you can't enjoy music as much with lossless', or 'if you remove all constraints of space/time/money/laws of physics blah blah'.

 

[Riku540]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spaceconvoy Completely agree with you. I think the difference is that for some people, pure sound quality is their only consideration, while others factor in things like size, convenience, compatibility, etc. (of course, money is a factor for almost everyone). I only disagree when it comes to people saying some incredibly idiotic things, like 'you can't enjoy music as much with lossless', or 'if you remove all constraints of space/time/money/laws of physics blah blah'.

Funny, I thought I was the one who said those things...

 

[Publius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spaceconvoy Who's keeping 500 cds (and spending full price for them)??? Especially if you're already archiving them into flac, why not just sell them after you rip. For me, I'd say half my collection was burnt from friend's cds, a quarter bought new and a quarter bought used. Now that I've riped everything to flac, I'll probably sell the real cds when I get around to it. Therefore:

This is stealing music, plain and simple. I don't have a problem with sharing friends' CDs, since at least one person has the physical copy of the media, but just selling the CD back after you ripped it is unethical IMHO. Especially if you sell the CDs from where you bought them from (although I suspect many stores would ban you if you do that for a while).

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Publius This is stealing music, plain and simple. I don't have a problem with sharing friends' CDs, since at least one person has the physical copy of the media, but just selling the CD back after you ripped it is unethical IMHO. Especially if you sell the CDs from where you bought them from (although I suspect many stores would ban you if you do that for a while).

Interesting. Borrowing CD's from friends and ripping them is 100% illegal. Unlikely you'll get busted, but it's illegal.

Buying CDs, ripping them, and then selling them as used -- that is less clear to me. Since you paid for it, and you take an almost 60-80% haircut when you sell them back as used, I'm not sure this is illegal (as long as you do not share your ripped files). I'm not sure it IS legal though.

But ripping friends CDs is definitely illegal, every bit as much as downloading illegal copies.

 

[Publius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nspindel In ten years, when my hard disk crashes, I will be able to buy 250 gigs new for $20 by then. It's an issue of percentages. If $200 is really something that someone is moaning about then they probably don't own 2000 cd's. And if they have 2000 cd's worth of music and are still moaning over $200 to back it up, then chances are that they didn't spend $12 per cd, more likely they obtained the music by "other means" e.g. downloading for free. In that case, I really couldn't care less about their moaning. My point is very simple. If someone can afford 2000 cd's, then they can afford to spend $200 more on hard drive space, and still be able to afford 12 more cd's if they want them. The economics are simple - buy a cd, $12. Archive it losslessly on hard drive, 13 cents. Is this really worth arguing over? And as for your point about the hard drive crashing.... That's why I back up my flac archive onto a duplicate hard drive. So now I've spend a whopping 26 cents instead of 13 to have my music on a hard drive. With what I've spent on equipment, the hard drives are a fraction of a percent of the cost.

You're completely missing my point about investment and ROI. Read my post again.

In the most pathological scenario, if I have no use for lossless encodings and no use for the extra disk space, then I am throwing away money by buying a hard disk. I could blow $200 on practically anything else and get more for my money, most especially including more music.

In the opposite extreme, if I must listen on the computer and any lossy encodes are objectionable, then buying a hard disk is virtually required, and it would be foolish to spend that $200 on music instead.

Most people are going to be somewhere in between.

We're going around in circles, and fundamentally I'm agreeing with you that lossless encodes are always a good idea (and I run full lossless at home) - so I'm not going to post further.

 

[nspindel]

We are going in circles, that much is true

My point is really quite simple, and I believe this was exactly what I said in my first post.

IF you are listening to high end, expensive audio system, with your audio content on a pc, then the marginal cost difference between lossy and lossless is ridiculously negligible. And you spent all that money on the expensive equipment so that you could get the very best sound quality. So listening to compressed music in these circumstances would be foolish.

IF your goal is portability, then clearly you can't carry around a server full of hard discs, so by all means load the ipod or laptop up with compressed music if that's your choosing.

I agree - no real need to argue this any further....