[morphon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif 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.

You can find external 2TB drives for less than $150 each. 2x=$300, which might be expensive for some, but nothing like $3k. A lossy backup would be pretty simple as well, since you could get a relatively cheap 500gb drive and store everything as 320kbps MP3 and lock it away in a safe or something.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphon /img/forum/go_quote.gif You can find external 2TB drives for less than $150 each. 2x=$300, which might be expensive for some, but nothing like $3k. A lossy backup would be pretty simple as well, since you could get a relatively cheap 500gb drive and store everything as 320kbps MP3 and lock it away in a safe or something.

Yeah, I guess I could buy 4 1.5TB drives instead of 2 3TB drives, that would be around $600. Though I can imagine figuring out how to easily run backups and remember how it's all divided could be a gigantic pain. Not to even mention coordinating a file retrieval system like iTunes or foobar when your collection spans 2 different hard drives.

The other solution I guess would be to have the aforementioned 4 1.5TB drives that holds everything in lossless in duplicate and then have a single 500 GB drive that just holds lossy to run on the computer, thus making it easier to manage. Thus you still ahve your lossless backed up, but you don't have to deal with the pain of having 2+ TB's of music for your computer to deal with across two different hard drives.

 

[ldaustin]

External hard drives can be relatively inexpensive - as little as $100 per Terabyte. I load my Ipod with AAC files, but keep a copy and backup of all my music in Lossless. That gives me the flexibility to reconvert my music to a different format or bit-rate.

Once you exceed 200 or 300 albums an important consideration is all the time it takes to rip them. I currently have around 800 albums stored and I would not want to have to go back and rip them over again. Having a Lossless copy and a backup will hopefully mean I won't ever have to do that.

I can foresee a time when disk space and maybe even flash memory will be so cheap and plentiful that using Lossless will be an easy decision. If and (more likely) when that happens I won't have to re-rip my entire collection.

 

[Head Injury]

4 x 1TB in RAID10. Do it, now

Though I'm not actually sure if there's an external enclosure that does it. There probably is.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ldaustin /img/forum/go_quote.gif External hard drives can be relatively inexpensive - as little as $100 per Terabyte. I load my Ipod with AAC files, but keep a copy and backup of all my music in Lossless. That gives me the flexibility to reconvert my music to a different format or bit-rate. Once you exceed 200 or 300 albums an important consideration is all the time it takes to rip them. I currently have around 800 albums stored and I would not want to have to go back and rip them over again. Having a Lossless copy and a backup will hopefully mean I won't ever have to do that. I can foresee a time when disk space and maybe even flash memory will be so cheap and plentiful that using Lossless will be an easy decision. If and (more likely) when that happens I won't have to re-rip my entire collection.

well, it's not as easy $100 per 1TB, unless you want to split it up somehow. That is have a portion on one HD, and another portion on another, etc. If you need a single HD over 2TB, they get super expensive, really fast. 3TB drives are still in the thousands of dollars.

Furthermore, I don't know that your idea that one day HD's will be super cheap will ever come to fruition. For the simple reason that I think data management for the vast majority of people will probably go all cloud in the near future. Thus turning physical HD's into specialist things that are once again very expensive. I think the next 2-3 years will be the cheapest point for physical HD's, after which it will actually go up in price dramatically.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Head Injury /img/forum/go_quote.gif 4 x 1TB in RAID10. Do it, now Though I'm not actually sure if there's an external enclosure that does it. There probably is.

I need to figure out a solution pretty quick one way or the other, as my current dual 500GB drives are filling up very fast and I refuse to slow my music acquisition.

 

[chinesekiwi]

in terms of workload, consumer computer technology is so advanced these days that the difference is minimal and a non-issue. On DAPs (mp3 players), this is still are issue as they have much weaker CPUs.

 

[morphon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif I need to figure out a solution pretty quick one way or the other, as my current dual 500GB drives are filling up very fast and I refuse to slow my music acquisition.

I think you may be making it more complicated than it is. If you are already wanting to do a backup, then whether it is lossy or lossless is just a matter of size. All the logistics are the same until you run out of maximum reasonable size for the hard disc itself. So, stuff like keeping track of what has been backed up and what hasn't doesn't magically go away if the file size is smaller. FLAC at CD resolution is, I think, a reasonable size. Much smaller than SACD-resolution DSD files, for example.

Also, I don't think I would ever want a backup that was higher quality than the version I listen to, especially if I listen on a desktop PC. If I had to make compromises for my portable needs, then fine. But why would I want to store the FLAC and listen to the MP3 when I could just listen to the FLAC?

Don't worry about cloud storage - people are now shooting HD video and doing stuff to it on their computer. 12MP Cameras are starting to become normal. People are, by nature, packrats (some exceptions). Storage space needed will just continue to climb for quite some while.

 

[fjrabon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphon /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think you may be making it more complicated than it is. If you are already wanting to do a backup, then whether it is lossy or lossless is just a matter of size. All the logistics are the same until you run out of maximum reasonable size for the hard disc itself. So, stuff like keeping track of what has been backed up and what hasn't doesn't magically go away if the file size is smaller. FLAC at CD resolution is, I think, a reasonable size. Much smaller than SACD-resolution DSD files, for example. Also, I don't think I would ever want a backup that was higher quality than the version I listen to, especially if I listen on a desktop PC. If I had to make compromises for my portable needs, then fine. But why would I want to store the FLAC and listen to the MP3 when I could just listen to the FLAC? Don't worry about cloud storage - people are now shooting HD video and doing stuff to it on their computer. 12MP Cameras are starting to become normal. People are, by nature, packrats (some exceptions). Storage space needed will just continue to climb for quite some while.

well, your original point, which I think is a decent one, is lossless allows you to change different formats down the road if you need to. Where if you switch between different types of lossy, it slowly degrades. So in that case, you'd want your backup in lossless and what you listen to could just be the lowest bitrate you can't tell a difference with.

I personally have never met anybody that passed 320 kbps v. lossless double blind testing. So I really have no major problem storing all lossy. That's probably what I will end up doing, just storing everything all lossy and in a few months when my 500 GB drives fill up, I'll probably buy a 1.5 TB drive that is my primary and then use the 500 GB drives as backups and store most everything in 320kbps, with a few things here and there in lossless. I don't really see .mp3 going away anywhere in the near future.

 

[grokit]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjrabon /img/forum/go_quote.gif I could be off, but I know that it was an apple computer that had CPU issues with music playback.

Quote:

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

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.

Yes, it only affected the "Nehalem " Mac Pros, and Apple responded very quickly once they were aware of the issue. The issue was related, ironically, to the Nehalem's brand-new advanced power-management protocols, for some reason audio processing triggered the problem. A simple, isolated glitch that was rapidly dealt with by an automatic software update.

Mac Pro Audio Update 1.0 fixes Mac Pro CPU heating issue

 

[nullstring]

I don't know this topic has kept going.

1. CPU use for FLAC has been negligable for 10 years now
2. HDD use for FLAC is only an issue if you have many many albums
3. In the case that you have many many albums, you should be using FLAC, because the cost of realizing that you need to rerip (or download) your music library is much higher than the cost of the extra HDD space.

 

[Kenny6007]

i always go FLAC if possible because, as mentioned, hard drive space is cheap these days where a 1.5tb is easily right under $100 now and 2tb is around $125 with prices still dropping.

i've ripped all my music into FLAC now because without the CD player right in front of me this reduces the need to physically get up, search for the next CD, and then swap discs. also with an HTPC in the living room i can easily stream from my main listening area to the living room and having my whole catalog browsable via XBMC running on the HTPC. since my main system is in the listening/office room i'll be hooking up a touch screen monitor to the actual listening area so everything is literally at the touch of my fingers

i went with flac because the extra space it takes doesn't matter too much and i can easily convert into any other format for portability if needed. i have about 1.2tb of music, i also rip my bluray/DVD's as well so my file server has about 10+tb of storage .... i'm going to be grabbing a couple 2tb drives though because i am out of space

 

[Kenny6007]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nullstring /img/forum/go_quote.gif I don't know this topic has kept going. CPU use for FLAC has been negligable for 10 years now HDD use for FLAC is only an issue if you have many many albums In the case that you have many many albums, you should be using FLAC, because the cost of realizing that you need to rerip (or download) your music library is much higher than the cost of the extra HDD space.

i didn't mention CPU/RAM usage in regards to FLAC but ^ said it all

 

[Rainbow Randy]

As computers age and slow down, is it related to additional hard disk being taken up, therefore taking a longer time to sort through the data, or is that a nonissue? Or does slowdown occur primarily because of additional software being run in the background?

Also, this is a bit off-topic, but I've read from a couple forum posters that Macs tend to maintain their speed and snappiness better than PCs. Any truth to that? I've only been a Mac guy for a few months now (and am quite pleased). Thanks for all the responses.

 

[haloxt]

Computers don't physically slow down because of age, except maybe hard drives or cd drives going kooky, or you have so much dust things are overheating.

99% of the time computers slow down over time is because of software, viruses, choosing worse settings, and never running a hard drive defragmentation program like diskeeper. People never defragmenting probably accounts for a big chunk of computer sales.