[quimbo]

some of us collect live music by artists that support the free trading of their concerts.  For example, head over to http://www.shnflac.net/torrents.php and join.  You'll have access to over 25,000 concerts including over 7,000 grateful dead shows (multiple versions of many dates), almost 2,000 garcia shows and then many other bands.  There are also lots of concert videos as well.
 
All of the concerts are flac or shn (older shows), 
 
I am one of the site admins there.  Very friendly site, no ratios or anything like that.  Stop on by.
 
quimbo

 

[hifimanrookie]

some of us collect live music by artists that support the free trading of their concerts.  For example, head over to http://www.shnflac.net/torrents.php and join.  You'll have access to over 25,000 concerts including over 7,000 grateful dead shows (multiple versions of many dates), almost 2,000 garcia shows and then many other bands.  There are also lots of concert videos as well.

All of the concerts are flac or shn (older shows), 

I am one of the site admins there.  Very friendly site, no ratios or anything like that.  Stop on by.

quimbo

Thanks for the tip quimbo..i will check it out

 

[Epsilon39]

I voted for 250Gb, but note that I am just starting with music on mobile media (FiiO X3). I do have many Terabytes of stuff on cd and dvd, it remains to be seen just how much of that I end up migrating to my mobile music setup.
Epsilon39

 

[MohawkUS]

I can assure you there is zero benefit. Regardless of your storage media, every track you play is buffered into system memory first. If you really think SSDs sound different, try using a RAMdisk. Unless you have a mechanical disk in an undamped metal tray three inches from your ear, I promise you that you're being sold snake oil. That being said, SSDs are great for everything else -- I've used them since Samsung released a 16GB model a number of years back.

I am very much not joking. I also hear a slight difference between FLAC and WAV, not enough though that I would still use WAV if my hard drive was filling up though. Let me qualify my statement with two things. I am using JPLAY for music playback, tried some of the same tests with Jriver and could not tell the difference; and two the power in my house is a little iffy. Perhaps that somehow plays a factor.

I did try a RAMdisk awhile back as a 'poor man' solution when my SSD died. Small enough improvement there for me to say that I could be imagining it.

Equally controversial I'm going to say the computer hardware you have makes a difference. I tried the USB stick vs internal storage thing on an Ultrabook some time back and both sounded horrible. Worth noting that I did it in a way that the music was stored on the laptop and transmitted to my desktop for playback.

 

[sub50hz]

I am very much not joking. I also hear a slight difference between FLAC and WAV, not enough though that I would still use WAV if my hard drive was filling up though. Let me qualify my statement with two things. I am using JPLAY for music playback, tried some of the same tests with Jriver and could not tell the difference; and two the power in my house is a little iffy. Perhaps that somehow plays a factor.

I did try a RAMdisk awhile back as a 'poor man' solution when my SSD died. Small enough improvement there for me to say that I could be imagining it.

Equally controversial I'm going to say the computer hardware you have makes a difference. I tried the USB stick vs internal storage thing on an Ultrabook some time back and both sounded horrible. Worth noting that I did it in a way that the music was stored on the laptop and transmitted to my desktop for playback.

 
Sometimes I am really surprised at what people think makes their music sound better. This is one of those times.
 

 every track you play is buffered into system memory first

 
Keep that in mind. It doesn't matter what kind of drive you use, full stop.

 

[Hapster]

Yea, for some reason think that if a song doesn't take up 100MB of space, it's not perfect, ahah. What am I missing without 192khz files, inaudible white noise?

 

 

[germanium]

I have 2-80GB SSD's for a system drive in hardware RAID 0. I also have 2-1TB drives in a software RAID 0 that can be moved to any windows XP or later box & be recognized by the operating system as a RAID drive with no other hardware or special drivers. The software RAID drive is where all my music/media files reside.

 

[hifimanrookie]

Yea, for some reason think that if a song doesn't take up 100MB of space, it's not perfect, ahah. What am I missing without 192khz files, inaudible white noise? :rolleyes:  

I have a watercooled pc rig for gaming and a dedicated higher end rig for listening to music and i agree with u a bit because:

On my completely watercooled HIGH END gaming pc system (for fps gaming!) i can hardly hear any difference between mp3 and flac or wav..BUT..on my other music dedicated system (around 10.000usd worth) i DO can hear a clear difference between mp3 and wav/ better quality flac..

one warning though..i found out that some FLAC music files u can download on certain sites are actually NO lossless material..they are actually dupes...as they are just converted mp3 files into flac! I read about those fake flacs also in a forum somewhere..so if u say that wav sounds same as mp3(192 or whatever bp/s) then u have OR a mediocre sounding system (like my gaming pc) , or ur ears are bad OR u have been listening to the flacs i just mentioned...

Ur probably also one of those saying high quality cables, special feet under ur components or a high quality audio rack dont influence the soundquality . Well am glad i am not one of them..as i do hear differences..not day and night differences..sometimes just nuances..but still very recognizable on my rig...as i said..my gaming rig, although also expensive, is less choosy what i use or on what i put it on

 

[Byronb]

I am very much not joking. I also hear a slight difference between FLAC and WAV, not enough though that I would still use WAV if my hard drive was filling up though. Let me qualify my statement with two things. I am using JPLAY for music playback, tried some of the same tests with Jriver and could not tell the difference; and two the power in my house is a little iffy. Perhaps that somehow plays a factor.

I did try a RAMdisk awhile back as a 'poor man' solution when my SSD died. Small enough improvement there for me to say that I could be imagining it.

Equally controversial I'm going to say the computer hardware you have makes a difference. I tried the USB stick vs internal storage thing on an Ultrabook some time back and both sounded horrible. Worth noting that I did it in a way that the music was stored on the laptop and transmitted to my desktop for playback.

Just can't wrap my head around what would make the sound different. It is 1's and 0's, Doesn't matter how they are stored. 

 

[iQEM]

i vote 250gb or less, have about 20gb on my ipod photo 40gb, 15-20gb on my iphone 4s, about 60gb on my laptop at home, and about 30gb on my Mac desktop at the office...have not got much collection of lossless, most of its are 192-320kbps mp3&AAC but its come from original CD's so its sounds great..

 

[dwayniac]

I have 180gb of media content on 500gb and 250gb hard drives. The music portion of the 180gb of media content is backed up on the 250gb hard drive and is also contained on a 80gb laptop drive and 32gb sd card.

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

  Just can't wrap my head around what would make the sound different. It is 1's and 0's, Doesn't matter how they are stored. 

Well only one thing I can think of, is how quickly the audio file is fetched from the hardware, HDDs have slower access time than SSD and SSD slower fetching time than a RAMdisk (HDD space stored directly in your RAM). You know how there's various of players that focus on trying to eliminate layers n stuff in Windows so it travels more directly to the hardware for faster access times etc. A bit same logic here in the various access times on the storage types. 

BUT that people would actually HEAR a difference sounds farfetched but anyway that seems like the only logical explanation.

 

[kamalz]

 
Well only one thing I can think of, is how quickly the audio file is fetched from the hardware, HDDs have slower access time than SSD and SSD slower fetching time than a RAMdisk (HDD space stored directly in your RAM). You know how there's various of players that focus on trying to eliminate layers n stuff in Windows so it travels more directly to the hardware for faster access times etc. A bit same logic here in the various access times on the storage types. 

BUT that people would actually HEAR a difference sounds farfetched but anyway that seems like the only logical explanation.

 
 My time with spinning hd is over.
 I prefer SSD gen 4

 

[MohawkUS]

Just can't wrap my head around what would make the sound different. It is 1's and 0's, Doesn't matter how they are stored. 

I honestly couldn't tell you. It could be jitter? If you look on the Jplay forums you'll find people going to much further lengths than I would ever dream of. USB cards, cables, special SSDs, dual computer setups. Even many who insist that SSDs are no good either who use some other kind of flash storage with a converter. And the tweaks they do software wise are immense. I won't lie, if I cut down a lot of background services there is a tiny difference, but I'm not willing to brick my computer for everything but audio use as many of them have.

 

[Dr4Bob]

About 400GB of ALAC files on a 1 TB hybrid drive in the MacBook with a 1 TB external backup and Carbonite off site backup. All ALAC are CD rips.