This was not good.
New solution: rip all my CDs to digital music files. I briefly considering hiring a service to rip all my CDs, but it was (and remains) prohibitively expensive. So, I steeled myself for the massive task of doing all the ripping myself. My first decision what was format to use, and I considered a couple:
- Uncompressed WAV: Obviously, this would be the highest-quality and most future-proof format. Unfortunately, the storage requirements would be very high, and many playback devices can't handle WAV natively, so I'd end up constantly converting to another format anyways.
- Lossless compression (i.e. FLAC): This is an intriguing compromise; it would preserve the future-proof quality of WAV, but not eat up so much disk space. Unfortunately, the device support just isn't there, so I'd be converting to WAV and then to mp3 every time I wanted to play something. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll regret this decision eventually, however.
- Lossy compression (i.e. mp3): This is what I ended up with; at high bitrates (lame --alt-preset extreme originally, -V0 currently) I can't hear any artifacts in my usual playback environments (iPod over headphones or in the car, Tivo through my stereo at home) and the disk space requirements are fairly modest. The downside is that when (not if, but when) mp3 is surpassed by a better format, I'll be staring a re-rip in the face.
1 comment:
@AZ: Absolutely agree about the tradeoff in quality versus compatibility. I'll admit to not having worked extensively with other lossy formats (aac, ogg, etc.) but I'm just not sure how much better lossy can get. In other words, if you're going to go much bigger (filesize-wise) than V0 mp3's, why not just go lossless?
I suppose that if a lossy format came out that delivered V0 quality in one-tenth the space, I might consider it if there was widespread device support, but with disk space costs continually dropping, I really believe that lossless will become the standard soon.
Great point about source quality as well - I suppose if all I listened to was Rachmaninoff, my tolerance for lossy compression might be lower.
That's really cool about TiVo doing on-the-fly conversion! First I'd heard of it. On the other hand, it seems like it'd be simpler for TiVo to just support aac natively...
@Dan: Even when we were at Real, I ripped to mp3... :) That was always an uphill battle for RealAudio outside of the streaming space - without the device support, using RA just didn't make a whole lot of sense.
I touch on how long the process is taking in another article, but suffice it to say that it's a lot of work no matter what shortcuts and optimizations I might take.
Naming convention-wise, I use the following structure:
Artist\Artist - Album (Label, Year)\Track Number - Track Name.mp3
For bands that I only have one album by, I eliminate the top-level folder to reduce a navigational step on the TiVo. It works reasonably well, although browsing on the TiVo kind of stinks since you can only go page-by-page. I used to have a set of twenty-six top-level folders (i.e. "a" through "z") to help with that a bit, but that way adds navigational hassle on anything but TiVo...
On a side note, creating the folders is a pretty simple step in the process; since EAC outputs "Artist - Album (Year) Track Number - Track Name.mp3" already, I can just copy-and-paste the first three fields. I wrote a program to insert the label information based on a separate database I maintain, since freedb doesn't provide it.
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