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WAV - APE or FLAC...that's the question...

213.93.181.5
Posted on July 25, 2010 at 10:44:44
audiofanatic
 Is there a difference in quality using either one of these formats when it comes to bitperfect playback?
For example, does plaback of a WAV file cost less resources than FLAC or APE?

Any other related info is very welcome!

 

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hard drive storage is inexpensive, posted on July 25, 2010 at 11:09:28
Joe Murphy Jr
Audiophile

Posts: 4424
Joined: February 3, 2001
 Why use compressed formats when you can get a 2TB drive for $99? Seiously, use .wav or .aif -- remove all doubt about processing power, compatibility issues, audio voodoo, etc and just enjoy the music.

 

How do you tag wav files?, posted on July 25, 2010 at 11:28:53
Daverz
Audiophile

Posts: 2146
Location: So. California
Joined: September 24, 2002
 iTunes can tag AIFF files. I believe it uses ID3 style tags.

FLAC supports the free form Vorbis tags, which are much more flexible than ID3 tags.

And despite the relatively low cost of storage, I think doubling storage capacity without any loss in quality is still a plus.

 

the ripping software, posted on July 25, 2010 at 16:17:45
Joe Murphy Jr
Audiophile

Posts: 4424
Joined: February 3, 2001
 The software that rips the disc (iTunes, J River Media Jukebox, etc) provides the tagging for you.

Doubling with FLAC, ALAC or whatever is a plus, but then you have questions like in the original post. The use of either .aif or .wav mean no more questions re: processing power.

Since a 2TB drive can hold over 3200 CDs worth of audio, why compress? If anyone on this board can't afford $99 for 2TB of storage, they're on the wrong board. And anyone who does own more than 3200 CDs has got to be able to afford another $99 for storage.

 

RE: How do you tag wav files?, posted on July 25, 2010 at 16:22:44
Chas_1
Audiophile

Posts: 35
Joined: December 5, 2004
 I would love to just leave it as wav's but the dang tags..

 

Waste not, Want not..., posted on July 25, 2010 at 18:08:16
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 "2TB drive for $99?"

Not so simple. You have to multiply the cost by at least 2 to allow for backups. In addition, you have to deal with the situation when you run out of storage and don't have any more room in your computer for additional drives. (Been there, done that.)

Spinning drives consume electricity and make noise. Fewer is better.

File systems run best when drives are less than half full.

When you go to hires, Terabytes seem smaller. ...

Halving files sizes halves the backup time.

FLAC has a checksum which will detect data corruption.

There is no sonic penalty with memory playback software, such as cPlay.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: How do you tag wav files?, posted on July 25, 2010 at 20:45:14
Dawnrazor
Audiophile

Posts: 12794
Location: N. California
Joined: April 9, 2004
 And despite the relatively low cost of storage, I think doubling storage capacity without any loss in quality is still a plus.

That is the question really. Does on the fly decompressing affect quality?

I cant say either way since I went with .wavs and cue sheets. I dont miss any tags either.

Though it may be a pointless argument if the player decodes a compressed file before playback or in big blocks vs. on the fly. There are a few players that do this and well IMHO that makes flac a possibility.



Cut to razor sounding violins

 

RE: the ripping software, posted on July 25, 2010 at 21:28:19
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 > The software that rips the disc (iTunes, J River Media Jukebox, etc)
> provides the tagging for you.

Some programs have a way to store tag information in WAV files. Most other programs will not recognize and use those tags.

Some programs may let you associate tag information with WAV files and store the information in their internal database even though they aren't storing that tag information in the WAV files themselves. That tag information will not be accessible to other programs. If you move files to a different computer or to a different drive, re-associating the database information to the WAV file in its new location might be tricky.

Storing tag information in Flac files provides a robust way to survive mistakes and misfortunes. I've moved my entire music library from PC to PC several times and changed file locations on a single PC even more times.

Storing tags in WAV files was recently added to J. River MC. before that, tag information for WAV files was only stored in the MC database. Compatibility with other programs is still a problem. There isn't a widely followed standard for storing tag information in WAV files, so it requires case by case testing and troubleshooting.

> The use of either .aif or .wav mean no more questions
> re: processing power.

Maybe if you have a single core Atom, decoding 16/44.1 Flac files might require a few per cent of CPU time. On 3 year old, low end PCs (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or 2.4 GHZ AMD X2 CPU) CPU usage for the whole system is never more than 1-2% during Flac file playback. Playing a 24/176.4 Flac file requires 2-3 % of CPU time.

> Since a 2TB drive can hold over 3200 CDs worth of audio, why compress?

Think about your storage needs before deciding to increase them.

I keep two generations of backups for my music collection and all the file son our personal PCs. I keep one backup off-site. At the time, I bought the current generation of backup disks, 1.5 TB was the cost effective choice. I can get the entire backup on a single 1.5 TB USB drive. Storing a single backup drive and doing the on-site / off-site swaps with single drives is much easier than managing multiple drive backup sets. Right now, I have about 200 GB of free space on my backup drives. If I converted to WAV files, I'd have to buy a set of 2 TB drives for backup and then I would have less than 100 GB of free space on those drives.

Within a PC, a single drive produces less noise and less heat than two drives of the same type.

I'd suggest to the original poster that he understand what he is doing before following Mr. Murphy's advice. He may be happy with his logic but
you should understand the trade offs before taking his advice.

Bill

my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: the ripping software, posted on July 25, 2010 at 22:00:00
audiofanatic
 Thanks for all your answers!!

Decided to go for WAV with all my files, your answers confirmed my thoughts and discspace is not an issue.
I am converting the remaining FLAC and APE files into WAV with Foobar, it does an excellent job providing a proper CUE file.

 

maybe not, posted on July 25, 2010 at 23:04:20
Joe Murphy Jr
Audiophile

Posts: 4424
Joined: February 3, 2001
 Not so simple. You have to multiply the cost by at least 2 to allow for backups. In addition, you have to deal with the situation when you run out of storage and don't have any more room in your computer for additional drives. (Been there, done that.)

OK, so $198 for storage space for over 3200 CD files and a backup of those files. How many people have over 3200 CDs? Yes, there will be a few who make that claim (and it's actually true), but the great majority of people just plain don't.

Spinning drives consume electricity and make noise. Fewer is better.

And instead of two 1TB compressed drives spinning, you can have just one uncompressed drive.

File systems run best when drives are less than half full.

Sounds like drive manufacturer marketing material to me.

When you go to hires, Terabytes seem smaller. ...

Yes, they do. So again, instead of spinning two compressed drives, just spin one uncompressed drive.

Halving files sizes halves the backup time.

Immaterial. No one has to sit there and wait for the backup to be made. Tell the program what to do and go about your business.

FLAC has a checksum which will detect data corruption.

Ya got me there.

There is no sonic penalty with memory playback software, such as cPlay.

And if the user doesn't want to use cPlay and favors other software this is also immaterial.

Tony, there is a neverending list of things one can do to improve computer audio playback. Some of it makes a difference and some of it is just personal preference. From software to hardware, it's a new money pit for the businesses taking advantage of it (and, for some, of those getting into it). When does it end? Where does it end? $700 playback software? $350 USB cables? $900 soundcards? SSDs? My guess is that the original poster has a decent computer he wants to use for audio, but he's worried about processing power or other computer issues messing up audio playback. He probably has a reasonable collection of music -- not thousands upon thousands of CDs -- and just wants something that works and works well without the worry. And just so you know, I'm not trying to be a dick and if I'm wrong re: the last 2 sentences, then I apologise to the original poster.

 

after reading what you "do"..., posted on July 25, 2010 at 23:19:18
Joe Murphy Jr
Audiophile

Posts: 4424
Joined: February 3, 2001
 I would have to say that you would have been better off just sticking with CDs. Seriously, that's not a labor of love -- that's OCD. How bored does one have to be to create that much work for oneself?

 

RE: after reading what you "do"..., posted on July 25, 2010 at 23:25:16
audiofanatic
 QUOTE: I would have to say that you would have been better off just sticking with CDs. Seriously, that's not a labor of love -- that's OCD. How bored does one have to be to create that much work for oneself? UNQUOTE

maybe you should read for which hobby this board is intended?

 

when it stops being a hobby, posted on July 26, 2010 at 00:10:51
Joe Murphy Jr
Audiophile

Posts: 4424
Joined: February 3, 2001
 "maybe you should read for which hobby this board is intended?"

wiki:
A hobby is an activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure or relaxation, typically done during one's leisure time.

Sounds like "hobby" was passed up a while back.

I apologise to you for offering advice. I really should have known better.

 

RE: when it stops being a hobby, posted on July 26, 2010 at 00:45:16
audiofanatic
 QUTOE: I really should have known better."

YES, you should but knowledge is a gift not everyone has......
I don't blame you, pity though!

 

RE: after reading what you "do"..., posted on July 26, 2010 at 01:26:53
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 > I would have to say that you would have been better off just
> sticking with CDs.

Your opinion. I'm not clear on what part of what I do you thought excessive.

PC based playback:
I figured out what I wanted from PC based music playback before I started, understood what would be required and why the effort and expense was worthwhile.

Ripping about 2000 CDs was a slog. I picked my tools and honed my methods so that entering tags for classical music CDs was quick and bearable. I did the ripping job once and I'm done. Keeping up with purchases is no big deal. I've been listening via PC based playback for over 4 years and I love it.

Making Backups:
I'd be doing backups for my personal PC and for my wife's PC even if I didn't have a collection of music files.

A full (from scratch) backup is usually an overnight job on each PC. An incremental backup takes a few minutes on each PC. Not a big deal.

Having an on-site backup and an off-site backup:
Keeping two generations of backups only adds the time needed to swap drives with a friend who keeps the off-site backup. He brings the current off-site disk he has to my front door, I put it on the hall table and hand him the disk I have had on-site. We go off to lunch. Afterward, he stores the off-site backup in his house and I store the new on-site backup in my house.

> Seriously, that's not a labor of love -- that's OCD.

I doubt that anyone feels that doing backups is a labor of love. It can prevent anguish.

> How bored does one have to be to create that much work for oneself?

I find that thinking out what I should do, how I should do it and why it is worthwhile reduces work and makes life easier and more pleasant. Of course, if thinking is hard work for you, you might disagree.

Since I understand what I am doing, backup takes only a bit of memory and a few minutes of work at intervals.

Bill


my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: after reading what you "do"..., posted on July 26, 2010 at 01:50:31
audiofanatic
 @ Old Listener:

I agree...

 

RE: maybe not, posted on July 26, 2010 at 07:43:40
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 File system degradation as a function of high storage utilization is a well known property of file systems. As storage fills up, it becomes more and more difficult for the file system to allocate new storage without fragmentation. The latency properties of spinning rust dictate that storage layout affects performance. With solid state disks this isn't true, but these run into worse problems as they get full, namely reduced lifetime.

If you use off site storage then typically you have to mount the storage and run a backup. While some people may be able to arrange their lives around the backup process so they don't have to sit and twiddle their thumbs, it's been my experience that, at least for off line backups, I end up waiting. The same goes for disk and file system maintenance: more drives, more work. Maybe I don't have to sit there (sometimes I do) but I at least have to keep track of the stuff and check it periodically.

Here's a new argument. If you purchase Internet downloads most of these come in lossless compression, generally FLAC, to save on download time, Internet bandwidth and storage costs. If your software is set up to play FLAC directly, as most audiophile software players are, then there is no inconvenience associated with your ripped library being in FLAC.

If you are audiophile obsessive then you may want to expand the FLACs. You may also want to up sample your 44/16 files to 176.4/24 format off line, as this allows for better upsampling algorithms and less load on your computer system while playing music. If you think this way, then your realize that even 44/16 WAV files are "compressed". Of course the drive vendors would like a lot more of people who think like this. (I am not one of these people, by the way. But I have experimented with this.)




Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

I have to admit, posted on July 26, 2010 at 10:38:03
Daverz
Audiophile

Posts: 2146
Location: So. California
Joined: September 24, 2002
 that I'd probably never have got through all the ripping and tagging of more than 3000 CDs and all the Squeezebox Server headaches if I had a life. It took me about 6 months to do all that ripping. But now that it's done I can find what I want to listen to immediately without ransacking the house, and find myself listening to stuff that has languished in boxes or tucked away on shelves gathering dust for years.

 

RE: I have to admit, posted on July 26, 2010 at 20:14:08
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 > I'd probably never have got through all the ripping and tagging of more
> than 3000 CDs and all the Squeezebox Server headaches if I had a life.

I see nothing wrong with putting a temporary intense focus on something that matters to you.

> It took me about 6 months to do all that ripping.

About 4 months for me (~2000 Cds) with a trip sandwiched in.

> But now that it's done I can find what I want to listen to immediately
> without ransacking the house, and find myself listening to stuff that
> has languished in boxes or tucked away on shelves gathering dust for
> years.

Yes, indeed!

Bill


my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: WAV - APE or FLAC...that's the question..., posted on July 27, 2010 at 01:45:51
soundchekk
Audiophile

Posts: 2440
Joined: July 11, 2007
 Hi.

Obviously several other inmates put quite some stuff already on the table.

Here are my two cents:

I would advise to go for flacs nowadays.
(However I am just checking out if .wav images plus cue-sheets (which contain certain tags) wouldn't be the better option for at least classical CDs)

Why flac?


* a consistent and high quality track tagging. Have a look at e.g.
perfect meta from e.g. dBpoweramp. A consistent track-tagging is IMO one of the key arguments for PC based audio .
There is IMO no other way to handle a huge collection properly on a PC without a consistent tag scheme applied to your tags.
I really started to enjoy my ripped collection as soon as tags and albumarts were pretty consistently available. Though I am still not 100% happy with my classical album tags.
* if you like you can make a wav from a flac later on. You just drop the tags. Going the other way around gets you obviously into trouble.
A different thing is a wav-iso and a cuesheet. That one you'd be able to convert to single tagged flac files afterwards.
* Filesize is usually a less important subject.
However, if we talk music players a la iPod storage size matters.
If you look at network streaming - especially WLAN - size does matter too. Uncompressed (Hirez-) PCM steaming does cause much more load on the ethernet.
And if you also store videos and photos on the same disk storage size can quickly become a challenge.

* Soundquality is not an issue if you look for the right DAC or SW player. Realtime flac decoding can have an impact to soundquality under certain conditions. There a solutions out there e.g. do the flac-pcm decoding on the server and not on the client - see Squeezebox Server)

* Most of the download portals offer flacs too.


So - what are we gonna do on the tagging subject, if our collection is all-wav already?

Don't worry there is a solution to it.

We need to have a closer look at the filename scheme and structure.

Why is that?

1. Some players come with a nice feature called tag-guessing. It works on .wav as well as on other file formats where tags are not existing.
A prerequisite would be to have the same filename structure applied to every single track to make tag-guessing work properly.
(Though on e.g. the squeezebox server you can define different tag-guess schemes)
2. Also if you do a search on filenames or filename based tags you need to have all information in the filename.
3. If you move files around you know what's in there

I ended up with this basic structure consisting of 4 fields:

track_number-artist-album-track_title

Keep in mind though that every additional single dash within above fields will make that tag guessing fail. The interpreter/scanner/parser will identify an additional field. This will make your tags useless.
I had to go through all my .wav-filenames to remove additional dashes manually later on to make them consistent. You also need to consider that there are different CD types ( see below) out there, which won't match that scheme. For these you need to find a structured solution before you start ripping.

The directory structure is IMO a matter of taste, I prefer

artist-album-year/ over e.g. widely used Artist/Album/

You need to think of a generic and 100% consistent field structure for your file-names you are going apply. No matter if you go for .flac or wav.


You also need to think about how to handle your tag contents properly. As you know there are different CD types, such as

* normal CD
* various artist sampler (track artists) and classical CD collections
* classical cd (label, composer, conductor, performer, ensemble, title, key, part, opus)
* single, double,triple,... - CD albums

Make sure you define your scheme before you start ripping.

As a special solution you could rip CDs into
.wav images and cuesheets.

This solution would have the gaps right and the tags would be available within the cuesheet.


I'd strongly recommend to test all kind of options on a couple of CDs on different player and maybe even different operating systems before you go for the big batch conversion or ripping.


I ripped my collection roughly 3,5 years ago. Everything became .wav mainly due to sound-quality reasons.
Nowadays there are other ways to achieve best SQ, even with flacs at hand.
Lucky me there is a tag guessing feature with certain applications. I can enjoy tags on my files nowadays.


As I said currently I am considering to redo my classical music at least.
Though I am not 100% sure yet how to do that. Gap handling and tagging are the main subjects I am currently looking at.

Good luck.


 

RE: maybe not, posted on July 27, 2010 at 03:53:50
Ryelands
Audiophile

Posts: 1868
Location: Scotland
Joined: January 9, 2009
 File system degradation as a function of high storage utilization is a well known property of file systems.

This is of course true in general terms but I'm not so sure it's crucial to have plenty of spare space on an HDD or partition used only for storing music data.

In this scenario, usually described as WORM - Write Once, Read Many - the possibility of files becoming significantly defragmented over time is low even if, like me, you edit or move them about fairly regularly.

As an example, for about a year I've kept all my music data on a 1 TB (932GB data storage) drive. It now holds just over 48,600 files and has less than 15 per cent free space.

On average, I edit the filenames and tags for at least one album a day mostly, as soundcheck confesses, because I labelled them sloppily first time round. Even so, WinXP's defragger reports that only eight music files are fragmented and that no more than a couple comprise more than two or three fragments.

I don't feel the need to migrate to a larger drive until the current one is about 95 per cent full. As that leaves me space for roughly 250 hour-long albums in flac format, it'll be a week or two yet . . .

One thing that does seem to help is setting the drive's sector size at the maximum 64K to reflect the larger than average file sizes typical of a music library. On backup drives which I left at the default 4K, fragmentation is considerably worse though still not enough to need anything done about it.

Whatever, Bill, soundcheck and others are absolutely right to emphasise the importance of deciding on a naming convention or conventions as early as possible. Unless your audio kit is very "high end", the time needed to digitise one's music library is the biggest investment of the lot and should perhaps be prepared with the same care as many devote to the likes of choosing amplifiers and bits of wire.

(BTW, I wouldn't have thought that 3,000 CDs is an unusually large collection.)

 

RE: maybe not, posted on July 27, 2010 at 06:47:38
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1877
Joined: March 31, 2008
 On average, I edit the filenames and tags for at least one album a day mostly, as soundcheck confesses, because I labelled them sloppily first time round. Even so, WinXP's defragger reports that only eight music files are fragmented and that no more than a couple comprise more than two or three fragments.

Changing filenames won't affect the allocation of a file.
Tagging most of the time won't affect allocation either as most programs reserve sufficient space in the header to avoid a rewrite when you add or change a couple of characters.

The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: WAV - APE or FLAC...that's the question..., posted on July 27, 2010 at 07:41:51
Chas_1
Audiophile

Posts: 35
Joined: December 5, 2004
 Not sure if anyone mentioned this but on a FLAC file, you can always decompress it to get back to the WAV if you need it. At least, so says the documentation. I have never tried it. I use FLAC, the implementation on Linux appears flawless to me. I certainly can't hear any difference and the CPU usage of MPD going from .1 to .015% might be signifigant to some who are chasing that down.

 

FLAC data integrity, posted on July 27, 2010 at 07:58:52
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 "Not sure if anyone mentioned this but on a FLAC file, you can always decompress it to get back to the WAV if you need it."

When FLAC is encoded it calculates a checksum of the original audio data and stores it in the file. When the file is decoded the recovered data is compared to the checksum and an error is indicated if the recovered data does not match the original data. This protects the data against corruption due to hardware or software problems with the computer system, including any bugs in the FLAC encoding or decoding algorithms. FLAC software, including that used by players such as cPlay, detect and report checksum errors. (I have seen these once or twice, due to a corrupted Internet download.) If one has a corrupt file that one wants to play for better or for worse, the FLAC utilities allow decoding of the corrupt file as an option.


"Also included in the STREAMINFO block is the MD5 signature of the unencoded audio data. This is useful for checking an entire stream for transmission errors."

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

good advice, one more thought, posted on July 27, 2010 at 08:44:30
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 Good thoughts from Tony and dave.

Dave, you talked about changing file names. I don't use tags and file names in the same ways. When I fix an inaccurate tag value, I rarely fix the file name.

In my music player s/w (JRMC), I use tag values for normal browsing except on rare occasions. If I seem to have lost something, I might look for files by folder and file name. I'm willing to tolerate a sloppier, more time consuming search process on those rare occasions.

If I used file names to browse my music collection, I'd want every file name to be completely accurate.

Bill

my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: good advice, one more thought, posted on July 27, 2010 at 09:39:27
Ryelands
Audiophile

Posts: 1868
Location: Scotland
Joined: January 9, 2009
 If I used file names to browse my music collection, I'd want every file name to be completely accurate.

Ah. I do browse using file names and derive tags from them only so that what appears in a player's UI corresponds with them (OK, I use cPlay - corresponds on a good day). So, in my case, file names must conform to a naming convention.

As I see it, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other - you either use tags to derive your file names or the other way round. I may have made my choice because I didn't know what I was doing but I never found a way of browsing using tags that didn't seem more trouble than it was worth and I stopped looking for one long ago. Experienced users of other players seem to do better.

I'm sure I'd have saved myself a deal of work if I'd understood better what "tags" were and how they worked and I'd like to think that newcomers can avoid my mistakes. (Anyone who claims they got it right from the off has, I suspect, a short memory.)

BTW, Roseval's point about re-writing tags explains it well (which sort of means that I didn't . . .)

I hadn't really thought about "spare room" in file headers but was trying only to argue that performing regular maintenance on a library doesn't mean you can't safely stuff a music drive to the gunwales. You can even if it's foolish (as TL notes) to do the same with a workaday data drive.

 

RE: good advice, one more thought, posted on July 27, 2010 at 12:04:12
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 > I'm sure I'd have saved myself a deal of work if I'd understood better
> what "tags" were

You'll probably get into heaven anyway.

> As I see it, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other - you either
> use tags to derive your file names or the other way round.

I stick a CD in the drive, get the tags right and then start the ripping process. The folder and file names are derived from rules (templates) i specify to JRMC. When the ripping process ends, the files have the right names and the right tags.

--- my experience
When I started, I used EAC to rip Cds and then MP3tag to fix the tags. Then I imported the files into JRMC. That was a tedious, error prone and fragile process. Subtle differences in allowed characters and replacements for forbidden characters caused problems. Human error was always a problem. Inferior user interfaces in EAC and MP3Tag added to problems and annoyances. I soon moved to using JRMC for ripping tag editing and playback. The process is so much less painful this way.

I'm sure that using iTunes or Foobar for all phases of the process would have similar virtues.

Bill


my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: good advice, one more thought, posted on July 27, 2010 at 13:58:26
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1877
Joined: March 31, 2008
 Subtle differences in allowed characters and replacements for forbidden characters

That is indeed one of the problems.
One day I bought a NAS, perfect for making backups of several PC’s including the audio.
The moment I did, I got a couple of errors because the NAS is Linux and does have a slightly different filename convention,

Another limitation is size, nothing wrong with track-album-title-performer but
1_Franz Schubert _Schubert: Lieder, Vol. 2 (Box Set)_D. 699_Der entsühnte Orest ("Zu meinen Füssen brichst du dich"), song for voice & piano 1820 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Gerald Moore
might be a bit to long.

For me tagging and artwork are one of the reasons to embrace computer based audio. The tags allow you to browse you’re collection in so many ways including searching. Simply typing ‘beet kemp’ gives me all Beethoven’s piano sonatas played by Wilhelm Kempff, sorting his compositions by year, opus number, etc, etc.


The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: good advice, one more thought, posted on July 27, 2010 at 21:52:58
Old Listener
Audiophile

Posts: 2090
Location: SF Bay area
Joined: February 6, 2005
 An amusing example.

> Another limitation is size,
> nothing wrong with track-album-title-performer but
> 1_Franz Schubert _Schubert: Lieder, Vol. 2 (Box Set)_D. 699_Der entsühnte
> Orest ("Zu meinen Füssen brichst du dich"), song for voice & piano 1820
> Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Gerald Moore
> might be a bit to long.

When I stared using dBpoweramp for secure ripping, I set up a template for creating folder and file names from tag values. I wanted to avoid any manual tag entry at ripping time and clean things up later.

Unfortunately, some of the tag info from the AMG database the program used looked like your example. The ripping process would start and after a track or two, a message would pop up asking whether I wanted to overwrite the existing file. dBpoweramp was truncating folder/file names that exceeded its maximum and doing it silently. Of course, at that point I had to cancel the rip and shorten the tags. A huge annoyance. I complained to the developer who first saw no problem but later put in a check for file name truncation.

Bill

my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/

 

RE: hard drive storage is inexpensive, posted on July 27, 2010 at 23:32:08
bassbinotoko
Audiophile

Posts: 469
Location: Vancouver Island
Joined: January 27, 2009
 If you make backups to hard drive or burn DVD-R, FLAC or APE mean a significant reduction in time to copy and number of discs.

 

RE: hard drive storage is inexpensive, posted on July 28, 2010 at 00:43:28
audiofanatic
 QUOTE: If you make backups to hard drive or burn DVD-R, FLAC or APE mean a significant reduction in time to copy and number of discs. UNQUOTE

This is true, that is why I have 2 identical drives: 1 in my audiopc and 1 in my external backup. When I add a new file I allways add it straight away both to the external and internal drive. That way I don not have to make (incremental) backups every now and then as both drives are identical all the time. The time-issue is only a problem when 1 of the harddisks is crashed.

In my opinion, the advantage of loading an uncompressed file directly into memory is significantly better/faster opposed to having a compressed file that needs to be decoded first.

 

RE: hard drive storage is inexpensive, posted on July 28, 2010 at 14:02:01
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1877
Joined: March 31, 2008
 In my opinion, the advantage of loading an uncompressed file directly into memory is significantly better/faster opposed to having a compressed file that needs to be decoded first.

I wonder if this is true.
Reading from a disk is in general the bottle next in performance compared with CPU power. A FLAC is about 40-50% smaller than a WAV.
I wouldn’t be surprise if the speed limiting factor in case of on the fly decompressing FLAC is the I/O, not the CPU

The Well Tempered Computer

 

Decoding FLAC is not quite as fast as reading off disk, posted on July 28, 2010 at 15:18:05
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 In my system the time to copy a FLAC file from one drive to another was 12 seconds, the time to copy the corresponding WAV file was 22 seconds, while the time to DECODE the FLAC file and store it as a WAV file was 30 second, which included 15 seconds of CPU time decoding the FLAC. The bottom line: on this system 15 seconds of CPU time saved 10 seconds of disk time, i.e. WAV is more efficient measured in elapsed time. Obviously this ratio will vary depending on the particular computer system, but given that the two are roughly equal I suspect there is not a big effect one way or the other.

You might get different results if you measured energy consumption, perhaps someone has a handle on this. (You would have to consider the increase in power consumption associated with CPU load as well as the increase in power consumption associated with doing disk I/O.) It might be possible to measure this directly with one of those electrical gadgets that measure appliance efficiency.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

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