Audio formats/storage volume

Genghis · Post by **Genghis** » Fri May 21, 2004 3:00 am

I think it's about time I got my music collection onto disk for convenience and posterity (I've got some CD rot and I want to back everything up before it gets worse). Questions for you experts:

I have about 400 CD's and want to back them all up in a non-lossy format (like .wav maybe?). I also want to copy them all into .mp3.

How much hard drive space do you think I'd need for the non-lossy backup? This would be my "permanent" storage.

How much hard drive space do you think I'd need for the mp3 copies?

Can you recommend a better format than .wav for my non-lossy format?

What's the sweetest portable/personal mp3 player on the market these days? I'm going to Iceland and need to hear something over there besides that techno house crap they all listen to.

Thx for any advice.

- G

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Fri May 21, 2004 4:19 am

Genghis wrote:I think it's about time I got my music collection onto disk for convenience and posterity (I've got some CD rot and I want to back everything up before it gets worse). Questions for you experts:

I have about 400 CD's and want to back them all up in a non-lossy format (like .wav maybe?). I also want to copy them all into .mp3.

How much hard drive space do you think I'd need for the non-lossy backup? This would be my "permanent" storage.

How much hard drive space do you think I'd need for the mp3 copies?

Can you recommend a better format than .wav for my non-lossy format?

What's the sweetest portable/personal mp3 player on the market these days? I'm going to Iceland and need to hear something over there besides that techno house crap they all listen to.

Thx for any advice.

- G

Wav = approx 40megs per song
Mp3 = approx 4 megs per song

As for lossless, I'd stick to MP3 and if needed, use a converter to bring it back to wav format.

As for MP3 players, RIO has a 1.5 gig one IIRC.

TheCops · Post by **TheCops** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:46 am

mp3's suck ass if you have discerning ear... they jack the bass tones, squash the drum tones, and castrate the crisp rings of cymbals. that said they are sufficient for portability purposes like trips to iceland (say hello to bjork for me).

for back up purposes .wav or .aif formats at 16 bit stereo 44.1k rates are what cd's are mastered to so having a higher rate will do essentially nothing. as far as surround sound dvd's and stuff like that i have no idea for i am a dinosaur.

converting an mp3 back to 44.1 16 bit will do you no good since the sonic information was already lost upon making the mp3 in the first place.

i think merlin is correct about the file sizes. looking at my own .wav of a 3:40 second song, it is about 37 megs (44.1 16 bit stereo) and the mp3 is 3.7 megs (16 bit 128 stereo mp3)

i hope i have confused you well enough and have fun on that volcano they call a country out there in the atlantic G!

p.s. spend the money on a nice set of headphones.

Avder · Post by **Avder** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:08 am

A 44khz 16bit stereo wav file will be apx 11megabytes per minute.

a 44khz 16 bit stereo mp3 file compressed to 128kbps will be apx 1megabyte per minute, with the loss of some audio quality.

If I were you I'd look at making one to one copies of your oldest CD's and burning them to CDrs and then repeating every few years. At 400 CD's worth of data, thats gonna come out to be anywhere from 125-200GB worth of disk space.

I'd seriously suggest you get to burning and pronto. Or, if you can tolerate the slight distortion mp3 introduces (I can, most people can, some people with anal retentive eardrums cant), I'd suggest you rip everything to Mp3 and just burn your oldest cds.

kurupt · Post by **kurupt** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:40 am

i've heard about a new format that is supposed to allow you to rip cd's without loss and compress a song on average to about 25mb's. this is great for quality freaks, or at least better than 50mb wav's. 25mb per song is still large, but it may be worth checking out. i think the format was called xmf but dont quote me on that, maybe some googling will help you in that area.

for lossless conversion wav is the way to go if that new format doesn't work out. you'll need a hefty hard drive though. 400 albums? thats 700mb or so per album in wav. 280,000mb. for backup purposes i reccomend ogg vorbis over mp3. its a flat out better format. for a portable mp3 player, you'd have to use mp3's though. not aware of many if any players that handle more than the mp3 format.

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:43 am

Seriously for the best Mp3 Format, it is a two step process, single mp3 converter programs suck.

You need EAC and LAME encoder

The LAME encoder will be used by your EAC as an external MP3 Encoder in the settings of EAC

This method is not FAST, but it is the BEST

NOte once you have everything set up (the wizard helps you) you might download this and drop it in your EAC folder for an ASPI layer

Testiculese · Post by **Testiculese** » Fri May 21, 2004 7:22 am

For mp3's you also want nothing less than 384vbr bitrate. Anything less sound slike what cops described. Trashy. 384kbvbr is the bare minimum to keep decent quality.

400cd's..you'd need about 400gb of storage for wav.

Check out the ogg format.

roid · Post by **roid** » Fri May 21, 2004 7:52 am

i use OGG files to backup my cds. works great, awesome quality (i can't tell it from the cd, not like i can with mp3s).

if i ever need to listen to stuff on a portable mp3 player i just convert the OGGs to mp3s.

OGG files are also a tad smaller than mp3s (and with much higher qual, basically it's very superior), so if you'r a real audiophile then just make the OGGs like 2X the size they would normally be. i can't imagine ANYONE being able to tell an oversized OGG from a CD, although i'm sure some ppl here will pipe up now and try to proove me wrong.

graggh bring it on!

Vertigo · Post by **Vertigo** » Fri May 21, 2004 8:31 am

roid wrote:i use OGG files to backup my cds. works great, awesome quality (i can't tell it from the cd, not like i can with mp3s).

if i ever need to listen to stuff on a portable mp3 player i just convert the OGGs to mp3s.

OGG files are also a tad smaller than mp3s (and with much higher qual, basically it's very superior), so if you'r a real audiophile then just make the OGGs like 2X the size they would normally be. i can't imagine ANYONE being able to tell an oversized OGG from a CD, although i'm sure some ppl here will pipe up now and try to proove me wrong. graggh bring it on!

I entirely agree with you, an oversized .ogg has an audio quality almost indistinguishable (sp?) from a cd. The only way you'd be able to hear is to have some rediculously good/expensive hardware and a VERY good ear.

i.e. you won't

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri May 21, 2004 9:12 am

Unless you can tell the difference listening a 192+ kbps CBR mp3 will do the job nicely at about 1.5 MB/minute. Personally even with a high quality sound card, amplifier and a $200 dollar set of closed studio headphones I cant tell the difference between a 192k MP3 and the CD it came off from.

Tetrad · Post by **Tetrad** » Fri May 21, 2004 11:13 am

Genghis wrote:Can you recommend a better format than .wav for my non-lossy format?

FLAC http://flac.sourceforge.net/
SHN http://research.umbc.edu/~hamilton/shnfaq.html
Monkey's Audio http://www.monkeysaudio.com/

All lossless. Monkey's Audio is the newest, and has fancy windows programs and winamp plugins. I think SHN is the most popular though, it's what all the Phish people use to trade live sets and whatnot. I'm not so sure about FLAC, but it's the first one that came to mind, and probably easier to use than SHN.

Just do a google search on them if you want comparisons on file size and compression time.

Asrale · Post by **Asrale** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:30 pm

You know, that subject of CD rot is overhyped. Commercially-pressed CDs are a LOT more resistant to rot than CD-R/W and won't rot in your lifetime unless you really mis-handle them. Store them vertically (not horizontally), leave out of sunlight/humidity, handle them like a fragile crystal, don't stack "naked" discs. Things like that.

As for CD-R though, yes they will rot, but as long as you use HIGH-quality media on a reliable CD burner for a reliable burn, it's not that much to worry about. I use CMC discs for non-critical data myself, but if it's something like a new master backup (which I do about once per month, I still use Zip disks for short-term backups) or a second copy of a PC game or music CD, then I'll break out the Fuji Taiyo-Yuden discs and burn at 16X.

If you use CD-RW, that rots pretty quickly. The heat-sensitive layer corrodes away in just a couple years.

As for your MP3 player question, you didn't say if you wanted flash memory or HD-based. Can't help you if you want HD-based, but for flash, iRiver's new players (released a few weeks ago) are feature-PACKED, like the iFP-790T/890T. 256MB, supports ASF/MP3/OGG, 40+ hours of AA battery life, all the standard features...

>> Personally even with a high quality sound card, amplifier and a $200 dollar set of closed studio headphones I cant tell the difference between a 192k MP3 and the CD it came off from.

And on this subject, well some CDs are just plain recorded or mastered poorly so even 192 kb/s MP3 retains most of the details. That's just a sad fact. And until recently I believe, studios were still recording in 16-bit sound (there was a recent jump to 24-bit recording). And as good as the Audigy 2 ZS is, even with its 24-bit DAC, it can't match a music card coupled with reference monitors.

bash · Post by **bash** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:54 pm

200 gig drive.

kurupt · Post by **kurupt** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:32 pm

i can hear a huge difference between 192 and cd. huge.

for compressed backups go with ogg like i said before. decent quality, great filesize.

roid · Post by **roid** » Sat May 22, 2004 4:25 am

*begins banging beer glass on table*

OGG OGG OGG OGG!!

pATCheS · Post by **pATCheS** » Sat May 22, 2004 2:27 pm

MP3 technically has better stereo seperation than OGG above 160kbits, IF YOU USE A GOOD ENCODER AT MAX QUALITY SETTINGS (to use anything faster is suicidal, and lower bitrates are only barely acceptable for SOME audio content)!!! In OGG's defense, I must say that I concluded that with really anal methods of quality testing (inverting and mixing channels, turning off the non-rear channels of my surround unit, things like that that bring out the distortion), not just my ears. Q6 or Q7 OGG is sufficient for anything I would ever listen to.

CDex is a good program to take a look at, for lovers of MP3 and OGG alike. Best CD ripper I've ever used, only one I will look to in the near future. My old D2 Infinite Abyss CD is over 7 years old and full of scratches (I used to have bad friends), and it successfully ripped all but one track, which had a bit of the data surface removed. At 4x with full paranoia (cd-paranoia is a library designed for accurately reading CD audio, and it's *very* good at what it does). It took forever, but it ended in sweet success after several trials with the various settings, which are well-elaborated upon in the help file. Available at http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/.

On lossless formats, they never acheive much better than 50% compression. The only one I've tried is FLAC, which I know there is a Winamp plugin for. It encodes kinda slow (iirc), but that may be inherent to that sort of compression.

Against lossless audio: OGG is more than adequate for most people, and is certainly more portable than any lossless format out there (WAV isn't portable, it's too inefficient

). Plus, high bitrate OGG transcodes to 128 or 160 kbit MP3 acceptably well, for those who need to be able to do that (MP3 CDs, players, PDAs, whatever).

blah.

Delkian · Post by **Delkian** » Sun May 23, 2004 10:53 am

pATCheS wrote:The only one I've tried is FLAC, which I know there is a Winamp plugin for. It encodes kinda slow (iirc), but that may be inherent to that sort of compression.

According to the developers, they've paid more attention on decoding speed, as you usually only encode once but decode several times.

Genghis · Post by **Genghis** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:18 am

I'm impressed, there's a lot of good advice here. Thanks to you all; now that I have a starting point I'll hit google to make my final decisions.

Regarding Arsale's info: I thought CD-rot was overhyped, too. But I recently noticed some of my older discs not playing right, and upon examining them they actually have little holes in the recording media. The holes are kind of amoeba-shaped. These discs are about 10 to 15 years old. I'm been extremely anal about my discs; I never stack them, I put them in their cases immediately after playing, and I've stored them upright for the past 15 years. So anyway, this little observation is the impetus for my "little" backup project.

Regarding backup method, I was going to use a couple of biggie hard drives. In fact, I've been wanting to go RAID-5 for a while now and this may be the excuse I need on that investment.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:51 am

Caution, spinning hard drives do not last as long as cdroms in cases (even with cdrot). An idle powered off hard drive will probably outlast any optical media except magnito-optical media tho?

Someone feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I just always assume a standard IDE hard drive has a usible life span of 5 years.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:54 am

Of course there's a greater risk when dealing with mechanical storage media (HDD). I think that 5 years is a bit shortsighted though... I'd estimate 7 to 10.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun May 23, 2004 12:52 pm

I think 5 years constant use is a safe bet for IDE drives. Sure I have IDE drives aged almost 15 years that still work, but they have not had even 3 years of actual operation in those 15 years. A hard drive that is not powered on or in a computer but rather sitting in a static safe bag on a shelf in a cool dry place will last a very long time.

-Krom

Tetrad · Post by **Tetrad** » Sun May 23, 2004 1:55 pm

Keep in mind that HDDs have many more advantages, namely that you can transfer a huge amount from one to another in a relatively short amount of time. I don't think I'll ever get around to sitting down all day and copy my 200+ CDs of backed up (cough) movies to disk, but just copying stuff from one drive to another isn't an issue. So in a few years time when storage is more plentiful, and your music collection has gotten larger, it's a relatively painless process to move it over to new drives. Plus with some sort of RAID parity or mirroring system you're pretty much assured that your data won't get lost, short of a catastrophic mechanical failure that takes out more than a single drive at once.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun May 23, 2004 6:02 pm

Absolutely, I just recently dumped 179 GB from my two older hard drives on to my new 500 GB RAID0 in less then one hour. Keeping the data on the old drives (and also burned to CD/DVD just incase). You can move a lot of stuff around in a short time with hard drives and just sitting idle they last just about forever.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Sun May 23, 2004 8:28 pm

When I chose to rip my CD collection, but was space-conscious, I chose to use variable bitrate OGG files with an avg. bitrate of 160 kbps.

Although I tend to find that an OGG of a given bitrate is marginally larger than an MP3 of an equivalent bitrate, the OGG sounds like one level higher in quality (i.e., a 160 kbps OGG sounds like a 192 kbps MP3). It is difficult to verbalize the difference, but OGGs just sound "crisper" and "fuller" than their MP3 counterparts. MP3 sounds "mushy" in comparison to me. You can really tell the difference on complex, multilayered tracks like "Bring me to Life."

I think if I could rip them again, I'd probably use OGG at the highest level of quality. I suspect that even at 256 kbps, though, there'd be little discernable difference.

But OGG is not lossless. Interestingly, I never knew that much about Monkey's Audio being lossless. Sort of like the PNG of the music world, huh? Good to know.

STRESSTEST · Post by **STRESSTEST** » Sun May 23, 2004 8:33 pm

I dunno Steve... I think I'd just re-burn them to CD so there is no issue of dynamic loss whatsoevarz

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Sun May 23, 2004 8:46 pm

what stress said.

if that ain't your ball, then use a lossless codec and archive it to a HD.

Tetrad · Post by **Tetrad** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:15 pm

In the interest of fairness, I just thought I'd point out that Windows Media 9's version of WMA has a lossless encoder as well.

Not that anybody would want to archive in it, but still.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Mon May 24, 2004 3:02 pm

some quality testing of the various audio formats/

Audio formats/storage volume

Audio formats/storage volume

Re: Audio formats/storage volume

Re: Audio formats/storage volume