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'Best' ripping format for CDs

Ah yes, the one that won't play on the largest installed-base of portable music players, phones and tablet devices the world over!

yes "the leading lossless codec" is a) an oxymoron - as all 'lossless' codecs are, by definition, lossy.... and b) is unqualified/unsubstantiated claim.

in fact, as Tony rightly notes, with more portable music players bearing the i-thingy brand, it would have to be that apple compression by penetration in terms of players or tunes sold through iTunes as the leading codec.
 
Teddy, FLAC won't play in ITunes, on IPods, iPhones, Pads.
That's the hardware and software that most people have in their pockets these days, and I strongly suspect that iTunes is the choice of music player for most home PC (non OSX) users.

I appreciate it's likely very different in the pro world.

When all said and done its largely just the name that's different.Both are effectively audio zip files, and yes it's naughty of Apple not to allow playback of FLAC natively.
Yes, very peevish. Most classical downloads, at least from smaller companies, are in either MP3 or FLAC formats, although I think iTunes allows you to convert from FLAC to iFormat...

Personally, I can't be doing with iTunes. I can't get it to work properly with a large classical library - for some reason those iNutters seem to think it's not cricket to just play audio files in order of filename in a folder!
 
Not that different, most pros I know use Logic on Macs!

PS last time I saw a PC in a studio it was used as a door stop and had a very obvious boot-print / foot-shaped dent in the side, which apparently occured shortly after Cubase had given the final mid-tracking blue screen of death the owner was prepared to put up with. That was a good few years ago now, but I doubt that much has changed since.



ive been engineering professionally for a decade.

I can count on one hand the number of Macs ive seen in recording studios...

and when you get to Classical Music?? Nobody, and I mean NOBODY uses Mac..because the Mac DAWs are terrible for classical work.

Pyramix, Sequoia and Sadie are the Classical Standards. all PC.

statistics dont lie.

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dont take the chart as proof...or what i say. go to online download merchants.

see how many offer flac vs ALAC.

no contest.

you have to understand that not everyone cares for apple and their locked in, proprietary systems.

the computers are terrible value, dont perform any better, Itunes is a steaming pile of shit, and ALAC is about a decade late to the game.

people in the know use FLAC and Linux/Windows.

I have found that the Macs better serve those that are computer illiterate. This is truth. they are good because they are easy to get up and running, but thats where the advantages end.
 
i
you have to understand that not everyone cares for apple and their locked in, proprietary systems.

the computers are terrible value, dont perform any better, Itunes is a steaming pile of shit, and ALAC is about a decade late to the game.

people in the know use FLAC and Linux/Windows.

I have found that the Macs better serve those that are computer illiterate. This is truth. they are good because they are easy to get up and running, but thats where the advantages end.
Indeed. As far as I can tell these iWotnots are mostly just fashion accessories.
 
I convert everything to WAV. Disks are so cheap today. I have 2x 1TB USB 3 external HDDs - 1 for everyday use and 1 for backup. 1 TB is probably more that I will ever need as I try to buy as much CDs as I can. Hopefully I will have a deck set up again in September and will dig the 200+ records I bought when I was a student =) That was some 20 years ago...

Apologies for the off topic but I lol every time I read this article =)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/feb/05/comment.media
 
Fair enough, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever not to use lossless compression. FLAC saves space and allows tagging (which I think I'm right in saying WAV doesn't). Still, you can always transcode another time! :)
 
dont take the chart as proof...or what i say. go to online download merchants.

see how many offer flac vs ALAC.

no contest.

You are forgetting that Apple is the largest digital music retailer and will (I assume) shortly be selling lossless (I am certain this is the only reason they released their codec into the public domain). Within a week or so of that move it will be the largest format. Game over, as they say.


people in the know use FLAC and Linux/Windows.

I have found that the Macs better serve those that are computer illiterate. This is truth. they are good because they are easy to get up and running, but thats where the advantages end.

LOL - I love the attempt to patronise! Who are these "people in the know"? A few school kids who read gaming blogs with bright text on black backgrounds and talk about "warez"? Grow the f*** up! I suspect I owned a digital recording studio (ADAT!) whilst you were still at school. Rather annoyingly for your argument I'm also an ex-corporate IT manager (of the technical kind, i.e. I have some programming languages etc) who was playing about with UNIX (SCO / Xenix etc) long before anyone even thought of Linux, in fact I was playing about with Linux when Red Hat first came out. I started with PCs back when the 8088 was the current chip, i.e. I can remember the 1st version of Windows. I am not approaching any of this from a point of ignorance!
 
You are forgetting that Apple is the largest digital music retailer and will (I assume) shortly be selling lossless (I am certain this is the reason they released their codec into the public domain, there is no other logical reason to do so). Within a week or so of that move it will be the largest format. Game over, as they say.
You might be proved right, but I'm not sure how it's possible to view that as anything other than a disaster. As for FLAC, I'm pretty sure most non-iWotnot gadgets support it, so I can't see it disappearing any time soon. And trying to corner the market by developing a proprietary alternative to what has long been available for free smacks of nefarious intent. (Unless it offers significantly better compression/lower CPU usage than FLAC?)

I don't get the iCraze. And that bloody infernal iBloatware is hopeless for classical, so the small independent classical companies - and hopefully the larger ones too - will offer FLAC for a while yet. On the average I really don't think the world's really waiting for any more iBling, but despair springs eternal.
 
I don't get the iCraze. And that bloody infernal iBloatware is hopeless for classical, so the small independent classical companies - and hopefully the larger ones too - will offer FLAC for a while yet. On the average I really don't think the world's really waiting for any more iBling, but despair springs eternal.

I don't understand your point here? Are you saying Flac has additional tagging fields to the standard MP3, AAC etc format? Remember iTunes is only a media player, it doesn't define the file structure / file header etc, those are global standards. FWIW, given these limits of the file formats (not Apple's fault) I've been happy with the way iTunes has tagged much of my classical library. I've found myself fiddling about with some albums to get them to sort / display how I wish them too, but nothing has presented me with an insurmountable problem. It's certainly more advanced and more easily cross-referenced than anything you could do with a crude directory structure / file name structure as you suggest.
 
Unless I've been doing something wrong, my run-ins with Apple's software have been very frustrating, because it tries to deduce play lists and albums etc from metadata in the audio files. If you're into classical, this makes it horribly difficult to navigate your music collection. As far as I could tell, there's no way of simply loading the contents of a folder into iTunes (or iGizmo) and playing them in order of file name or track number or whatever you like, as you can in Foobar for e.g. or on a Sony Walkman.

I've always used PCs and use Foobar so my only encounters with iWotmots have been at my finacee's, during my efforts to get her into classical, and these encounters have not impressed me. (She's more into popular culture than I am! :D )
 
There are probably pros and cons for both FLAC & ALAC. With FLAC you can at least vary the compression rate but it can cause problems in playback if compressed to much I have heard. ALAC I think has a fixed compression rate. That behemoth Apple have the Lions share of the consumer market then to the vast majority of consumers, that is listeners then Apple will be the the most common in usage whether it be mp3 or any other format. It may only be the audiophools on the listening end of the market that bugger about or even know what a FLAC is.
 
Unless Amazon move into the iBollocks camp as well, I think MP3 will remain the most common format for the foreseeable future.
 
FLAC and AIFF are both ok, if I had my time again, I would embed the album artwork manually into each AIFF I ripped, Apple is fine as long as you stay within the Apple world.
Keith.
 
Unless I've been doing something wrong, my run-ins with Apple's software have been very frustrating, because it tries to deduce play lists and albums etc from metadata in the audio files. If you're into classical, this makes it horribly difficult to navigate your music collection. As far as I could tell, there's no way of simply loading the contents of a folder into iTunes (or iGizmo) and playing them in order of file name or track number or whatever you like, as you can in Foobar for e.g. or on a Sony Walkman.

I've always used PCs and use Foobar so my only encounters with iWotmots have been at my finacee's, during my efforts to get her into classical, and these encounters have not impressed me. (She's more into popular culture than I am! :D )

From my perspective I can't think of anything more bizarre than wanting to play a folder of music. The way iTunes works is I take say Starker's Bach Cello Suites and stuff it in the CD drive. iTunes does a web-based look-up and recognises the CD. It tags it thus:

Artist: János Starker
Album: Bach: Cello Suites & Sonatas
Composer: JS Bach
Genre: Classical

Each track is tagged with it's track number, number of tracks on the disk, disk number in set (2 in this case) and the track title etc, e.g. track 1 of this set is 'Bach: Cello Suite #1 In G, BWV 1007 - Praeludium'.

This is exactly how I'd do it myself, and I'm remarkably OCD when it comes to these things. As iTunes is a pretty sophisticated database amongst other things searching even a huge library like mine is very simple, e.g. I can be on this disk very simply by simple browsing or by typing 'Bach', 'Cello', Starker etc. All very easy and simple IMO. Typing 'Bach Cello' would bring up both this title and any tracks on say the Du Pre Complete EMI Recordings box set I have ripped, and that's not something you could do with simplistic folder structures. It makes navigating classical amazingly simple IMO, but you do need to keep an eye on the initial tagging as it can often make mistakes (errors in the Gracenote database etc), plus for neatness one needs to fiddle with multi-disk sets to make them display as one multi-disk item etc, but not much hassle and I'm sure that goes for any other ripping software too.

iTunes also has a useful 'Sort order' field too, e.g. you can decide whether to sort the above under Bach, Starker, or if you are a blithering idiot, under 'J' for Janos. This is one of the things I like the most about it as, given aforementioned OCD tendencies, if I were to find say Bob Dylan sorted under 'B' on a computer music system I'd be quite tempted to go mental in the nearest PC World with an axe. I really can't deal with shit music cataloguing! I've found I can get iTunes to sort and list my stuff at least as logically as I actually file the hard copies, and I can't really expect more than that. It's obviously much easier and quicker to search too.
 
I really can't deal with shit music cataloguing!
Nor me, which is why I like to do it myself!

To be fair I'd be most surprised if iTunes didn't have some means of letting me do what I want - I never tried searching in the manner you suggest - but a not inconsiderable fraction of my CDs were ripped a while ago on a computer with no internet connection, so the directory name is in some cases the only way to navigate to what I want to listen to.

Foobar and FLAC are free and do what I want them to do; I use PCs for my professional work, so I've never seen the point of moving over to iWotnots, especially in view of the price. All the classical download sites I buy from offer FLAC, so I won't be transcoding any time soon.
 
FLAC and AIFF are both ok, if I had my time again, I would embed the album artwork manually into each AIFF I ripped, Apple is fine as long as you stay within the Apple world.
Keith.

Keith, this little program will do that for you with AIFF.

http://www.blisshq.com/itunes-album-art.html

It'll imbed the artwork that you already have and also scans the interweb if it cannot find stuff in the usual places. For example, it scans Amazon for their cover art.

It has lots of other features too.
I bought the unlimited licence and let it play with my collection of about 1300 albums for about 2 hours - and all but about 20 albums were fixed with imbedded cover art.

Take a full backup before you run it, because it does include options to move file location and if you get these wrong its a sod to rectify.
 
FLAC and AIFF are both ok, if I had my time again, I would embed the album artwork manually into each AIFF I ripped, Apple is fine as long as you stay within the Apple world.
Keith.

yep, and thats my point..

there are loads of us who have no desire whatsoever to be part of the apple universe.

damn near ALL of the retailers who offer downloads do so in FLAC.

Foobars functionality (and media monkey and jriver and db power amp, so on so forth) makes Itunes seem even more shitty than it is by default.
 
there are loads of us who have no desire whatsoever to be part of the apple universe.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated ;)

I understand the point that Apple products tend to cost more than higher specified PC counterparts. However you need to look at several factors that drive this:

- Build and design is usually superb. Just go pick up a MBP or iPad and then look at the competition.
- Reliability. This shouldn't be underestimated and I'm talking about the hardware and more importantly the reliability of the software to work properly and integrate. This is the upside of a closed system.
- Lifespan. Buying a mac pc means you are good for around 5 years of solid performance without the need for upgrades, and if you sell within that period you'll realise far more cash than for a competing PC product, generally IME.
- Focus. I moved to OSX about 7 years ago and prior to that point was a fairly geeky windows PC user. Overclocking processors, applying fancy heatsinks, buying additional high-end cards. Lets hang a huge great chunk of copper of this fecker and see how far we can go before it croaks. All good fun, but with a mac and OSX, well you just don't want to do that. Instead you play music and use application productively because they work, reliably.

For me, switching from Windows PC to Mac changed the way I use computers fundamentally.
 
thing is i can build a pc every bit as powerful as any metrosexual looking mac for a 1/3rd the cost.// same lifespan.

i dont HAVE to OC or any of that. i do it just because I have the ability. one PC i built just to run vortexbox...

but the thing is..if I WANT to OC/tweak I can. the option is there. not so with mac

macs are a collossal waste of money...and for no better performance

I have used macs and pcs both since they came out basically.

i stuck with PC. macs dont appeal to me at all.

macs change the way i use computers fundamentally too. they made me stick with PC. :)
 


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