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WAV or FLAC????

I agree with Igloo. Storage is cheap.

A 500gb SSD now costs about £150 (HDD even cheaper). Eliminate the debate or doubt or worry - rip in wav or aiff.

Compare the storage cost to your expenditure on the rest of kit.

No problems with metadata using wav with JRIVER.
 
Yomanze said:
Agreed, but I used bit perfect rips & LAME.
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The LAME developers would be the first to admit that their MP3 encoder is not perfect - they are still improving it release by release.
MP3 has fail points, harpsichord and castanets are notorious.

In the end MP3 is a crude compression method and easily bettered by Ogg and AAC at a given bit rate
 
I was happily using EAC, (or at least the very simplest bits of it) to rip and burn CD for some time on an XP machine. I since got a Win7 machine and cannot get EAC to work. It seems to get confused between the two DVD drives and a Clickfree external backup. When you are as old and stupid as me, you shouldn't have to deal with this shit...
 
LOZ said:
I agree with Igloo. Storage is cheap.

A 500gb SSD now costs about £150 (HDD even cheaper). Eliminate the debate or doubt or worry - rip in wav or aiff.

Compare the storage cost to your expenditure on the rest of kit.

No problems with metadata using wav with JRIVER.
Click to expand...

But far less worry or doubt to use FLAC or ALAC in which the metadata is embedded in the file. There may not appear to be any problem with reading metadata with wav files in JRiver until your database becomes corrupted or you choose another player at a later date. With the data in the files you just read it into the player.

Storage may be cheaper than it was but a large collection can still go over a TB, and for what gain? The data from a lossless format will appear to the player to be exactly the same as wav file and as such won't sound any different.
 
camverton said:
But far less worry or doubt to use FLAC or ALAC in which the metadata is embedded in the file.......
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You should keep backups of your collection. Using FLAC saves a lot of time mirroring a 1TB disk.
Computers fail, often corrupting the disk in the process, or get stolen. Your collection represents a lot of time and effort ripping CDs, digitising vinyl etc, you don't want to have to do it again
 
In reality why do a regular 1TB mirror as your backup ?

Once the database has been created surely all you need is an incremental backup which only takes a fraction of the time.

I take an even simpler approach - Every time I download music, I immediately add (manually) a copy of the files to my backup (USB3 HDD - I still don't trust SSD for backup due to many problems I've had with them in the past).

And I agree with most above, that storing wav is a waste of time and space but if you must...

Also I strongly believe you should store files in an industry standard such as FLAC or WAV .
If you store as AIFF you're at the mercy of whatever Apple chooses to do with it.
 
davidsrsb said:
You should keep backups of your collection. Using FLAC saves a lot of time mirroring a 1TB disk.
Computers fail, often corrupting the disk in the process, or get stolen. Your collection represents a lot of time and effort ripping CDs, digitising vinyl etc, you don't want to have to do it again
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Absolutely, backups are a must, preferably several with at least one kept off site in case of fire or theft.
 
"at the mercy of Apple"


How so? You can convert AIFF to whatever you like, should the need arise.
 
muzzer said:
You don't need Apple or iTunes for AIFF playback, AIFF is uncompressed but contains all the tagging info etc.
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Igloo Audio said:
+1

Thanks for getting there first. The phone rang :)

Peter
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Yes, but isn't support for aiff 'generally' available on apple devices and not on others? For example, devices by FiiO don't playback aiff but recognise alac and flac among others.

Regardless, what is the advantage of aiff over alac or flac? They sound the same, after all.
 
Brian said:
Yes, but isn't support for aiff 'generally' available on apple devices and not on others? For example, devices by FiiO don't playback aiff but recognise alac and flac among others.

Regardless, what is the advantage of aiff over alac or flac? They sound the same, after all.
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Hi Brian,

Using AIFF or AIF (windows) is more of a top-down approach.

Studios use AIFF probably in equal numbers to WAV, so though WAV is the default industry standard, AIFF is equally popular if using the Apple OS/products, and for file tagging not available with WAV. Equally, and unlike FLAC, as a dealer I can easily move files from on our Mac Mini's using iTunes to PC based systems using JRiver, while at the same time AIFF is supported in professional applications like Adobe Audition without having to use FLAC add-on filters if even available (?). Then given that 3TB is about £100, I don't see any professional or even practical reasons for using FLAC at home, and especially given many if not most of us are using iPods, iPads and iPhones, we keep all the lossless and lossy file formats Apple based.

Best regards,
Peter
 
Have to say I am surprised people have suggested aiff. Flac is smaller, lossless and open source. I am not sure what advantage aiff has in the non apple world.
 
strummer said:
I just downloaded the latest EAC Beta. I've not ripped anything for a while, so was rusty on the procedure.

Ripped 1st CD & couldn't find any mention of FLAC, so I clicked the WAV button & ripped as WAV..

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that files on a CD are WAV & the only reason FLAC was preferred is WAV didn't include all the Song Title data???

Anyway, the album plays as normal on SB & has all the titles etc.. Sounds perfect.

Should I stick to FLAC or continue ripping to WAV?



Ta!
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When I briefly entered the world of streaming I was informed (by a friend in the biz) WAV has superior sound quality over flac as flac is a much smaller file. he has been in the biz for 30 years, what he doesn't know isn't worth knowing so I would stick with wav.

When I used WAV it sounded identical to my cd so I continued with it, had all the track & album info etc..
 
Ragaman said:
... I was informed (by a friend in the biz) WAV has superior sound quality over flac as flac is a much smaller file. he has been in the biz for 30 years, what he doesn't know isn't worth knowing so I would stick with wav.
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Plain text files print out at superior visual quality than the same files extracted from a zip archive because the compressed files are so much smaller...

Same thing.
 
If you have poor or inadequate processing ability in your kit, best stick with WAV. With good kit, flac is fine IME
 
Ragaman said:
When I briefly entered the world of streaming I was informed (by a friend in the biz) WAV has superior sound quality over flac as flac is a much smaller file. he has been in the biz for 30 years, what he doesn't know isn't worth knowing so I would stick with wav.

When I used WAV it sounded identical to my cd so I continued with it, had all the track & album info etc..
Click to expand...

What biz was he in? Presumably not computing!
 
WAV :)

IMHO in a very good system wav sounds better, than flac. Most probably the decompression process from flac to wav can cause some additional system load and data stream will be more irregural and impact the sound quality.

Just make your own exeperience, do not believe me ;)

HD space is so cheap and with dbpoweramp is it possible to rip cds into waves with all tags included.
 
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