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The MP3 files are gone…

I’ve deleted all my MP3 files… and re-ripped all my CD’s and encoded them in the FLAC format instead. So why did I do that? The two main (and inter-connected) reasons are: I wanted to future-protect my audio files, and I want good audio quality.

Future-protection
I don’t mean to imply that the FLAC format will last forever, but by storing my music in a loss-less format, I can convert it to something else at a later date without loosing anything. For those who understand what it means that MP3 is lossy, imagine converting MP3 files to some other lossy format, and then converting that to yet another lossy format some years later. The quality of the audio files would be worse each time they were encoded into something new. In IT terms, MP3 is quite an old encoding format originally standardised in 1991. With the astonishing success it has had, I doubt the format will disappear completely in my lifetime, but it will become increasingly dated. And who knows, maybe it will eventually disappear. The only way to ensure I don’t loose any of the audio quality of the original CD’s is to store it in a loss-less format. I may convert the audio files to another format in the future, but I don’t want to rip the CD’s again with all the associated pain of ensuring the various tags are correct.

Audio Quality
I remember when I first listened to some MP3 files 8 years ago or so. I couldn’t understand what everybody was so excited about, I mean, the sound quality was terrible. I could easily hear the difference between a CD played on my stereo and the same music played as MP3 files on my stereo. Later I learnt that it was possible to encode MP3 files in a good quality. So that is what I’ve been doing until now. I encoded all MP3 files as vbr, variable bit-rate at the highest quality settings. That resulted in audio quality good enough that I couldn’thear the difference between the CD and the audio files. But as pointed out above, it wasn’t a future-proof solution. It is also some time ago that I started ripping and encoding my CD’s so I wasn’t really sure that all CD’s had been encoded the same way.

How I did it
I’ve done all the ripping on my Linux server, not because there aren’t any decent Windows programs around to do it, but because it could quitly sit in the corner ripping and encoding while I was doing real work. Occasionally I would then slip it another CD.

The programs I used were grip and of course the FLAC encoder/decoder. The latest version (1.1.4) is really fast compared to previous versions.The paramters I used with FLAC were:

-8 -V

-8 ensures you get the highest compression. Some sources on the internet claim that the time taken to encode using -8 is not worth the few extra % disk space saved. As already mentioned, v1.1.4 encodes much faster than the previous version. I found that it did save me anything between 50-150 KB per track, so I thought it was worth it. -V verifies the file at the end of the encoding, if you have a lot of CD’s to rip and encode, you want to be sure your copy is good.

Grip (like cdparanoia) does a lot of checking of the CD and that takes time, but unless you want to do it again as you find that some of the CD’s had scratches resulting in poor audio, you had better do the ripping right the first time.

Disk Space
Well, loss-less encoding takes up way more space than a lossy format, even at the high quality encoding settings I was using for MP3. I did a test of 6 different CD’s (some classical, some modern), comparing the disk space used when they were stored as MP3 files and afterwards when stored as FLAC files.

6 CD’s, encoded in 86 files: Mp3: 622 MB, FLAC: 2117 MB

Encoded as FLAC files, all my music CD’s now use 54 GB of disk space. I was actually a little surprised by how much disk space the FLAC files are using, but I don’t regret it.

Anything else?
I expect to run into a few problems with being able to play the FLAC files. My D-Link DSM-320 media player for example doesn’t support the FLAC format. One of my kids has an iPod, the other an iRiver, so there will no doubt be other posts about FLAC files.

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