Flac?

quote...Very easy question, which audio format do you use, WAV, AAC or FLAC, and why?
I don't see space being an issue now as it's dead easy to pick up a a massive hard drive now, meaning that I could store my whole CD collection in WAV format with a 250GB drives, so space is not a problem any more.


........showing my ignorance here; can some one elaborate for me?

is it a better idea to play music off a computer rather than cd player? People are clearly playing music off hard drives or is it a method of storage after downloading from the net?

Whats the idea behind this, please?




cheers,


David

 

I rip all of the CDs I buy to flac, no particular reason other than having 1.5TB of disk space to fill. I suppose it is a backup of sorts, in case of loss, theft, scratches etc.

I don't often play music from the pc for 'listening' simply because I don't have seperate DAC and my CD player sounds better. When I'm using the PC, however, Its much easier to just load up foobar (or whatever other music player) and listen to whatever, instead of trekking downstairs and finding a CD. If I had a decent DAC, I'd probably play all of the music through a PC simply for the easy-factor.

 

there are some who have ditched cd players in preference to hard drive / computer based systems, such as: squeezeboxes & sonus multiroom systems, with the data stored as flac files (convenient format lossless compressed wav's about 66% of the size). the players are often partnered with a dac.
i even get reasonable results with an xbox streaming flac files from a nas over a wireless network, connected via optical to my cyrus processor, acting as a dac.

 

Certainly FLAC beats WAV because FLAC supports tags and WAV doesn't. I don't know much about FLAC vs AAC. Also FLAC supports some lossless compression, although I don't know how useful this is, and it can certainly slow down the ripping process.

I have just started allowing music files into my life, as I bought a Squeezbox, and I would advise to master tags at an early stage, otherwise they can get out of hand. Most music file players use tag information and if the tags are a mess, so will be the displayed information. Tags can be hard to fit to classical music and to Various Artists compilations, and it helps to establish a plan early on so that one's tags will be consistent.

The other thing to think about is backups, as all hard disks die. I have two hard disks which I keep mirrored.

Good luck.

 

Stick with WAV if you want to retain the Audio quality, all depends on what is at the top of your list, Audio quality or Tags I guess?

 

FLAC is the same quality as WAV, its lossless compression ie around half the size but without discarding any information.

 

I'm sorry but IMHO that's bollox!

I'm not sure how you've arrived at that judgement, but if I use a standard Squeezebox, one of our SB+ players, or a Transporter there is simply no difference in audio performance between WAV & Flac.

Since Flac is lossless it is also very easy to convert back to WAV or any other format should you desire.

 

Think of FLAC as a zip file, if you zip a word document, it doesn't lose content, it is just smaller, FLAC works the same way, everything is intact inside

 

thanks very much for this.

another one to get my head around