253 hours, 46 minutes, 45 seconds

[maxg]

On random play.

There are some things you can only do with a computer!

24 Gb of music - 24!! - that is more storage than there was available on line in 1997!

Or is that 1993? Who knows...you know what I am talking about anyway.

[bdc]

27667 tracks in playlist, average track length: 5:01

Estimated playlist length: 2317 hours 52 minutes 17 seconds

123 gb.

[meuge]

Whoa!

[Erukian]

bdc, with all that music only taking up 123gb, that's gotta be pretty low quality compression.

I use foobar2000 and here's my stats that it gives me for my database.

Total length: 1wk 1d 3:38:12.405

Average bitrate: 302

Total size: 24.9 GB

Song Number: 2823

I only have 2823 songs to maek up 25gb of music, you have nearly 10x my collection's size.

If I kept my quality standards and had your number of songs i'd have 250gb of music. So i'd guess your average bitrate is either 128 or 192

[bdc]

Most of them are ~192kbps ripped with LAME. There are also a lot at 320. I have a few albums ripped with flac, but there are a few thousands at a lousy 128... a properly ripped 192kbps mp3 does not sound bad, though.

[colterphoto1]

I too, go for quality on my iMac 'Jukebox'. Currently 7 days (thats 168 hour in the master list, 2310 songs using 18+Gb. Lots of CD's are imported without any compression, if I know I'll be making compilation CD's.

So nice to just click the mouse and have RadioMC come on. I have something like 70 Holiday CD's, most on iMac, just love those holiday tunes- some are pretty far out. Just got Playboy Jazz Christmas featuring Arturo Sandoval- smooooooth baby!

Michael

[ben.]

Heh, when I think of storage space, I think of linear feet of 14" deep shelving. Compression? Well, I don't like to squeeze 'em in too tight.

[Erukian]

i've pretty much given up on mp3. My MP3 player supports FLAC and OGG so i use those almost exclusively. All my music is my own (bought). A year ago i ripped everything to FLAC, it took up way too much space. Nearly 80gb. I then converted my FLAC to two folders, one is ogg at 200kbps average, and the other is MPC at 250-300kbps per song. MPC gives me the best sound out of all the codecs. When I'm just listening to say CD-Audio vs mp3 I just prefer the cd-audio. FLAC vs cdaudio i have no preference, and CD audio vs MPC gives me no preference.

I'd recommend anybody here who has their stereo hooked up to their computer to check out the musepack encoding format.

[Marvel]

The thing with LAME, which I use, is that you have to make sure you keep up to date and switch out the older versions. It isn't automatic for sure, but the newer versions are way improved. You can probably say the same for all the codecs.

I am not seriously listening when I play back material off of my PC.

Marvel

[shoe11]

Here's my stats:

Total length: 35.5 days

Bitrate: Apple Lossless

Song Number: 12973

Total Size: 311.5 GB

Output:

M-Audio Audiophile USB -> Illuminations D-60 -> Benchmark DAC-1 -> Etymotic ER 4S

Anybody using more than 311 GB?

~shoe

[meuge]

I dunno, 80GB doesn't sound like too much. Storage is dead cheap these days and the difference in quality between WAV/FLAC vs. compressed formats is large. These days you can get a 250+GB hard drive for under $150, so space really isn't a huge issue.

Shoe - that's the idea! I am aiming to have a terabyte worth of music before the end of next year.

[edwinr]

Listening to you guys, I feel bad about MY floppy disc storage medium. I only get 10 to 12 tracks maximum from each disc. And they're all LP non Rewritable as well!

[maxg]

Shoe,

Wow. I didnt think I would have the largest collection by any means - but 311 GB!!!

What form is that in? Almost all my recordings are at 256 Kb. You say you have 35.5 days - as I have 10 days I would use some 80 Gb for 35 days - approximately.

You are using 4 times that - are you just copying CD tracks to your Hard disk? Seems a lot of storage for 35 days of music.

Still - I concocted the whole collection in 4 weekends by ripping all the CD's in my collection I cared about. I may not have the most - but I might have the fastest grown collection. 0 to 24 Gb in 8 days.

Another possible win for me:

1. The safest collection. Aside from the fact I have all the original CD's I have the whole collection on DVD disks at home, on the hard disk of my portable computer and on my 160 Gb backup drive. Aside from a major earthquake I reckon it is safe.

As an aside - anyone building a digital movie collection (DIVX / XVID etc.)? I am creating a rather nice disney movies collection for the little one - got most of the classics now. At 650 Mb per movie - in decent enough quality to play back on a 32 inch TV and over the stereo - the compression is amazing.

[shoe11]

Max,

I originally purchased 750GB worth of storage with the plan of storing my entire CD collection in AIFF format. AIFF is the native format for CD audio and as a result when I ripped my collection at that size I needed around ~475GB if memory serves.

I completed the ripping into AIFF shortly before Apple released their Apple Lossless Encoder for iTunes. Apple Lossless is bit perfect to the original uncompressed files stored on CD's, but still has a compression scheme to reduce the file size vis a vis uncompressed (AIFF) files. So once this format came out, I went through and converted my entire AIFF collection into ALC files. It saved quite a bit of storage space for me and again the files are exact copies of uncompressed CD's. Whereas the AIFF file format will always be 1411 kbps for each track, the ALC encoder is between 800 to 1100 kbps per track. That's why I'm using so much more storage space than you are.

~shoe

[Timmikid]

FLAC, OGG, MPC, CODECS, LAME, FOOBAR????

I'm only 36 years old, but now I feel ancient! I have no clue... I've heard and used AAC or MP3 just to try it out, but this? I will have to buy a new pc and a player (Ipod or sony?)

----------------

On 11/26/2004 6:57:17 AM shoe11 wrote:

I completed the ripping into AIFF shortly before Apple released their Apple Lossless Encoder for iTunes.

Does this all work on pc, or do you need an apple for this?

Lots of fruit on this site.

[maxg]

Tim,

You and me both pal. I tred to get a grip on all the possibilites before I started ripping. Trouble is there are too many formats out there and you never have a n idea what will play on your stuff (in my case a DVD player) until you try it out.

As I started with MP3 and discovered that at 256 Kb it sounded great to me (relative to CD that is) I thought - bugger it - at least I know it will be compatible with any new technology that comes my way. Hence the whole thing in Mp3. What you gain or lose by going for one of the more esoteric formats I cant tell you - but if you choose badly and it dies - what are you going to do with all the stuff you ripped?

For me a new format has got to offer a whole lot more that either 30% better compression or 10% better sound before I would consider it - the risks are too great.

Mak,

I have heaard you on this thing before. Comms over storage arguments are good - but 1 MB of comms costs a whole lot more than 1 Mb of storage - however you dress it up.

Frankly it is not an either or - you will download live and on-line just as you listen to the radio now - and you will store gigabytes of mucis on a thumb nail sized device you can never find when you want it.

Theoretically the only thing that will really change is that neither music nor writings should ever be out of print again.

[colterphoto1]

AIFF is slightly older Apple file storage without any compression. Lots of space, but is very pure. Works only on Mac. Kind of like a PC .wav file, where it empty space and segments of similar notes are not compressed MP3 style to save space.

I too, have those large black shiny vinyl discs. They do sound better in some respects that CD's. Do take up some storage though. I've got about 1000 I'm desperately trying to keep out of the garage of my new home. Got 3 Technics turntables to go with em also.

I've noticed DJ's at weddings with two PC's or two i-pods and no actual CD's or source material. Really neat mixing and cataloging until you hear the raspy, grating sound of 128 bit MP3 scans all night at 115 dB or so over cheesy Bullfrog or Generic PA cabinets. I'm wearing earplugs from now on.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH- being 46 is on the cusp of being able to absorb all this computerese. Whats the Rush line "all this machinery making modern music and to still be open-hearted" They got that right!

Michael

[Erukian]

Here's some info for you guys who arent in the know about the various codecs. I'll just go over a bunch of stuff maybe you oldies can learn something from me heh.

Think of a store bought CD as data storage, since a CD can hold 700mb then each song ends up like 40-50 mb depending on the length. You can copy the entire contents of a CD to a computer without 'compressing' the audio, when it's not compressed it's lossless, when it is compressed it's lossy. People use the word 'lossy' do that to show with a lot of compression you lose some data, you might cut off all frequency's below 20hz and above 16kHz to save data space. Get it? Your taking these 40-50 mb CD files on your computer, smashing them down to a small size of lets just ballpark, 5mb a peice (thats a big size reduction).

Lossless compression is like taking a bitmap and putting it into a zip file, depending on how complex the bitmap is, the colors it uses etc, determines how big the .zip file will be. You can try this, make something in paint and save it, then right click and zip it up. You'll notice if you right click > properties on the original bitmap and then the zip file, there's a major size difference BUT you don't lose any quality. Zip files use complex algorithms to get rid of redundant data to save space. This is probably hitting upside your head if you have no idea what i'm talking about.

Flac, WAVPack, Apple Lossless, Monkey Audio. Those are just a few of the major types of lossless compression codecs. Each codec has it's own way of compressing audio. When it comes down to it, with lossless you KNOW the quality will be perfect-cd audio since your not altering the audio any way. Like zipping up a file then later extracting it, it's as good as when it went in than when it comes out. The "best" lossless codec is which ones yeilds you the smallest files. Right now their relatively the same, no standard has broken from the pack as the best. On average a song in lossless ends up in the 25-35mb area depending on the codec.

Right now most of the crowd is looking at lossy compression. What I consider are the major codecs right now are MP3, AAC (this is apples), WMA (microsoft's), OGG and MPC (open source codecs, dont know what open source is, search it on wikipedia.com)

A brief history of the codecs i listed:

MP3 (mpeg layer 3) is the oldest, it's what all the media talks about, and since it's so mainstream it's what a lot of hardware manufacturers are building devies for. From DVD-players with mp3 support to the hundreds of mp3 portables out there. MP3 is huge, when i say huge i mean it's dominating and has for at least 5-7 years.

WMA (windows media audio) comes in second when it comes to hugeness. With the backing of microsoft, this is the default codec that windows media player uses to copy music from your CD's to your music collection. Since it's newer than MP3, a better more advanced algorithm is used to compress audio. The only drawback is that WMA uses DRM (copy protection) so say you reformat your computer and your leave all your music on your 2nd hard drive. You can't access it anymore since your windows installation doesnt match up with what the audio was encoded for. The advantage is that anybody who downloads music off your computer, whether it's through a P2P program or whatever, won't be able to play it and the RIAA wont sue you.

AAC (advanced audio coding) is growing because of the iPod. This is apple's flavor of music compression, it's proven better than WMA and MP3 when it comes to quality, BUT it won't play on a lot of MP3 players besides iPods. If you have an iPod. This is the format to go, if you don't, then your MP3 player (portable or shelf) probably does just only that, MP3's and your stuck with that.

OGG Vorbis is getting nearly 4 years old and came out a little after WMA i think, it's proven to be better than WMA by many audiophiles but it doesnt have the hardware compatability that WMA, AAC and MP3 have. For just listeing to music on devices like your computer or a few select MP3 players that support OGG. This is where you want to go. When comparing OGG to AAC, recently AAC passed up OGG in quality (AAC is one of the newest codecs) with one of the latest version, but OGG took back that crown with the aoTuV Beta3 release. Right now as it stands, as i'm typing this post. The majority of people who like to watch all the codecs evolve (like me) believe that OGG's latest release puts it above all the other codecs I talked about when it comes to sheer quality of the sound. AAC is really close to OGG when it comes to quality, but the AAC user base is much bigger overall because, again, of the iPod.

MPC (Musepack) is what I prefer to use. I'm sure that doesnt mean much to you, but it's sort of become the audiophile snob codec. It's designed for higher quality compression that the other codecs but at a sacrafice, file size. This is a pretty niche codec but reviews and blind testing has proven that it's the best out there. If you want the best quality when it comes to lossy "I" believe this is it. Since this codec is niche, hardware manufacturers laregly ignore it and so the only place to playback MPC files is on your computer.

I hope this helped out some folks who might of heard about the codecs but had no idea what they did.

Before I close out, let me say that since your probably interested more in lossy rather than lossless (we all dont have 750gb to play with that the goal of any codec is Transparency. Transparency is when you can't hear any difference between the original CD audio and the compressed file.

Here's what I believe anybody with a good ear and good speakers should do who uses their computer to playback audio. If it's just your computer that your using, ditch MP3 or WMA as fast as you can. AAC is a very good choice, OGG is good too, MPC is what I use. With MP3 files, for transparency when i have my $300 headphones hooked up to my soundcard, 256kbps is transparent. With AAC, 192 is transparent. WMA, 192 or 256, i'm not sure which. OGG, 192. MPC, 192. Each codec has problem samples. There might be a part of a song that it just doesnt compress right and sounds off. MP3/WMA has a lot of these, MPC is from what i've read the least. Just be safe, i usually have my MPC files above 200kbps, sometimes above 300kbps if it's classical.

If you want to discuss codecs the hydrogenaudio.org forums are a great place to go. Some very smart people in there. I'm not a professional but i've spent a lot of time reading about audio codecs. I strongly believe AAC/OGG/MPC are the way to go for computer listening. If you rely on some other hardware to playback your lossy files, if that hardware doesnt do WMA then use MP3. MP3 is the last resort here, you use MP3 if that's ONLY what your hardware supports. It is the crappiest quality out of all of the codecs, so just keep that in mind. It can't do a lot of the cool new stuff that other codecs can use to compress audio without MP3 breaking it's format. While MP3 has come a long way with the LAME encoder, it's far from the best. When using the LAME encoder though to make MP3 files, 192kbps VBR (variable bitrate) is a good setting but my own blind testing tells me that 256kbps is the only place that MP3 becomes transparent, no matter which encoder is used.

I've talked long enough. Hope you got _something_ out of this. Better yet, i hope i sparked your interest in various audio codecs.

[colterphoto1]

my brain hurts, can I go home now?

[boomer9911]

and counting, time up yet....