Can't tell difference between FLAC and high quality MP3/AAC

This basically sums it up for me. Lossless is a no-risk commitment.

The OP should not be at all distressed from finding out he cannot distinguish high-bitrate mp3 from lossless. Hardly anyone can, if we are to go by published, controlled listening test results.

 

I will refer to FLAC and ALAC as worryless codecs from now on.

 

If you've ever lived through a major earthquake, you wouldn't laugh. Trust me, we got an evacuation plan in my house.

Lossless and WorryLess... but only if it's an AccurateRip of the CD.

 

Oh, believe me, I'm not laughing at your particular situation! My wife and I try to visit California every other year and if we had the money, we would live there, no question. We both love wine, so we would possibly live in Temecula, Sonoma or Napa, if we could. Living only an hour or so away from an AMOEBA location, along with being close to the vines, would be ideal for both of us! That earthquake that Napa took a few weeks ago, was devastating and many people were effected, including wine maker B.R. Cohn, who just happens to also be the manager of The Doobie Brothers and he supposedly lost 50% of his wine supply and that sucks!

 

I have ripped 10+ CDs to FLAC from now on, using EAC. I guess I am going to save it on my hard drive for...ever. I guess I'll convert them in AAC (vbr) to gain space on my apple device.


Thanks to all of you!

 

The bottom line (for me anyway) - is not about how much storage costs or whether or not it sounds better or any of that - this is about my valuable time - which has a price tag that far exceeds any hard disk, CD or file.

My standing rule is to rip a CD once and ONLY once.

My master archive is ALL FLAC - with over 70000 tracks ripped and metadata complete. No matter what format, fad or changes come down the line now or in the future - it takes about 22 seconds to transcode any of my FLAC master albums files into whatever format is required.

I made the huge mistake of committing a bunch of CDs to WMA (of all bloody things) back in 2005) and then in all my wisdom - sold the CDs to a local shop. While the cash was great in 2005 - nary a day goes by that I do not think of consequence of that move. AND at the time - I was thinking the exact same thing - WMA sounds great, I can't tell the difference and so on.

Since that fateful day - I have actually rebought about 90% of the discs sold and converted them all to FLAC.

All I can offer the OP is this: If you are gonna commit your valuable time to rip a disc ( and take even more time to properly tag it's content ) - it needs to be an identical bit for bit replica of the source disc that you only do once. The end result should become your ultimate master - from which you can roll into any format whenever the need arises.

VP

 

One nice thing about dbPowerAmp is it can rip to multiple formats during the one rip. I've only played around with it and never really taken advantage of it, but if someone wants both FLAC and MP3, they can do it in one shot.

 

Far slower though, Dbpoweramp will use all cpus in a computer if doing one conversion, not so if ripping to 2+ formats where it uses only one cpu at a time, at least in my version (maybe fixed now).

 

I have dbPowerAmp as well - but my rips these days happen right inside J.River Media Center - which is just as secure and accurate as dBPA but has the added advantage of placing the ripped files right into my staging area within JRMC - so can immediately get down to the tagging and so on.

Also - not every ripped CD is ever going to make it to MP3 or any other format - so doing a double convert doesn't make sense for me. I focus ALL my time on getting the very best master rip to FLAC that I can. Also - once tagged properly in MC - any MP3s I do make from the master library - get all my tag work instantly embedded to my specs.

VP

 

I'll eventually look into JRiver, but for now, I'm stuck with iTunes.

My workflow is somewhat complicated.

1. Tag whatever is easy to do in dbPowerAmp, which usually works well for everything but classical.
2. Rip to ALAC
3. Fix tags with a combination of foobar and vi editor. I frequently have to to enough editing of track titles for classical music that I copy them out of foobar and edit them in vi before pasting them back.
4. Import into iTunes
5. Convert to AAC
6. Copy AAC and ALAC files to dropbox
7. Import files from dropbox into iTunes on my Mac Mini

 

I do the same thing.
One of the label guys was ready to kill me when I told him that "I make CDR copies of my discs to play in the car," I did that for two reasons: 1) just in case if a disc was damaged and unplayable, I can make a new disc to play in the car. The original disc is home safe and sound. 2) theft. It was bad with car break-ins around the area. If some kids or homeless junkies stole my CD wallet, they got a case of useless CDRs. Take a bunch of CDRs and try to sell them.

My most cherished possession while driving is my 80gb iPod that's loaded with 350 albums, all of them ripped between 250 and 320. It's not HDTracks quality in the house, but in the car it's more than adequate. That device has everything from Ahmad Jamal to the Zombies plus a dozen or so box sets. It's awesome in shuffle mode.

 

CouldCareLess... as I heedlessly rip my CDs to Apple Lossless using iTunes with zero regrets.

 

Learn from my sad mistake. I lost weeks of work relying on iTunes about 12-13 years ago, ripping many CDs only to find that one or two tracks had momentary bursts of static, noise, or digital clicks. Only with dBPowerAmp and AccurateRip do I have the peace of mind knowing that the rips are good. Having an error log to tell you precisely how each track ripped is very assuring. It also helps to have several additional DVD-ROM drives, in the event a specific CD can't rip very well on a given drive. I learned many lessons in those initial experiments, and they helped me avoid lots of problems on the next 5000 CDs I ripped in the last ten years. I still have more than 5000 to go...

 

I was actually just riffing on the legendary "AccurateRip — Necessary or Just Being Anal?" thread, where I was part of the tiny minority voting for the latter view.

I am a disgrace to the audiophile ripping fraternity. Never had a problem with an iTunes rip.

 

I thought I was, too, until I started discovering many, many little annoying problems -- actually some big -- with rips done in iTunes. Nobody I've talked to yet can give me a solid reason why to avoid using iTunes except that it's what they're used to, it's what they've always done, and they don't want to spend X dollars on an AccurateRip program (or even a free one like EAC). It also takes another 5-6 minutes to make an AccurateRip, so that's a factor. But beyond that, there's no reasonable reason to stick to iTunes except that you don't want to acknowledge that some of the rips you've done so far may be bad. I get that it's hard to consider that this may be true, and it my case, it took two or three years of hearing occasional problems before I finally came to the conclusion that all the rips I did prior to 2005 were bad. Once I figured out a solution, the glitches (even microscopic ones) vanished.

A lot depends on your degree of persnickity-ness and how sensitive you are to certain kinds of sonic problems. We've got people here who claim they can hear the differences between different AC cable, plugs, and sockets; on the other hand, we have people ripping to MP3s and throwing their CDs away. The difference is: with a bad rip, you can see it on a scope, measure it, and hear it. It's especially bad with a marginal CD pressing, which is a torture-test for any DVD-ROM drive to plow through. iTunes will zip through real fast, because it has no way to sense that the disc is glitching; dBPowerAmp will rip it twice, compare the two rips in RAM, and then tell you when there's an issue. It's small insurance to be able to say, "hey, I know I did everything humanly possible to coax the best possible sound quality out of this CD" vs. saying, "eh, I don't care, it's good enough." For many people around here, "good enough" rarely is, especially when it comes to sound.