Your Ripping Workflow #3 - multiple formats

It’s my hope by asking questions 10 different ways to Sunday, I’ll gain both knowledge and wisdom to help me in my ripping project, and maybe give you ideas as well. This concerns how many ways you need to save your files, for how many different applications.

Let’s say, you have, I dunno, Abbey Road in hi-res, 5.1, ATMOS and wav/mp3/FLAC/ALAC/TOS/ISO/DSF/MQA/Chu-Bops...now I know, you probably wanted to save every little different version, but, realistically, how many of these are you really gonna need?

And, for what? One format for the phone, one for the desktop, one for the streaming player, one for the 5.1 DVD player in the Infiniti...

Did you think about that at first? “All I need is FLACS...oh waitaminute, I wanna play the Beck blu-ray too...and there’s my dance mixes I made in college I saved on mp3...” Are you making it easy for yourself, or is the job making itself more complex than you anticipated? And, are you saving all the formats in the same place, or are you perhaps keeping the surrounds apart from the stereos...?

In an effort to make my server “all things to all needs”, I want to make sure I don’t end up with 300 tracks someplace where it won’t make any benefit, or sense; my shelves, drawers, boxes and cabinets are confusing enough already!

 

My solution already works (for me). Buy the highest resolution version I can afford, and that becomes my archive copy. Then, I re-encode it as needed for the various devices I use.

Generally that means a FLAC archive via a high-res download or CD / DVD / BD / vinyl rip, then a lossy WMPro re-encode for my phone / DAP / etc from that source.

For lossy sources, of which I still have a number of, I've been slowly replacing them with CD rips care of the buyer's market today. But assuming I will always have a small number of tracks that I will never get a FLAC / lossless copy of they are sequestered in their own folder area. The goal isn't to get that to zero...only to minimize it as much as possible.

 

No need for multiple formats of the same contents for me, my car plays FLAC and MP3 and my phone, PCs, media centres (running Kodi) and Hi-Fi DAP (running Moode Audio) can play everything else, FLAC, DSD, Ogg, MQA, MP3, Monkey Audio, you name it.

 

Honestly, lossy is dead to me outside of streaming. It honestly has been for a while. Storage is too cheap these days. My phone has more than enough space to keep a decent amount of music locally for the odd chance I want to listen to something while mobile. It used to be you had to use lossy to minimize space consumption on a portable device. If I want a different album, there is generally enough space on the portable device to add anything I want. I have access to my NAS as cloud server, so I can freely deleted and add songs and albums as I see fit.

As far as multi-channel goes, I don't really use it. I do have rips of these files, but, I generally ignore them. If there comes a time when I want to explore this content it's there. I have ISO rips of all my SACDs and they stay that way. I use JRiver so I don't really need to do anything to the ISO files to play them as they are recognized as an SACD player would recognize and access the files fully contained on the physical disc. I don't really see the need for playing these files on a portable device. Phone devices don't really support DSD because the chipsets aren't included and I'm not really interested in using an external DAC with my phone. If this capability native to the phone ever get gets implemented, I may change my mind. So there's no real point in creating DFF or DSF files. But the only reason to even create these files would be eliminate the unused redundancy like Multi-channel or the Redbook layers to shorten transfer times. While there is a benefit of also removing storage barriers on portable devices that still persists, especially if you are using higher resolution files, cloud access and transfer speeds are the bigger barrier. You don't really want to wait on transfer a to be extended if you aren't actually going to use the 5.1 high resolution channel data of the multi-channel content. Again I don't do this, but as things mature DSD on a phone may become viable. If this is the case, I'd hope there was a way to extract the DSF or DFF from the source ISO file on the fly. I don't know of way to do this today, but, again I'm not pursuing this capability either. I can extract the individual tracks, but, at this point I don't see the advantage for me to break the ISO container or keep redundant files on my NAS.

 

You can play DSD on most Android phones/tablets with an app like USB Audio Player Pro.

 

FLAC for the main system and mp3 for the car and bedroom stereo.

 

Rip CDs directly to NAS, each disc in it's own folder with a Folder.jpg with art:

Pixel Size 1000 x 1000
File size 300 x 300KB

This keeps the cover art compatible with a popular digital player.

For use with my car player, I use dBpoweramp Batch converter and embed the cover art to 600 x 600 and maximum file size of 250KB.

If I later add higher res, or other material, they go into the relevant artist folder with an obvious description added to the the album [24/96], [DSD] etc.

Space isn't really a problem these days, so I only delete something if it is obviously poor.

 

I have some high def files but truthfully, most of them do not get used very often.

I rip CDs to FLAC for my main directory, then Apple lossless, AAC and MP3. Hard drive space is so cheap.

Vinyl captures are done at 32 bit, after any editing or click repair it then gets dithered down to 16 bit files.

 

It's funny; I have a car that can only read Mp3 on the flash drive. I have another one that can only read Mp3 burned to a CD-R.* Yet, I have a player for the gym that's about the size of a SIM card...and it plays FLAC just fine.




*And yet - get this - neither car will play the other's media...!