Adding my CD library to Roon in lossless format?

FLAC files are zip files in effect.

They use standard compression, and you do not want to push the compression to high as that can impact the streamers ability to decrypt without additional noise generation (or so I read)

Thatā€™s nonsense BTW.

Thatā€™s why I said I read it (but have never seen it myself).
But some streamers use older, low power processors and when using higher compression levels it takes much more processor to decompress, so I would not completely write it off (as they might not be able to cope in real time).

So while I do not necessary agree with the comments, I can understand that the benefit of using higher levels of compression vs disk space benefits is just not there.

What about aiff files?

Hi,

Thatā€™s not correct, the higher levels take more CPU to compress, but the amount of CPU remains more or less constant when decompressing.

I tested this with FLAC and AIFF files years ago to confirm what I had read.

These days even the so called ā€œlow poweredā€ CPUā€™s are orders of magnitude faster than what we had a decade or so ago ā€¦ itā€™s breeze for them.

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Never bothered with them sorry. I am mostly using FLAC files on default compression settings (ripped using dbpoweramp).

I hav a small number of DSD and WAV files, and they are generally much larger.
I donā€™t think Roon copes with any kind of modifier like zip for space savings.

Yes I had said that I have never seen it in my response, but I also never tried to use the highest level of FLAC compression.
But modern processors are much faster I agree.

Make sure to configure your secure ripping settings and everything else as needed
https://dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper-setup-guide.htm

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As Marian said, nonsense. Decoding effort is nearly independent of compression level. The additional workload occurs when encoding - but higher than the default level 5 buys you practically no space savings.

Table of sizes, encoding, and decoding time per level:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202063734/http://synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/index.asp

(Edit: And as for the absolute times, note that this was on an Athlon from 2008 :slight_smile: )

Not sure what you mean by lossless but if youā€™re ripping a CD to CD quality [16/44] itā€™s not a very large file. If by lossless you mean ripping it to a higher bit rate and a higher sample rate, thereā€™s no improvement in audio quality but itā€™s a larger file

Lossless means that the original samples can be reconstructed after encoding and decoding. I.e., no up- or downsampling, and mathematically lossless encoding only, no psychoacoustic models (like in mp3) or other lossy techniques (like in more modern lossy codecs) to leave out data.

A lossless rip of a CD to WAV in original 16/44.1 quality takes about 400-600 megabytes. The same lossless rip to FLAC is on average 45% smaller. Whether thatā€™s significant depends on how my CDs one rips, I suppose. But FLAC has other advantages as well, as mentioned above.

Yes, Lossless and Hi-Rez are two different things.

Apple conflates them in one category:

"What is lossless audio compression?

Most audio compression techniques lose some amount of data contained in the original source file. Lossless compression is a form of compression that preserves all of the original data.

Apple has developed its own lossless audio compression technology called Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). In addition to AAC, the entire Apple Music catalog is now also encoded using ALAC in resolutions ranging from 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) up to 24-bit/192 kHz.

While the difference between AAC and lossless audio is virtually indistinguishable, weā€™re offering Apple Music subscribers the option to access music in lossless audio compression."

Nope, I donā€™t see that ā€¦

When they say ā€¦

This is not about upsampling from 44k to 192k, what they are saying is they have a ALAC files of various sample rates from 44k to 192k.

To be honest Appleā€™s [marketing department] is not the best source to read to further oneā€™s understanding of audio comprehension.p (or audio AQ in general].

Try ā€¦

Thanks, but believe me, I understand this! I also understand marketing gimmicks

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That may be, but at least they got it right that most people canā€™t distinguish between AAC and ALAC.

A late reply: I would also suggest using XLD on MacOS. Just to mention some great features: XLD supports bit-perfect rips and checking these via AcccurateRip: after ripping your CD, it calculates a check sum and checks that against an internet database of checksum. This way you can be certain that you have a bit-perfect copy of the CD - from the couple of hundreds of CDs that Iā€™ve ripped, there were only a few cases (mostly damaged or copy protected ones) that failed to get ripped bit-perfectly. Additionally, XLD supports several profiles and has command line tools: it is possible to rip to FLAC, ALAC, MP3 and whatever format you want in just one go. My ripping process was: rip to FLAC, then check metadata, then use XLD on the command line to convert to any other formats. XLD will also save Cue sheets, allowing you to reproduce the CD later. Best tool for ripping ever IMHO

If their iPhone were capable of delivering 24/192 files to consumers, Iā€™m pretty sure Apple would be touting it!

Cheers, just trying this out on a compilation album. Iā€™ve set the app up according to the instructions for FLAC. Makes one life easier having all the meta data correctly added for multidisc albums. Thanks for the recommendation.

But they can, with a small DAC.