I want to re-rip some of my CDs and store them for access from Roon. (Because originally I ripped them as MP3s!)
What is these days a good format? I quite devoted to the Apple eco system, so maybe Apple Losless? or is an uncompressed format like AIFF “audiophiler”?
It shouldn’t make any difference due to the lossless compression, but what are people’s experiences?
FLAC with default settings or ALAC if you really want to. FLAC compresses to slightly smaller files and decompresses a bit faster but it doesn’t matter much nowadays.
FLAC or ALAC are both good formats.
The compression in FLAC and ALAC is totally lossless meaning that the samples that get presented to your DAC will be exactly the same as those read from the CD during the ripping process and will be the same as using an uncompressed format. The different levels of compression available affect the amount of compute required to do the compression (during ripping) but do not significantly affect the compute required for decompression during playback (which is minimal).
These days, PC’s and MACs have more than enough processing power available to do the compression in real time irrespective of the compression level used so there is no cost associated with using the heavier compression settings used in FLAC and ALAC in terms of the time taken to perform the ripping.
Using compression has a single advantage: The storage space required is significantly reduced.
Using an uncompressed format has a single advantage: In the unlikely event of bit-rot, the impact of single bit errors in an uncompressed audio file may be more limited - a single bit error can corrupt at most one sample whereas, with compressed audio, there is the potential for a single bit error to corrupt multiple samples.
IMHO, the storage space saving of lossless compression outweighs the additional resilience of uncompressed audio because the reliability of modern storage media is very good.
AIFF
It’s ‘WAV with metadata’
Storage is so cheap, why bother saving space and using decompression?
There’s some additional considerations, though:
I would expect most of us use SSDs now; they’re an insignificant proportion of system outlay and are getting cheaper every day - plus they are fast, silent, cool running and very reliable
Yes, but this has no impact on the two points I mentioned. And AIFF has no other advantage that would outweigh them
Tools like afhash filename.aiff can be used to create checksums of AIFF files.
Oh
I’ll stick with SSD and AIFF (For CD quality)
Transportability. FLAC is an open standard, and you can encode using compression level 0 (no compression) anyway.
I’d use FLAC every day, and did so when I used a MacBook as my daily driver.
But, with lossless codecs, you can go back and forth between ALAC and FLAC without detriment.
FLAC also has a comprehensive integrity check built into the standard. I have a script that I can run on my collection periodically to check for issues.
Edit: the kind of error checks and reports available for FLAC files.
Sure, but that’s true for any file. Then the hashes must be saved somewhere, and then for mass checking them one needs to write some kind of script, probably. I.e., stuff that is beyond 90% of Roon users.
As this gains nothing over what FLAC does automatically, why add the complication?
As long as you rip lossless, you will be safe, because you can convert any lossless format into any other lossless format without problems.
If you are in the Apple Eco system, I would recommend ALAC, as any Apple device easily reads that format and it has great options for Metatags. I am more in a Windows Environment, but I nevertheless use ALAC (more for legacy reasons). I have about 100,000 files most of them ripped from my CDs, but also many hundreds of high-res purchases from Qobuz, HD Tracks, and the like. No issues with ALAC here.
ALAC and FLAC are more or less identical from what they can do, and both are open source these days.
Of course, you can use a format like AIFF, but it is not “audiophiler”. WAV/AIFF are especially good if you want to actually edit your files.
But the main idea is really: If you re-rip your CDs now, use the lossless format that is the most comfortable to you NOW. Because if you decide down the road that another format is more to your liking, you can easily (batch-)convert from one lossless format to another, without ANY loss in quality. That’s the beauty of lossless.
I would say:
“FLAC (with secure ripping) unless you can find a good argument for something else”
There are many good arguments for other formats in particular use cases. But FLAC is a very sensible default with no downsides vs other formats. Others might absolutely disagree, but I do think it’s probably the most common lossless format for the reasons enumerated above.
Neither does WAV. And this is actually the most important point to me that makes FLAC the winner independent of any file size benefits. Many people gloss over this point. But they’ve likely never had file corruptions occur. I’ve seen folks with 100,000+ file collections and all of a sudden a file or two turns out to be corrupted. Maybe it was something failing with HDD? And they find that their backup HDDs contain the same corrupted files (because of occasional synching of main drives with backup HDDs). So now they are in the position of wondering which files are corrupted. With FLAC the answer is easy to find. Point any number of programs to your top directory of all your music and let it run, maybe overnight, and come back to a list of any corrupted files (dbpoweramp [TESTCONVERSON], or foobar2000 ‘verify file integrity’ or command line FLAC, etc. ). But with WAV, ALAC, AIFF the above is not possible.
Yeah, I didn’t mention that specifically because it’s simply a dumb format to choose these days.
I’ll also say - if you’re reripping today, highly suggest you use something that provides secure rips. XLD for Mac, EAC in Windows, maybe EAC on Wine for Linux (not sure). I only know Mac at this point. But make it bit perfect whatever you do if you’re going to bother, regardless of (lossless) format.
For Linux, use abcde, which uses cdparanoia and flac, and is stable and reliable and utilizes MusicBrainz metadata.
Here’s my config file for uncompressed FLAC.
LOWDISK=y
CDDBMETHOD=musicbrainz
FLACENCODERSYNTAX=flac
FLAC=flac
FLACOPTS='-s -e -V -0'
OUTPUTTYPE="flac"
CDROMREADERSYNTAX=cdparanoia
CDPARANOIA=cdparanoia
CDPARANOIAOPTS="--never-skip=40"
CDDISCID=cd-discid
OUTPUTDIR="$HOME/Music/Rips"
WAVOUTPUTDIR="$HOME"
ACTIONS=cddb,read,encode,tag,move,clean
OUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/${ARTISTFILE}-${ALBUMFILE}/${TRACKNUM}.${TRACKFILE}'
VAOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/Various-${ALBUMFILE}/${TRACKNUM}.${ARTISTFILE}-${TRACKFILE}'
ONETRACKOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/${ARTISTFILE}-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}'
VAONETRACKOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/Various-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}'
mungefilename ()
{
echo "$@" | sed -e 's/^\.*//' | tr -d ":><|*/\"'?[:cntrl:]"
}
MAXPROCS=2
PADTRACKS=y
EXTRAVERBOSE=2
COMMENT='abcde version 2.9.3'
EJECTCD=y
Maybe this will scare some, but it is so easy to use, and far better than running anything under Wine.
I’ve ripped my CD collection as uncompressed FLAC. Uncompressed as hard drive space is not an issue. dbPoweramp ripped about 98% of my discs on my MacBook Pro with a connected Apple Super Drive. For the handful of discs that failed XLD did the job. On the same hardware.
Tagging went automatically correct most of the time. The few times that it didn’t I’ve used JRiver Media Center to tag the rest.
I did the same thing a couple of years ago. I’m also an Apple user so I chose to rip to ALAC so it would be easier if I wanted to copy albums to my Mac or iPhone. If I was a PC user I would definitely choose FLAC. Either one is lossless so there should be no difference.
What should have a been a very straight forward answer:
Ripping Program - dbPoweramp (for mac)
Format - FLAC
Settings - compression level 5
has been cluttered up with all kinds of Apple and audiophile dogma. Sad, very sad.
Edit: read this post while you can since I’m quite sure that someone will flag it for removal, which is also very sad.