Re: OT ... audio

[Matt Ion <soundy106@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim wrote:
> On Dec 8, 4:16�am, Matt Ion <soundy...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> iTunes has an option, under CD Import Settings, for Apple Lossless
>> Encoder, as well as MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV encoders. �Comes included
>> with my bone-stock install of iTunes 8.x.-
>
> Thanks Matt, I'll check it out.
>
> Just out of curiosity, which format is the best? I would imagine if
> one recorded their favorites on a Terabyte external drive, or two, in
> the best lossless format, they could always down convert them to
> lesser formats for other devices ..... Yes?

Quality-wise, ripping to WAV at 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo (which is what
your CDs are recorded at - well, technically they're 14-bit, so you're
already ripping at a higher resolution) will give you NO loss of
quality, but will also use the most space.

Figure 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits (or two bytes) per sample,
time two audio channels, that's 176,400 bytes per second of audio...
give or take.  Factor in a bit of overhead, round it up to 180,000 and
convert that to kbytes, and you can call it 175kB/s.  Multiply by 60,
that's about 10.5MB/min... 630MB/hour... 1000 hours of music becomes
"only" 630GB.

And yeah, from there you can convert to MP3 or whatever other supported
format if you need to load some music on a smaller device (Smartphone,
iPod Nano, etc.)

> I just saw an external terabyte hardrive on sale for 169.00. So with a
> couple of those, it seems that one could have a pretty good size
> collection even using lossess format. I've also seen these hardrive
> racks that you can add 6 or eight hardrives, as you need them and for
> a mirror drive set up too.

I've set up a couple now for additional storage for high-traffic DVRs.
$3000 or so for a rack-mount, 8-bay system with hardware RAID (including
RAID 6).  $200 each (a few months ago) for eight 1TB SATA drives to load
it up... configure for RAID 5, and I have 6.5TB of usable space with
parity and hot-swappable drives.  Very nice.

> So lossless audio storage doesn't seem that hard a thing to do.  Or am
> I missing something? How about management? I'm presuming that the
> I-tunes application will do that, or that there are other music file
> management tools that are available?

Lots, I was just using iTunes as an example because my friend was doing
this with his 80GB iPod.  And I personally like iTunes (I know a lot of
people don't), largely because of how it automatically manages the files
and folders.  But there are certainly others that will use WAV, and most
of them will also use FLAC if you want to go that way.