Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
It's not only good enough, it's the only logical option. The music is *on the CD* in 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, so if you rip it, that will be your maximum quality. Trying to rip at a higher quality will just use up huge amounts of space for nothing.
Praise to you  There are people who vehemently argue that they can hear a difference between WAV and FLAC, which is just bullshit, of course. If you take a WAV, and then make a FLAC out of it, and back to WAV, the two WAV-files will be 100% identical (if nothing went wrong). When playing a FLAC-file, the audio player is just decompressing on the fly, and will effectively be sending a WAV to the soundcard. The only reason for a FLAC to sound different is when some sort of weird decoding stuff or postprocessing is going on.
The only reason for me to use FLAC and take the storage penalty over MP3 is that FLAC is lossless and can be reconverted to other lossless formats shoud I ever need or want to do so. I also have a FLAC music player because I'm too lazy to create a separate MP3-library. I couldn't hear a difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC if my life depended on it. |
Although I rip my CDs as Red Book FLAC, if I was purchasing lossless downloads on line I'd buy the Red Book version since, based on my own experience previously mentioned, purchasing the Hi-Rez version wouldn't make any difference to my own listening.
I do rip to FLAC as my source file for the same reason you do, as a source for my player with the option to convert if needed (the main disadvantage being that it takes much longer to load the files on my player since it must convert each file as it loads it on my player). I use Sony's Media Go to manage my music and it will autoconvert from FLAC to MP3 or AAC if needed when it loads them on my player.
My current player, a Sony NWZ-A17 player, supports FLAC and Hi-Rez FLAC and provides enough storage space to allow me to load Red Book FLACs on my player. Due to this I don't worry too much about converting to other formats except in certain circumstances (see below).
Quote:
Originally Posted by GlennD
LAME encoded with VBR in high quality mode has been my go-to, and seems to be a good balance of quality vs size. In my case I've got all of my original CDs (and I still refuse to buy digital files unless that is my only option), so those are my lossless backups.
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Although I have the CDs for my FLAC rips, I use an external hard drive as a backup for my digital library mainly so that I don't lose the metadata for my files. It saves me from having to re-research the information (such as the actual year for songs, the creative team, and my own additions like including the original song information with song parodies) that I'd have to do again if I had to re-rip the CDs.
For some uses I agree that a LAME-encoded VBR MP3 at the highest quality is a good option. One place I use them is with some audiobooks where putting them on my player as FLAC would make no sense, such as with an audiobook that features only one person speaking. Converting an audiobook to a lossy format would save a large amount of space with little noticeable difference in the sound quality.