DrunkenBlog

Audio conundrum

I'm preparing to head off to canada again on friday, and wanted to import my new Kill Bill soundtrack (it's yummy) so I could have it with me.

At some point in the near future, I want to rerip my rather large music collection from standard 192k mp3 to one of the newer formats. I basically just have plenty of storage now, and I can really tell the difference with some of my music. IE, Lords of Acid really shows some artifacts at 192k mp3, but not at 240+. I know I could re-encode everything with much better quality for the same amount of space.

It's just becoming a bit of a hassle. There's:

• Ogg Vorbis
• MP3
• AAC
• FLAC
• AIFF
• WMA
• WAV

WMA and WAV are out right off the bat. WMA isn't a bad codec, it'd just be way too much of a hassle for me to access my stash. WAV is just a crappy encoder. The only thing I find interesting about these are WM9's lossless encoding option, which would be handy. If I used windows most of the time I might look into it... but it wouldn't play on an iPod or some of the less mainstream players.

MP3, with the LAME encoder, actually sounds excellent. LAME is just slow as hell on Macs when encoding, although I know they're working on an altivec-enhanced version. It's also CLI based, which is fine, but it'd be nice to have something a little simpler. It's attractive only because MP3 is so universal. Things like LameBrain make the whole thing so much easier... but again, Lame is just so very slow on PPC.

Ogg-vorbis is extremely attractive from a quality standpoint, but it limits you greatly in the players & peripherals you can use right now. It's also not the fastest to encode, and uses some decent CPU while decoding. If there was more player support (especially quicktime!) and peripheral support I'd prolly be jumping towards this one.

FLAC is probably the most interesting, if you have mondo space to spare. Lossless compression, so you basically rip everything to FLAC, then as different formats come along... no big deal, just re-encode the original FLAC files to whatever you want. One of the big chores of this endeavor is going to be sitting there feeding in hundreds of CDs and ripping. Whipping up a quick shell script or pointing an app to an HD of FLACs and telling it I want MP4s or MP5s one day would be cool. There's at least one CLI wrapper for ripping, but egh, without CDDB support and the like it's a drag. Entering tags by hand is 199* territory.

AIFF isn't very appealing. If you're going to use AIFF, you might as well just make disk images of the actual CDs or something.

AAC is pretty fast to encode, and has good quality, but again you limit your player support. It is, for the moment, pretty much a mac thing. That'll prolly change if the iPod and the iTunes Music Store keep going as they are. Right now only the iPod supports AAC I believe. It's just a real hassle to say "Here, listen to this track, these guys are great" if they aren't on the mac. Yeah, you can convert it to an MP3, but lossy + lossy = eww. And even though in the grand scheme of things AAC is very much a mac thing, a lot of the cooler tools for things like HE AAC aren't available. Suckage.

I'm really interested in Ogg & FLAC, but doubt I'll go that route right now. I'm not looking for iTunes support completely, as iTunes constantly pisses me off with its CPU usage, but a lot of the lower-CPU players just don't have great features or aren't really stable or have other problems, like Whamb. I really miss the winamp experience in OSX sometimes.

So I prolly won't do a damn thing about re-enconding for awhile until things shake out, or there is some other catalyst to spur me on, like a new digital audio player. Who knows, maybe AAC will take the world by storm, or Ogg will. I'm prolly still reeling from trying to rip radiohead's "hail to the thief" album... it's DRM protection really screwed up my Macs drive for a bit.

There's a new 1.5gig Ogg-friendly mp3 out, the Korean D-Cube. Actually looks kinda nice. I've been looking for a decent FLAC player (rio karma comes to mind), it'd be nice if iTunes supported it. The rio is supposed to play Ogg files too.

I'm a big fan of the iPod, but I'm really sorta leaning towards the Rio Karma or Nitrus since they support the formats I'm interested in. I can handle USB 2.0, but dont' want it to be a big hassle getting my music to and fro. Ethernet support is another plus. And it's getting good reviews.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    January 22, 2004, at 01:22 AM