The future of music storage

[bulleid_pacific]

It IS an inherent flaw actually - I don't routinely trust Wikipedia but ...Lossy audio compression schemes that are based on overlapping time/frequency transforms add a small amount of padding silence to the beginning and end of each track. These silences increase the playtime of the compressed audio data. If not trimmed off upon playback, the two silences played consecutively over a track boundary will appear as a pause in the original audio content. Lossless formats are not prone to this problem.

This is correct.

You are right though, that some players cope with this better than others and manage to strip some if not all of the silence out.

I'd rather not take a chance on the hardware's abilities and prefer to have gapless files to begin with.  Just my two penn'orth.....

[jerfilm]

Well if its too annoying, one can always load the whole piece into Audacity and snip out the "pauses" and export it in one piece.  Takes a bit of time, but if one is truly annoyed.......

Jerry

[Ilja]

That would take a LOT of time, though...


Oh, the fond memories of the time when in order to hear the entire first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, you were asked to tolerate a fade-out and fade-in in mid-movement as you turned the LP...

[bulleid_pacific]

Yes, that's true.

Alternatively, discs like that can be ripped so that the whole work is in one large file.  That eliminates the problem too.

I won't ever use mp3 though.  A 5Tb external HDD now costs just over £100 from some UK sellers.  That's enough for around 15,000 CDs in FLAC.  Another way of looking at that is that you are paying 0.7 pence to store each CD.  Even with a backup drive, that's only 1.4 pence per disc.  CD audio compression is simply a waste of time now.

[sdtom]

good point but I've used Wave files.

[bulleid_pacific]

WAV files take up around twice as much space as FLAC.  Although they offer no advantages over FLAC (or APE) - all are lossless - it's fine to use them as you'll still get 7,500 CDs on a 5Tb drive 

[Ilja]

"CD audio compression is simply a waste of time now"

It isn't when your only computing device isn't a desk-bound computer. Storage for laptops, let alone cloud storage, is still fairly expensive. For those devices, some form of compression is still a bonus.

[TerraEpon]

It boggles me anyone would ever use uncompressed over losslessly compressed. There's zero benefits with wav files. You can't even add metadata without some weird trickery.

[bulleid_pacific]

@ Ilja : Point taken. 

But nothing at all prevents the connection of a huge external HDD to a laptop via USB.  I admit it's not very portable, but you wouldn't want to cart your entire library from place to place anyway. 

I'm not against people using mp3 at all, but for people starting to rip a large collection from scratch it's important they make informed choices.  Rip a few thousand CDs to mp3 and you can't change your mind later without doing it all again!

[mc ukrneal]

When I first started, I needed to travel a lot and mp3 was the only way I could get all my music on one portable external drive. Today, with drives at 4TB, someone just starting out should use FLAC. Assuming 3 cds per GB, you'd get roughly 9k discs on a 4TB drive assuming 1 TB used for other stuff (say, pictures and work files). Even so, by the time you get close to filling it up, it's likely a 6TB or 8TB portable drive will become available.

[sdtom]

It boggles me anyone would ever use uncompressed over losslessly compressed. There's zero benefits with wav files. You can't even add metadata without some weird trickery.

What possible difference does it make if I send the file to a CD? I have an unlimited amount of blank CD's. Do the MP3's sound better?
Tom

[Ilja]

But nothing at all prevents the connection of a huge external HDD to a laptop via USB.  I admit it's not very portable, but you wouldn't want to cart your entire library from place to place anyway.

I would. And I'm doing a fair bit of carting. But MP3 is hardly ideal, I'll admit that; most of my CDs are converted to 192Mbps AAC, and I'm damned if I can hear the difference between that and the original CD.

[sdtom]

I'm not portable at all. If people want to listen they are welcome to come over. I've never gotten passed not being to listen to my music on 4 high quality older speakers with a high end pioneer amp and marantz CD.

[jerfilm]

Well, multiple terrabyte drives do not have to be huge.   I have several Passport drives - smaller than a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes.  how much more portable can we get?   Hmmmm, probably alot......

Jerry

[sdtom]

I understand there will be one terrabyte flash drives pretty soon