Helium Music Manager User Forum

[muzicman82]

Ok, so with the brand new 160GB iPod Classic arriving next week, this gives me over twice as much room. To celebrate, I plan on re-ripping a lot of my CDs.

I'm curious as to what format and bitrate you all suggest. I've been previously doing 192 kbps to be consistent with the rest of my library, but I began building it circa 1998, which was really high then. I had them on a 40MB Iomega Click Drive player (I was on the beta team!).

So, I suppose the candidates for iPod support reasonably speaking are AAC and MP3. I suppose 256 kbps VBR would be a nice update? Any reason to choose AAC over MP3?

And, if you don't think I'll hear the sound quality improvement, believe me.. I will. You see, I work for a pro audio company full time.. and do recording and such as well. I can certainly hear the difference between 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio and 24-bit/192 kHz audio. So, I know right off that re-ripping will benefit. I'm just deciding to what extent I want to do this.

[Tirmellon]

I'm curious as to what format and bitrate you all suggest.

FLAC
Lossless Quality for your CDs. If you need MP3 or AAC transcode them "live" when you want to use them on the portable player.

/Mathias

[muzicman82]

How does that compare to Apple Lossless, besides being sans-Apple?

What is it's bitrate? My only concern there would be diskspace, even though I have plenty. Is there a calculator on the web?

[Tirmellon]

Take a look here:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=FLAC

[muzicman82]

Thanks for info folks. I did a little comparison. Check it out here -

http://www.muzicman82.net/2007/09/07/to-flac-or-not-a-lossless-vs-mp3-comparison/

[PC Pete]

Muzicman, I also need to make and keep "archival quality" recordings.

I've been using 192k/24bit PCM for quite a while as my "archival standard", but of course it doesn't play nice in any of the "commercial" desktop players (Helium included, unfortunately).

I deal almost exclusively with terribly degraded audio (both audio and the media are almost irretrievably damaged in most cases), so my needs are a bit different to most MP3/M4A "high end" listeners. In particular, I need to record completely from broken, warped, scratched, melted, bitten, vomit- and mould-encrusted material. Not your average iPod rips.

I was lucky enough to have a real good play with a Korg MR1000 last year, and it totally blew me away. It uses 1-bit WSD/DSD format, and downconverts beautifully to 192k/24. And my current sound setup plays 192k/24 natively, which is just a lot of fun. So that little bitty Korg box set a very high standard...

I've also tried FLAC, Apple "lossless" and other minimally-lossy format converters to try and reduce the amount of disk space being consumed by my collection of historical and cultural (and some modern) recordings. Current disk space is 3.1Tb and climbing.

Like you, I tried doing filter conversions in Audition 2, and found essentially the same thing as you. It's just so hard to objectively compare the different formats! Especially in a subjective area like "audio quality".

The 2 biggest problems I've found with converting really high-res PCM are 1) Most (all!) lossless encoders (including the latest, otherwise very impressive MPEG4 H-AAC) are really only capable of handling 96k/24 bit due to the processing requirements of real-time encoding and decoding; and 2) the TIM (transient intermodulation distortion) that occurs with nearly all the psycho-acoustic models is just anathema to older recordings. Especially since I need to maintain the tiniest nuance of the original recording!

The new RFC64 RIFF standard proposal, like the MPEG4 and newer encoders, do support up to 18 channels and extra data and so on, but it seems that the world has "decided" to use MP3 192k as the standard "portable" audio format, and 96k/24 bit as the new broadcast standard. So folks like me (and I accept that I'm a corner case, if not a basket case) are left swinging in the wind.

I'm not a pro, I'm just a self-trained ex-PC guru with too much time on my hands, but if you or anyone else can find a good, mathematically lossless encoder that works with high-bitrate, high-sampledepth PCM files, I'd love to hear from you!

I can (and do) play back natively at 192k/24 bit , and even with my non-expert ears, it is perfectly possible to clearly hear the difference between a well-balanced high-bitrate, high-complexity, well-recorded MP3/MP4A file and a minimally acceptable 196k/24 PCM of the same source material recorded under identical conditions through the same hardware.

But then I can't fit a single track of an original vinyl album on the biggest iPod in existence! That's where I need to compromise

Archiving files is one thing. Making sure they're playable in 5 years' time is another. And let's not get started on the MS proprietary formats...

Meanwhile, I'm back to FLAC 8-ing my archive and hoping for the best.

[Shenzhou]

I use MP3 and the V0 "Extreme" VBR switch as a standard for my music collection. Almost no difference between it and lossless music to my ear and it's way smaller than FLAC or other similar lossless formats. I'd need like 500GB for only 13000 songs if I'd be completely lossless. That would be crazy... but not for everyone according to what I see. 500GB hard drives cost about $100.00 nowadays so it's pretty much affordable.

[PC Pete]

Shenzou, have you compared the MP3 recordings to MP4 AAC? The compression levels are the same or slightly better, and at the same bitrate as MP3, the psycho-acoustic modelling sounds noticeably better. Even I was amazed at the clarity. And I'm a PCM snob!

Plus, the AAC-HE compressor allows for things like more channels, multiple different stereo encodings, and it's almost as free as MP3. The downside is that because it's computationally more complex, some "borderline" MP3 players won't handle it.

I listened to a comparison a couple of weeks ago, between 192k CBR MP3 and 128k VBR MP4 (AAC-HE), and the MP4 was audibly better on all music content, especially the more complex audio passages, and even more on material with large channel separation (like Pink Floyd's "Time" on "Dark Side of the Moon"). You won't go back to MP3 after hearing MP4 (M4A is the audio-only filetype I think).

[willo]

My take on this format issue is two-fold:
-for quality, lossless is the only way to go. Since all lossless formats produce identical sound, the choice between lossless formats comes down to availability of tools and other factors (such as personal dislike of propriety formats).
-caring a lot about about slight quality differences between lossy formats is a moot point IMO. If you really care about the quality, lossless is the way to go anyway. Therefore, as for lossy formats my choice is the most compatible format (i.e. mp3)

For me this means keeping my master collection in lossless format (in my case flac) and making lossy copies as I need them (for portable use).

BTW, Until online music stores start to offer music in lossless (and DRM-free, at the very least not with proprietary DRM ) formats, they won't see a dime of my money.