*hrhr* Thanks for the warm welcome, folks
.
You are right, mp3s are smaller, but does that make them better ?
Once I was a mp3-advocate as well and furthermore very conservative and
sceptical. Changes were principally bad for me. I was full of prejudices against
every change. But for ripping my
christmas present, which meant very much for me, I
decided to inform myself, because I want to achieve the best possible quality.
And what was that ? 320k, of course, what else ?
So I happened to find a forum for amateure and sound engineers, so
the place for persons, who deal with sound on another level then the gal next
door... a lot more professional. And there me was told, that ripping this nice
discography in 320k is a waste of time, if I want to achieve perfect quality.
I didn't believe them that 'something better than 320k ? No way, that's the
optimum ! ' . Nevertheless I gave it a try, because these people really knew
what they're talking about. I ripped one album in mp3 (320k) and one in FLAC.
And trust me, it WAS a difference, a great one.
After this comparision mp3s turned out to
- NOT maintain the dynamic range of the original-CD
- an akustical loss in detail
- it didn't happen often, but there were some gitches at some songs
But FLAC was just flawless and perfect. You didn't only heard the song, but
also FELT the song !
You all certainly know WinRAR, don't you ?
And lossless Codec's like APE, or FLAC practically are the 'WinRAR of music' .
It compresses the music to 50 % of the original size and it carries a great feature:
You can decompress the file and the result is the original file !
So once you have ripped your favourite album with FLAC or APE, you have the
exact album, every single tiny bit on this disc, as a digital version on your
computer ! And you'll greatly appreciate this fact once the years passes and
time left some hearable marks on your CD
.
Nice to know and making lossless audio-compression even more credible:
Even music-labels change their gigantic music archives over to FLAC or APE !
Well, that's pretty revealing, isn't it ?
I deleted every mp3 on my computer and changed over to lossless audio-
compression as well. I just fed up with never having the guaranty of a
rip without gitches and having to accept less quality than an original-CD
provides. In the past I paranoidly listened to every second of the track to
discover possible gitches... you could never know... and sadly I even found some
!
Nowadays I just lean back, have a look at the log-file, and normally read
something like
' Peak level 98.5 %
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC EE8FCF8E
Copy CRC EE8FCF8E
<<< *
Copy OK '
this is a check sum to make sure that everything worked fine, if
the test and copy CRC is the same, the physical track on the original-CD and the
rip are identic and without any mistakes or differences
and then I know, everything is fine, there's nothing to be concerned.
Don't you want to enjoy MACHINA II the same way ?
Sure, it takes a lot more space, but hey, it's not the 90ies anymore, it's 2006 !
dsl-flatrates and huge HDDs are totally affordable and such equipment is not
luxury anymore ! I recently bought a 300 GB-HDD for 80 bucks and pay
50 bucks for a 2-mb- dsl-flatrate AND a telephone flatrate per month ! And compared to
other countries like japan this equipment is a third world-equipment !
So the size-issue doesn't really present a serious problem anymore... now less
than ever when one considers to rip Smashing Pumpkins-albums with APE or
FLAC
.
In addition to that one lives once only ;D .
But honestly speaking I don't know why you think that mp3 is easier to
transfere. I mean, no matter with what program you rip, the first thing to do
is, to configure the settings. So why don't configure it for a lossless codec ?
Trust me, as soon as you know the true promise of lossless audio-compression
you don't want to miss it anymore and don't appreciate mp3 anymore at all.
So, do you want to really possess and enjoy ' MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies
of Modern Music ', or do you accept a kind of song sample/audio test, hm ?