What the FLAC!

OK, so as requested by some friends, I'm going to post so more detail on what I'm doing with my music; besides simply listening to it!

I've always strived to have the best quality music that was possible, quickly moving from tapes to CD when they were introduced all those years ago. Once I started driving, I found I was carrying loads of CDs with me, which was inconvenient, expensive and a lot of them got lost or damaged.

I'd been monitoring the growth of mp3 and the illegal downloading culture as it grew and I had a few issues with it:

• I don't like having just odd songs, I want the whole album.
• I don't want poor quality audio, CD is a known entity, something I can trust.
• There is as I've said before a certain tactile appeal in owning the original discs.
• It's illegal, and I'm not supporting the artists.

These things prevented me for a time, from moving to mp3, but it was in the iPod in the end that did it...

The iPod is a fantastic peice of kit, and it allowed me to carry all of my music everywhere I went, including, with the relevant line in adaptors, in the car.

So I set about ripping all of my music to mp3. I wanted to make sure that all of my CDs were converted to mp3 in the best possible quality onto the iPod so that I wouldn't feel like I was making a compromise for the sake of convenience.

I found a website suggesting the use of Exact Audio Copy, and an mp3 codec called Lame. I followed the instructions on this website and had mp3s that I was very happy with on my iPod, perfect for listening in the car, or on the move.

For home, I still was still using CDs, but I could see that this wasn't the future, I was impressed with the convenience of mp3 on my iPod but still wasn't happy with quality. The iPod is great, but it's not a peice of Hi-Fi equipment after all.

I did some research into audiophile digital music players and came up with the Squeezebox from Slim Devices (Now owned by Logitech). This device has an optical output, and high end DAC chips, so it should make the best of the mp3s that I'd created. Functionally this product is amazing, but I was still disappointed - mp3s just don't sound as involving as a CD, though to be honest, this is only really a problem when you sit down and enjoy listening on a quality Hi-Fi system; but I do like to do that, so I had to find a solution.

What I've settled on now is FLAC. FLAC is an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec. When encoded with Flac, file sizes are smaller than the raw file, but no data is lost at all. The best thing about Flac though, is that the Squeezebox can decompress and play these files in the player itself, again, with no loss of data.

You may not be aware, but a CD player is made of three sections or stages:

1. The transport - which reads data from the disc, and trys to correct for errors as it reads. The transport feeds it's digital output to the next stage...
2. The DAC or digital to audio convertor - which converts the digital signal into an analogue audio signal which is then fed to the next stage...
3. The Audio Stage - which makes sure that the signals are at the correct level to go into your amplifier.

A lot of CD players now have a digital ouput to bypass stages 2 and 3, so that you can use dedicated stage 2 and 3 equipment that potentially could do a better job. This makes the CD player into a transport, a poor quality one will introduce more errors into the digital signal as it can't fix all the read errors as it plays the disc.

The squeezebox recieves the digital audio file as a digital stream, so doesn't have stage 1, it does have stages 2 and 3, but it also has a digital output. It therefore stands to reason that if I use an uncompressed or Flac compressed file into the squeezebox, and use the digital outputs of both devices, the only differences in the audio will be down to the transports used to play the disc (in real time in the CD player, or previously when I ripped the CD in the computer).

The key thing here then is that if I take the time to rip the CD perfectly, using a squeezebox will give me convenience of not having all my discs lying around, as well as the potential audio quality of the best CD transport or player ever made!

I did a little more research into Exact Audio Copy and I now use a very secure way of ripping discs that makes sure that all of the data is read more than once, with checksums for each track compared. If the drive has to do any error correction, it will read the area several times to make sure that a huge majority of the resultant data is the same, before it will accept this as the real data that should have been read.

All of this over the top process results in a rip from the CD which is far superior to a conventional CD player, which can only read in real time, and have to trust the first error correction that they create. To rip each disc does take a long time having said that, around an hour per CD, compared to around 10 mins if I used Media Player or iTunes. 

The raw ripped audio files are then compressed in two ways, Flac for my Squeezebox, and mp3 for my iPod, Media Center Extenders, and XBox.

I now have a system that I am very happy with, It gives me convenience, as well as an increase in audio quality over listening to CDs in the conventional way!

One thing that I didn't mention is that over the last few years, I did start downloading digital audio files, but now I'm going back and righting my wrongs, buying original CDs of everything I've ever downloaded.

If you'd like any more details of how I've set up Exact Audio Copy, please do get in touch, I'm more than happy to help.

Comments

[Hyperboy78]

Don't get me started!!....