[geeks] Audio Recording

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 09:18:02AM -0500, Dan Sikorski wrote:
>I'm assuming that the live performances mentioned in the original 
>post are music, and not spoken word or anything else.  I would go for 
>a lossless codec (FLAC) regardless of how good you think they sound 
>now. 

This makes no sense to me at all. If you use audacity or another similar
program it's going to keep the samples as uncompressed data. Back in the
days that a CD was bigger than any hard drive you could buy, it made
sense to compress the data to store it.

This puts about 8-9 hours of raw samples on a DVD-5 and you can do the
math for a cheap USB external drive. So compressing them with FLAC,
which takes a lot of CPU time and only saves about 50% of space does not
seem to be a big bargain to me.

If you need to convert FLAC to a useable format, e.g. MP3 or AAC, you
need to uncompress it (again at a heavy CPU price) before you recompress
it. Then you need some sort of program to re-create the tag information
from the FLAC file to the MP3 file. IMHO a big waste of time.

So my suggestion is to keep the raw files as they are, and save them to
backup media. Convert them to whatever your player plays and you are
happy with and use them. In a year that player will not be that good
anyway, and in five, you'll want to go back to the original files and
recompress them with whatever sounds better and your player takes.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.