[geeks] Audio Recording

[Shannon]

On 25-Jan-2011 09:38, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> 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.

Lot of CPU time on old hardware sure.

But even my 3 year old Mac does flac so fast it can sometimes outrun the 
hard drive write speed.

Drives are cheap, but still not trivial for me to buy, and more than 
that it saves me a lot of transfer time to use flac.

The time flac saves me is hundreds to thousands of times what it costs 
up front, even not including the benefit of fewer storage drives and 
backups.