[geeks] Audio Recording

[Dan Sikorski]

On 1/25/2011 9:38 AM, 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.
>

I guess i misstated what i really meant.  Either store uncompressed or 
use a lossless compression.  Or more simply stated:  Don't go though a 
bunch of effort to rip from analog, then store it in a lossy format.

> 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.
>

To me, FLAC is a very usable format.  I have both software on my 
computers as well as portable media players that use it.  Unfortunately, 
while my home theater receiver does FLAC playback, it has a hard time 
with 24 bit FLAC.  And by hard time, i mean, there's a bunch of static 
and little music.

> 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.

I think we're in agreement one one thing:  If you don't want to go back 
to the tapes, rip and store in the highest quality that you can stand to 
deal with.

     -Dan Sikorski