Future Proofing Your Digital Music.
April 22, 2008 – 8:59 pmNo one will argue that the MP3 audio compression codec has changed the world. It makes it possible for us to fit 1000s of songs in our pockets and eases the bandwidth impact of streaming audio. But is this it? Is MP3 the end? Of course not. Dozens of similar codecs have come along since the rise of MP3. Windows Audio, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis are just a few and they all claim to have some advantage over MP3. For instance Ogg is open source and royalty free. AAC claims better sound at certain bitrates. WMA…well fuck WMA, but for some reason people use it. There will be more. Better sounding music at smaller file sizes is inevitable.
What is the biggest problem with these codecs? They are all lossy. For those that don’t know, lossy means that the music file is not an exact copy of the source audio. Generally, certain frequencies (the frequencies we humans can’t hear) are stripped from the source audio. In addition, the audio has a reduced bitrate (less data per second is captured). So what you get is actually less than the original recording. Few people can tell in a blind challenge, but there is a loss of audio data. This is okay if you intend to keep the MP3 files forever, but if you ever need to convert to another lossy format you will lose additional audio data. Also there is no way to go to a higher quality file from an existing lossy file. It’s forever set at the quality it was encoded at. If you hope to roll with the changes you need lossless audio.
Lossless audio is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an exact copy of the source audio. A standard 75 minute audio CD holds 650 megabytes of data. Most CDs aren’t 75 minutes so they use a lot less space. If the album takes up 550 MB on the CD, then it will take up 550 MB on the hard drive. The most basic uncompressed audio format is WAV and it’s an exact copy of the CD audio (assuming the PC didn’t get any errors from scratches and chips on the CD). Ripping your CDs to WAV is not a terrible idea. You can convert WAV to any audio codec and WAV will always be supported by future audio software. Since hard drives are getting larger and cheaper, you could rip and store all your audio long term in WAV. The drawback is that the files take up a lot of space, maybe more than you can afford to use right now. So what do you do? You convert the WAV files to FLAC.
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It allows you to retain WAV quality while using 30-50% less disk space. FLAC also supports audio tags (like artist, album, and track number) and cover art. It all gets embedded in the file. Many software and hardware players support FLAC natively, so you may not even need to convert. You can even convert FLAC back to WAV with zero loss. Its nice to know that no matter what audio codecs get invented, you will be able to convert to the latest and greatest with no audio loss. At 300 or 400 MB per album, you can fit over a 1000 albums on a 500 GB hard drive. You can get a 500 GB hard drive for under $100. I’d say $100 is worth protecting your music into the future.
