Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Thinking about using the iTunes 9.1 feature of converting stuff to 128kps AAC to the iPod (vast majority of my collection is 200-256 kbps MP3). Is there going to be a noticeable quality difference? I mean, clearly there's an enormous gap from 128 to 200+ MP3 that I could tell even on shitty jogging headphones, but I don't have many AAC files to compare.

I use 128 AAC and it sounds decent enough for me!

Moka, what bands are filed under Bamboojazz?

― fuckin' raggett... how does that work? (Whiney G. Weingarten)

I created bamboojazz almost with the sole purpose of drinking piña coladas and margaritas on late summer evenings. Last year a couple of friends were obsessed with margaritas so this was sort of our pre-party soundtrack before the night took over. It's mostly comprised of afro-latin jazz with a laidback spirit.

Here are a few of the artists and songs:

Yusef Lateef - The Plum Blossom
Nina Simone - See-line Woman
Kenny Burrell - Moon and Sand
Dorothy Ashby - Lonely girl
Fortin-Léveillé - Soleil
Jorge Ben -Oba la vem ela
Coleman Hawkins & Ben Webster - La rosita
Smokey & Miho - Consolação
Dexter Gordon - Love for Sale
Stanley Turrentine - Wave
Caetano Veloso - Manhata
Gato Barbieri - Tupac Amaru
Herbie Mann - Coming Home Baby
Coralie Clément - Samba de Mon Coeur Qui Bat
Paul Desmond - Samba Cantina
Cannonball Adderley & the Bossa Rio Sextet - O Amor Em Paz
Maria Rita - Dos Gardenias
Horace Silver - Qué Pasa
Sara Tavares - Lisboa Kuya
Amancio D’Silva - A Street in Bombay
Faruq Z. Bey with Northwoods Improvisers - Oncala
Yo La Tengo - Let’s Be Still

Just bought 3 CD's.

/inyoface

CDs are digital music :)

I believe that "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 Kbps AAC" is VBR. Should sound good on portable devices, especially if you're converting from Lossless. Even a transcode (from say 192 Kbps .mp3) should be ok for most users/uses.

i'd recommend keeping it at least 192kbps

What I meant is that I have physical copies.

/inyodoubleface

I had an audio CD that someone had burned for me from ITunes, and I tried to rip it to MP3, and it did not sound good - the new MP3s sounded notably inferior to the burned CD. I wonder if going from lossy format to lossy format is worse than going from lossless to lossy and vice versa. Like the bits that get left out become more noticeable or something.

Yeah for AAC I like 192, though AAC 128 sounds good for most things except stuff like symphonic recordings with v wide dynamic range.

Kind of want to hear that Bamboojazz playlist now.

FWIW, when I talk about 128 AAC, I'm only talking about iphone/ipod, and only for storage sake. I'm currently backing up everything in Apple Lossless for archive and around the house listening.

I may have mentioned this upthread, but I've gone 256 AAC or 320 MP3 across the board. Space is cheap.

I had an audio CD that someone had burned for me from ITunes, and I tried to rip it to MP3, and it did not sound good - the new MP3s sounded notably inferior to the burned CD. I wonder if going from lossy format to lossy format is worse than going from lossless to lossy and vice versa. Like the bits that get left out become more noticeable or something.

― o. nate, Saturday, April 10, 2010 5:01 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

this is the equivalent of crossing the streams

DON'T DO THIS

Yeah, transcoding is generally bad and will give you generational defects. I wish there were more settings than just the one for the iPod transfer/transcode, because I'm skittish about deleting 14 gigs off the iPod, having iTunes do all the conversion and upload which I'm sure will take hours, then being unhappy with it and having to wipe/resync it all again.

There are no good options for upgrading my current setup - you can get a custom 240gb iPod with Rockbox but there's no way to sync playstats back and that's critical for me. For small, microSD expandable players, they all seem to have an 8000 track limit. What's a music obsessive to do? Thin the heard!

Off with all the Billy Bragg bonus discs, replace The Jam box set with just "Snap!", remove the Go-Beteeens 2CD reissues and listen to "1978-1990" (which I always kinda preferred), bye-bye to various live shows and radio session compilations. Hey, now I've got room for lots more stuff, starting with the Dead Can Dance box (instead of all the individual albums). Ah, the compromises one must make...

You can always kidnap your favourite artist and then store them in the basement and threaten to put powdered glass in their dogfood unless they perform yr favourite numbers to at least flac standard.

worst topic ever

So you're saying you regret ever starting it?

nah, i was just trolling

tbh, a year later, all i care about now is waiting for iTunes or Google to start up a compelling cloud music service \(^o^)/

i'm more or less of the mind that either buying a record or streaming is the way to go, especially since CD prices are pretty loooooooooool right now

Yeah, I hear you. The next cellphone I get will be an Android phone and I'm gonna try streaming my collection but I worry about the sound quality. I'm trying to embrace the less-is-more philosophy but it goes against my nature!

cloud storage will never really do it for me since i still get a lot of use of my offline ipod outside, and internet connections will always have some degree of unreliability, even at home. it's a fantastic option so you don't have to backup all your music, as long as you could download your own copies as well (RIP lala)

have pretty much gone over to buying mp3 albums now after years of reticence - only maybe 1/4th or less of my album purchases are still on CD, since the competition out there now means lot of albums go on sale often now via amazon, itunes, 7digital, etc. - especially when they're below the $5 mark they start to get more irresistible

cloud storage will not mean you're streaming everything and constantly need an internet connection

when done correctly, it will let you temporarily put the music on your device so you can access it even without a connection, then release those files back to the cloud to free up space

I believe Spotify already lets you copy stuff from the cloud, but someone who's actually used the service would be a more reliable source to talk to about that

My biggest concern re: flac is for iTunes' awful support of it.

I'm considering buying a huge hard drive soon and either replacing my MP3 collection or just starting with lossless from now on.

Thing is, how do FLAC users play in iTunes? I'm on a Mac so foobar/etc won't work. What about FLAC on your iPhone/iPod. I'm not using FLAC just to keep the original copies I want to play from it. Is there a plugin or something that solves all these issues?

I use Fluke

http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/

another option would be to switch to Apple Lossless (however that locks you in to their proprietary format).

all that said, are you sure you can accurately pick apart the differences between high quality mp3s and lossless?

I'll give Fluke a look. As for picking the differences apart its in part a future preservation thing, part a - I'm using my hifi over laptop speakers now and do convince myself I can hear the difference then, and also I make a lot of mix CDs for people, I'd rather make a mix from lossless files so when they rip it at 128 at least its not a transcode from V0 to 128, which at that difference I would notice.

Plus storage is so cheap now I don't see the point not using the best.

using a piece of software named Fluke is just asking for your computer to blow up

I am now using a Cowon portable player, so I finally had an excuse to convert the remaining 700 or so albums in my hard drive that weren't in flac yet. typical format issues, the Cowon won't play AIFF or Apple Lossless, but it will play flacs. fwiw I can definitely tell, when something is on shuffle, whether it is MP3 or lossless. my opinion at this point is basically "fuck iTunes, fuck Apple and fuck their proprietary bs".

I might give Fluke a look, but I have so much damn music there's no way I can put it all into iTunes anyway. I might as well leave it in well organized folders, I can throw them into VLC to play or onto the portable to take to work.

Josh L - Since you own a Mac, you're likely comfortable with being stuck with Apple apps (I don't mean that in a snarky way). Nothing wrong with Apple Lossless. An old friend visited last weekend who's a Mac person. He brought an old 80G hard drive and a wantlist, and I simply set my dbpoweramp batch converter to convert from flac to Apple Lossless straight to his drive. Overnight he had a drive stuffed with music without a kb to spare.

PMP players - I still use my 6 year-old 1GB Samsung, which works fine as I only use it for a 40-50 min commute to work, mostly newly downloaded MP3 albums that I screen before deciding to buy or not. I've been waiting for a non-iPod player that both plays flac files and has more than 64GB capacity, and am still waiting. A digital out would be nice too so I can use a portable DAC/amp with good headphones for trips when I want some good sound quality.

Apple Lossless - it's not technically lossless. While a CDs can go up to 22000 Hz, Apple lossless actually compresses it to a high quality VBR that cuts off at 20000.

Not that it's really important at all, most people can't hear past that anyway... But it's still not lossless.

any references for that claim?

When I download flac files I convert them to wavs using MacFlac prior to importing them into iTunes. I then convert them again to AAC within iTunes for listening – unless sound quality is such an issue that I really need the wavs, which is rare

Well technically no audio reproduction is lossless I guess, if that's what he means - but I imagine it's a bit of disinformation.

Isn't it though? Not sure about audio, but with images, there are mathematical formulas that make the files smaller without removing anything. There's no reason why lossless audio compression can't be completely lossless. Like with images, lossless compression relies on redundancy. The way I imagine it, and this may be wrong but I think it's the gist of it, if an image has a big area that's all white, instead of saying "white pixel here, white pixel here," thousands of times, it just says "all of those pixels over there are white". Lossless audio probably works similarly.

yeah I tried googling to see if apple lossless is really actually lossy. I can't imagine why they would compress the highs, the amount of data saved would be extremely negligible.

Might as well revive this one -- later today I'll be appearing on a friend and coworker's KUCI show, Our Digital Future, talking about music, music libraries etc. Much more on the casual side of things than deep and professional I suspect. You can tune in via http://www.kuci.org/ -- it'll start at 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time and will be archived later at http://ziba.kuci.org

I probably can't be bothered to tune in during dinnertime hour w/ family, but please do post a link to the archived show!

woah, this threads anniversary is this sunday

definitely want to listen to this

Hey Ned, does anybody at kuci pronounce it "coochie"? I know I would.

I'm sure it's been done...but not on the air. Necessarily.

Anyway, show starts in just under an hour, etc.

And about on. Post questions/thoughts as you like -- the talk may be a bit of a ramble!

just tuned in

That was fun -- didn't really touch on the issues of this thread per se but I liked being able to talk about New Order Recycle a bit!

got to listen to a chunk of this. good job Ned!

Too kind. The conversation as archived:

http://ziba.kuci.org/post/974943436/ned-raggett-on-our-digital-future-more-info

I finally got an Android phone and installed Subsonic media server & app. Now I can securely access my entire collection almost anywhere and it downloads the tracks locally for when I don't have coverage. Woohoo!

Thinking about Sonos vs Squeezebox. Sounds like Squeezebox has better sound quality and cheaper, but Sonos doesn't need a computer running all the time, and is easier to set up. What to do what to do.

I love my squeezebox.

I love mine too.

I'm not very familiar with Sonos, but judging from their web site, it's quite similar to Squeezebox. If you want to listen to your own digital music collection, you'll still need to have a computer running somewhere.