It would be great if v3 played FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis.

I wonder I wonder I wonder if my dream will come true

Rob

Greetings!

Okay! You got my attention!

I dread the thought of re-ripping everything (I don't have the time to spare), but if it means lossless compression, I will do it. I have never ripped to FLAC. Any good recommendations on rippers / encoders / methodologies?

Of course, if the files are significantly larger than what I have now, I might have to wait until I can upgrade my drives again...

Aw, man, you don't play the game fair.

Tease.

He could tease for England...

any chance this flac wish list also applies to pearl?

any chance this flac wish list also applies to pearl?

Well. Let's just say that the main reason we're getting a 3.0 carplayer release is so that 4000 people can guinea-pig the audio engine they're working on right now...

YOU MEAN WE'RE BEING USED?!

<contemplative pause>

cool!

Of course, if the files are significantly larger than what I have now, I might have to wait until I can upgrade my drives again...

Flac files tend to come out about 1,000 kbits/s, or about five times the size of good quality MP3s. Anyone with two 80G drives in their empeg would need to wait for 400G notebook drives to come out, which on past form is at least a couple of years.

In case Roger doesn't mention it, a good way to use flac files is to rip everything to flac, keep it somewhere, and have a small script that runs through all the flacs encoding them to MP3, or whatever the lossy format du jour is. That way, if a new lossy format -- Vorbis, say, or AAC -- comes along, it only takes a small script tweak and a few CPU-weeks to redo everything in that format, and not all that tiresome CD-shuffling.

Peter

Indeed this is the way to go! I have 1300 songs (~130CDs) taking up 35gig, ~26 meg/song.

The advantage is if you have a sports MP3 player, you can go FLAC -> Low qual MP3 (flash devices) or to HQ MP3 for things like ipod and empeg without having to keep pullling the CD out. 200G PC drives can be had for $150 now...

But I'd love to keep it in FLAC, if possible. It'd make it worth my while to get a 40G laptop drive. I spent so much on my car audio system that using lossy compression is almost a sin.

Is there an ETA on 3.0 betas yet?

Yeah I've just now learned of the wonders of FLAC. I've wanted to try it before, but was just too lazy. I've just started to rerip all of my CD's into FLAC using EAC and find it absolutely wonderful. TIme for my terabox and lots of space in my empeg!

Flac files tend to come out about 1,000 kbits/s

So that's about 30% savings compared to WAV, right?
Not all that impressive, IMHO. I remember reading about
some other lossless format that was supposed to save up
to 50%. But I forgot what it was. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Pim

Lossless Codec Comparison, courtesy of FLAC guy.

Hey, as long as 3.0 can crossfade mp3s I'll be happy !

Wouldn't the 8MB of RAM on a Mk1 and 12MB on a MkII be stretched thin with a technology like this? (FLAC)

It should just mean that the hard drive will have to spin up more often.

Wouldn't the 8MB of RAM on a Mk1 and 12MB on a MkII be stretched thin with a technology like this? (FLAC)

I think that regardless of the RAM, the hard disk would remain spinning almost continuously...

In reply to:

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I think that regardless of the RAM, the hard disk would remain spinning almost continuously...

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Why would you say that? If there's enough RAM, the drives should be able to spin down. Given a CD is around 10 megs/minute and a FLAC is around 5-7 megs/minute, you should go close to around 2 minutes cached (on a Mk2a at least).

Also remember that the player plays WAVs (albeit with some occasional skipping according to maczrool) and they are bigger than FLACs. Dunno if it spins the drives down, but I would guess it would

So that's about 30% savings compared to WAV, right? Not all that impressive, IMHO.

OK, I've now ripped a few more songs as Flac, and it seems that the first few I chose (the first of all was United States Of Whatever) came out at the top end of the size range. Looking at a few more, they seem to come out anywhere between 500 and 1000 kbits/s, averaging maybe 850kbits/s for Royksopp and 750kbits/s for Simon and Garfunkel. That's about 40-45% less than the original WAV.

Peter

I'm with Brad, cross-fading is what I'm eagerly waiting for. Though I'd also love some album-centric commands. And a way to uniquely identify tracks belonging to the same source in addition to the source field (in case of albums with the same name)

Bruno

You are correct. My 35 gig collection took 60 gigs. I was expecting it to take 40, but it's at 35. I know this because I only had a couple meg free when I had ripped all my CDs on my empty 60 gig. Then I converted all to ogg. All in all, 60%*wavsize=ogg size, for my music which is all forms of rock. It seems that disortion-plentiful music is ~60% and distortion-free runs ~40%.

out of interest, what are you using to rip and encode to flac and output mp3s?

I use CDEX (availiblel from sourceforge.net) for ripping to WAV and
then this thing called dbMusic amp to convert to FLAC. It consists of selecting a bunch of files in explorer and right click and select "convert to..."
I'd love to have a win-PC command line utility that could recurse dirs though!

I use EAC and FLAC. Great results.

I use EAC and FLAC. Great results.

I was actually wondering about this. I had made an attempt to rip a CD using this combination, but was unsuccessful. I kept thinking I must have typed something wrong, or that I needed to go back over FLAC's command line options. Would you mind sharing how yours is set up?

Yeah it took me a while to get it right. I'm at work, so this is what I got right off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure this is what I'm using

-V -T "title=%t" -T "artist=%a" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s -o %d

I think I'm going to include a -T "comment=FLAC 1.1.0 & EAC" so I know what I used to encode it. Otherwise it just puts in "Track 1" "Track 2" etc.