Re: [ARSCLIST] Soundcard/iTunes phollies

[Peter Rothstein <prothstein@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom,

I stayed with WAVs because I figured that since HDs were inexpensive enough
I would insure against the need to transcode in the future if any given
lossless codec stopped being supported (I think that FLAC or others "only"
reduce to roughly 1/2 the size of a WAV anyway).  I did try ripping and
compressing using EAC, just for kicks, and it seemed to work OK.  For the
WAVs I had to figure out a filenaming system that preserved the track
information, since WAVs don't have tags (as far as I know), and my library
software made it easy to parse the names to make "tags" for its use.  If I
was encoding, I might rip first and then just let my library software (I use
J River Media Center, it's also pretty versatile) batch encode, since I
think doing it at the ripping stage would create a logjam.

The server approach has really improved my access to and use of the music I
have, but it really did make me think more about what kind of support will
remain for all of the various formats as time goes on (let alone if I'll be
able to view my JPGs, RAW Files, read my PDFs and DOCs...).  

Peter Rothstein


-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 6:56 PM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Soundcard/iTunes phollies

Hi Peter:

I think we have many fellow fans of EAC here, but did you use it to extract
WAV or to extract and 
then reduce to MP3 using attached LAME encoding? For WAV extraction, I don't
think it's easy to beat 
EAC (and you really can't beat the price). I've long thought about doing
what you did -- extracting 
all my CD audio into hard drives -- but the places I listen to music in my
house (studio, media room 
next to studio, workshop next to media room and living room upstairs) are
all interconnected with 
balanced audio lines and all have reasonably good CD players. So I don't
really have a need to go 
through the effort. Now that I have a new generation iPod, I might stop
ripping into my pod library 
as MP3 (192CBR) and switch to Apple Lossless Format or WAV. I haven't
decided that yet.

-- Tom Fine