If you're going to RIP CDs into your computer or streaming device, here's the best way to do it. Check out the Octave catalog: HTTP://www.octaverecor...
AIFF predates WAV so it is not correct to say that AIFF is Apples version of WAV. The technologies were developed separately. They are equivalent in terms of audio data, but the difference is in the metadata support.
I've got to rip some CD's, and holy crap this is a level of information you just don't find on YT anymore. This is going back to the 90's and early Aughts.
All fine with information provided here, only one detail is missed, and it is that we can have metadata in WAV files by using EAC (exact audio copy) software for CD RIP available online. Explanations are on CZcams and EAC software is to be used only online (require internet connection).
Not all fine. Claiming FLAC and ALAC don't sound as good as their WAV or AIFF originals is just nonsense. It's as ridiculous as believing in a flat earth.
24 bit/48Khz was the sample rate required for film and sync. They are requiring higher now, I think 24/96. And they are wanting things mixed for ATMOS a lot now too (that then can be mixed down to 2.1) Music studio only mix at 24/48 because of film studio requirements. Better to down sample than to up sample. But for demos and such they still mix at 24/44.1. (smaller files)
i am a recording and mixing engineer and i always mix any music at 48khz. the anti aliasing filters don‘t have to be so steep (reason being the gap from 20khz to 24khz is bigger than 20khz-22khz, the nyquist limits for 48 and 44khz) and don‘t influence the high frequency content as much. and the samplerate conversion algorithms have gotten so good that they don’t matter anymore. there is an awesome video on samplerates by dan worrall/fabfilter, which explains the whole topic from an engineers view.
the 2 PCM encoded formats you begin with (WAV & AIFF, including BWF & AIFC) are linear formats, vs. compressed files, lossless or otherwise. You’re right, there’s no upside to re-encoding at a higher sample rate, or greater bit depth than the source when transcoding. You allude to a 3rd-party utility. Do you mean it bypasses MacOS audio services, as configured in Audio MIDI Setup? That’s nominally dealing with diverse sample rates and bitdepths on olayback..
Great post. Any recommended rippers ? I'm going through my CD collection and want to rip to aiff for DJing, I'm wondering which ripper to either get for free or to buy ? Any recommendations much appreciated !
I bet I'm considered an antichrist here but what about mp3? I have built a library over the years with 256 kbps mp3 files and they sound fine enough, but I've never understood the difference between bitmapping type 1, 2 or 3, and I don't even know if they affect ripping or just the playback. You say "best" but everything is always a trade-off. WAV is too large and even half the size is too big with the methods you mention. If I'm not completely an audiophile but want good enough quality for a good enough file size, what about FLAC vs mp3? If I choose mp3, what sample rate etc is preferred?
Life is a trade off. :) MP3 is lossy, meaning musical information is stripped from the file and lost forever. That mostly happens in the loud passages so we don't notice it as much, but the loss is still there. FLAC is about half the file size of WAV and is the opposite. Lossless. In the end, if the MP3 files sound alright then don't worry about it.
FLAC is for shy and afraid people worried about storage. WAV is similar to "have the CD stored on your device". MP3 is the choice to listen music in a very wide variety of devices. in USB you can play on SMART TV, boombox or car audio!
Paul - I got a fair amount of info on (Apple specific) formats, but not much on ripping "methods". Can you please elaborate on methods - i.e. software, variable bit rates, mp3 compression approaches, etc.? For example, I have used Exact Audio Copy in conjunction with the Lame mpo3 codec for over 10 years... Merry Christmas!
I have become increasingly convinced over the years that a good ripping program, like that native to my MAC, is really about as good as one needs. I have used EAC (as you) and thought I might have heard a difference but now I am not so sure. Either the basic programs have gotten better or...I don't know. I just use what's native in Apple and make sure my settings are right.
I ended this argument awhile back. How? When I rip a cd using EAC I rip both the wav and flac. I just set it to now delete wav after the rip is done. lol there! Done! Storage really isn’t a problem for me.
Modern SOCs or CPUs can decode audio with no noise issue due to the decoding itself. However, there is an actual concern with any PCM decoding and playback and that is sample rate conversion and bit resolution attenuation. A frequent scenario is that your 44.1kHz CD quality bit-perfect stream can be sample rate converted to 48kHz inside your device. Imagine drawing the slope of the sound wave with level values 44,100 times per second and change that to 48,000 times. You will need to interpolate the curve to identify those new 48,000 level values of the sound wave that will exist at different moments in time. Such conversion is lossy even 48,000 is higher than 44,100, and different algorithms do sample rate conversion with different levels of audio fidelity.
@@philiptong4978 Problem is that modern operating systems are build to run multiple applications that can all play audio at various sample- and bitrates. To facilitate mixing of the multiple audio channels, one output setting is chosen and all playback sources are resampled to that rate. The biggest concern is resampling and to avoid that, you need to run in some exclusive mode where your DAC follows your media playback. Problem is that nowadays your music streaming might give you 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 96kHz, 192kHz etc. depending on what track you play. I subscribe to Amazon HD music and get music in bit perfect but haven’t found a way to automatically avoid SRC.
@@ThinkingBetter seems a pity DACs can't simply be set to play whatever files at their NATIVE resolution and format without any SRC occurring. That needs to change.
@@rosswarren436 you didn't understand anything said! The problem is when your computer plays more than one source at the same time it will be resampled
Basically, it's best to make sure your PC is not resampling. So you use wasapi or asio drivers to replace windows default audio mess. Or on Linux you can now easily edit pulse audio to output the source sample rate only.
@@joeythedime1838 probly. But MP3 is lossy and FLAC is not. I mean, the data hitting the DAC is exactly the same using FLAC or WAV... not the case with MP3.
@@joeythedime1838 or 320 Kbps AAC....Unless the music was acoustic in nature, perhaps piano or guitar, or had some well-recorded cymbal hits. Even then, only those with young ears hearing to at least 15,000 Hz and knowing what to listen for could tell. Nothing wrong with all this high res stuff, and especially with DSD going forward for future generations to have the "best" possible recording, mastering, and reproduction, but yeah, at the end of the day our ears are our ears.
Merry Christmas! Any recommendations for full CD resolution (and higher) playback software for us Windows PC users better than VLC or Foobar2000 or even Windows Media Player? How "bad" is the native Groove Music? Or do Windows based PCs not suffer as much as MACs? I really can't hear any difference (currently) between uncompressed .wav and FLAC or ALAC files. If there is jitter my old ears can't hear it. Lossy compression such as mp3 and AAC arose because storage was expensive per Megabyte and because early slow Internet was barely able to handle it. I remember Apple selling tons of 128Kbps files at full price! Jeez. Ten years ago, storage prices dropped a lot, and that continues to this day where you can get external hard drives in the 4TB to 12TB range for cheap prices. And of course, now the Internet can handle high resolution file transfers. Are we to the point that it makes sense to forego using any compression at all, even "lossless"? Sadly, I worked over many months to rip about 1200 CDs at the "best" 320 Kbps AAC rate iTunes could handle, and I know I'll never devote time to doing all that again to "lossless".
Get someone else to do it for you :-D. Or just make it a year long project. dbpoweramp is great for windows. it uses accuraterip which means if the CD is in the global database, it will rip faster when the checksum on first pass is verified with registered checksum. or not...320kbps isn't that bad at the end of the day. may make more of a difference if you plan on upgrading to more "revealing" gear.
@@osirismarbles5177 thanks. I'll look for dbpoweramp. I've been using Exact Audio Copy the last three years or so and ripping CDs bought in that time to FLAC. I'll be ripping all new CDs I get to FLAC or ALAC, but man all those old ones - well, that WAS a YEAR long project, doing a few nearly every night. LOL. Not something I really want to do again, but who knows, I might go back and say take the "best" 200 CDs that are older and rip them lossless. Just wasn't sure if what PLAYBACK software I use on a Windows PC would be best or if there would be any that might be more faithful to the bits and have the least jitter. I've heard USB has less jitter than optical, for feeding a DAC, but I don't know if that is true. Thanks again!
@@rosswarren436 If EAC is working well for you, no need to switch to dbpoweramp (unless you want a couple extra features). As for playback, Audirvana? I haven't tried it, but it's probably the best (or only) Windows option for audiophiles. Otherwise, get a dedicated streamer that plays nice with dlna :) I'm a biased fan. There are too many on the market at different price points now not to try it out. Simple setup on desktop or in a bigger system.
@@osirismarbles5177 yes, for the most part I use my PC with a digital out into a DAC, into an amp in my computer office and an iPAD feeding a DAC feeding a preamp in my living room. Wanting something more elegant and not as clunky, hence a Bluesound Node might be in my future. Enjoyment is the main drive for me.
About half? AIFF, FLAC, AFIC and others, in my experience, this includes all Lossless audio file formats, take up MORE drivespace than 128kbps mp3 files. A file that is a long one (Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" 9:08 studio version as the example), in 128 is only 5.9 mb in size whereas in other formats, it will be between 9.8 and 30.5 mb for the same track.
About half the original, uncompressed format which would be .wav or .aiff without any loss of information. MP3 and other lossy file formats are smaller in size because they literally contain less information. Now, the justification for MP3 and others is that humans don't need auditory information above a certain frequency, so they discard some high frequency information. You can confirm this by looking at audio spectrum, you know that jumpy thingy some audio players display. Many audiophiles will contend an MP3 320 sounds worse than a flac or WAV though.
You will lose all the ultrasonic frequencies present in vinyl which are not present in flac files How are you going to restore those frequencies to a flac or wav file?
Not being a MAC fan boy I find it interesting that it only costs $10 to stop APPLE from screwing up your music files when you want them. Thanks for the info on file formats. And the hardware issues with needed conversions like decoding a FLAC. Yes it takes some processing in real time. Add some DSP overhead... I understand that in the open source community they consider themselves to have a strange sense of humor. Such as using recursive naming in internal discussions. e.g. I understood "FLAC" to originally be "FLAC is a Lossless Codec". The "F" not standing for "Free" but standing for FLAC as a recursion. But that is too complicated for the general marketplace. 🙂
Hi. Yes, I lost your FLAC point there, sorry. But I certainly concur with you about Apple. I am not saying they cannot / do not make excellent products in some ways but (a) their high (rip-off, in my view) prices, (b) their resistance to outsiders' (ie the owners) updating the products and (c) some questionable component mixes (though I have forgotten which) led me down the PC route. Sure, that road has plenty of pot-holes and speed-traps but at least I can build my own PC (as I have twice - including the one on which I am typing) and I can adjust the component-mix. And I can save mortgages for the house, not the house and computer. I first used Apples before Macs were produced at college in the early 1980s but, when buying my first computers went: Commodore-64, then a 286-based PC. I have stuck with PCs ever since. Mind you, I wish I could ditch Windows but some of my software does not like Linux and I do not want a duel system. PCs would be unbeatable with a better OS then Windows. But that $10 Mac fix says a lot. Happy Crimble and 2022.
@@sebxiou-lifestyle4465 Yes the way M'$oft used predatory and illegal business practices to lock the PC world into it's OS was actually taken to court and MS lost! But they waited it out a few years until Dubya came in and being Corp owned, dropped the lawsuit keeping us forced in that monopoly! And they illegally bought out a large number of small international businesses to be able to stuff the ballot box to stop the international community from establishing Linux and Open Office standards! So we are stuck here! And happy NewtonMass!
@@glenncurry3041 Hi Glenn, thanks for your reply and the good wishes. "Dubya" - I'm guessing US President GW Bush? Hope that's right. Of course, the WIMP GUI (Windows, Icon, Mouse-Pointer, Graphical User Interface) environment which has done so much for Windows and Apple originated with Xerox but they did not have the foresight to develop it further. Are you suggesting corporate greed, combined with political lobbying of the lowest order? Never, surely? :) Actually some international governments have gone for open-source office software and save quite some cash in doing so. But the big players - eg your Federal Government (USA) and our Her Majesty's Government (UK) and so on have, in the main, stuck with Microsoft etc. Ah well, all the corporate guys buy is more yachts and big, phallic space-craft which zoom up and down in moments. Premature elation, I call it! Cheers now.
I’m not sure what you mean by “it only costs $10 to stop APPLE from screwing up you music files”. I have used Macs & PCs for professional audio for many years. I have rarely ever had a problem with Apple screwing up any music files. The exception was when Waveburner had an issue with not applying dither properly, but after I and a number of other engineers reported it, Apple fixed it very quickly. Over the years I have had far more incidence of file corruption on Windows than I have with Mac. That is just a fact. I like both platforms for different things, so I’m not here to defend one over the other. I also use Linux and BSD type Unix. They all have strengths and weaknesses.
@@waterknot1 Did you watch the video? That is exactly what Paul said. A $10 program to get the data out without DSP corruption. I am familiar with APPLE being popular in creatives as I sold them to Corps for their media dept and graphics (like HD, Anderson Windows). As well as to graphics and video production companies. But it was always Windows PCs for real time video productions at colleges (like Northwestern U) and Arenas (like Panther). Including entire managed switching systems to dozens of displays. But then I worked for Symbolics selling their graphics systerms (T2, Batman Returns, ...) and then sold SGI (Wavefront, Alias, Xaos Tools,...) including to SEGA. So been at this for a while. Oh ya and the $1M SCALE hyperconverged network core running KVM I sold a bit before retiring last year. I've shipped leading edge IT around the world.
I remember 20 years ago doing something which I defined as "MP3 Waste". What this means is I wasted 10 CDs by burning lossy music as redbook standard CDs. Basically the term "MP3 Waste" in my terminology means saving lossy recordings as lossless PCM files and having MP3 artifacts in a WAV file. I wanted to mix the music from the albums I got. Windows XP had a really cool program called Windows Media Player. You can rip your music from CD, then make your own mix CDs. I fell for this gimmick and burnt lossy WMA music onto CD. As a child I could tell the difference listening to the CDs vs the original CDs but I didn't care because they sound like the computer. I regret this activity to the fullest. If I ever make my own mix cd, I will ALWAYS use WAV files or FLAC files. NEVER use Windows Media Player to RIP and Burn CDs, or at least make sure you rip as WAV before burning back onto CD.
Several questions, if I may . . . 1) For years I have ripped all my CDs to FLAC format, but specified "uncompressed" or "no compression." Is this better than 50% compressed FLAC? Are they as good as AIFFs? 2) Is Bit Perfect available in Windows? And if I stream all my FLACs using a PLEX Media Server (LAN), will I gain any sound quality improvements using Bit Perfect if it is somehow integrated into the system? Please advise. Thank you.
What the heck would be the purpose of ripping to "uncompressed" FLAC and why would there even be such a thing? Such a file would be exactly the same size as the source and wouldn't have any benefits as far as optimizing storage.
@@avsystem3142 The ability to store tag information. Storage space is no problem, though "uncompressed" FLACs are 20% small than WAVs. The FLACs were needed on a high-res DAP I sometimes use. The iBasso DAP did not play well with WAVs and I never use MP3s. So, out of habit, I continued to rip CDs to FLACs. I might not need FLACs for PLEX, but all the high-res audio files (24-192) that I download are in FLAC format. I should do a side-by-side comparison of uncompressed FLACs versus WAVs. What do you think the result would be?
The compression factor for FLAC merely determines how much processing effort is put into the compression. Higher factors (up to 8) require more CPU power. These days, there is no point in most cases in using anything other than level 8. The level used for compression has no real effect on the effort required to decode a FLAC data stream. The decoded stream will be 100% identical in every case.
Compressed files take much less time to read from the disks, and disks are MUCH slower than CPUs and so compression always saves resources and so no loss in quality can be observed even when using a tinker-board or a modern phone.
At the end of the day, I stick the CD into my Apple drive, set it to rip to WAV format (16 bit), then convert the WAV files to Apple Lossless (m4a) using XLD, with the sample rate and bit depth set to original. Drag them into Apple Music and happy days!
@@HOLLASOUNDS just because it works somehow doesn't make it the technically best way - if Windows is the solution I want my problem back and for rip CDs it's for sure the worst software when it comes to error correction and verification
You may very well think that, but I know that if you analysed the data going into your DAC you would see absolutely no difference. It is very easy to prove the FLAC and ALAC codecs with a bunch of files and then simply doing a binary comparison of the encoded and decoded files. Any file comparison utility should be able to do this, although I would tend to do it from a Windows / DOS command line with the fc command.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin I am sure as you know that bit perfect does not mean sonic perfection (Jitter). Yes I can convert the file to a lossless compressed format and back to wave and the file still sound like a wave file. This leads me to believe that it is something in the inline decompression timing, and it still could be my imagenation. Give it a try for yourself and see what you hear.
@@tebbywafer1665 If it sounds different, the player is doing something it shouldn't. There should be no variability in the timing of the decoded data stream regardless of the source format. Obviously FLAC or ALAC take more time to decode than WAV, but if the decoder works correctly, that time will always be much less than the average time between samples, and output buffering (needed for playback of any digital audio, including WAV) should take care of the variations. If there is jitter present, then that is a hardware artefact and is not a direct consequence of the audio encoding. People often forget, that WAV files are accessed from storage in chunks (a disk sector or network packet at a time, for example) and therefore are also not continuous in nature. Jitter in the timing of successive samples is possible, however decoded, but should be no different in magnitude to the bit jitter within a sample, both being caused by clock jitter. That's only ever down to hardware quality, and better DACs should be able to handle that in my view.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin, I am sure that you are correct. Jitter was only used as an example of something we discovered about digital music post-conversion to CDs. The story was that it could not get any better; it was bit-perfect, and 44.1 was the optimum sample rate. As for equipment, I think that most of us have the sub $300 dacs (somewhere in our different systems) and a lot of us use sub $3,000 DAC as excellent devices, and some of us use $10,000 plus DAC systems (chord et al.) and if they all worked as you describe we would only need the $100 dacs. I am 62, but I try to remember that young physicists make more breakthroughs than old ones because they don't any know better. Did you give it a try for yourself?
Wav files do indeed sound better than flac files. On paper they are the same, but audibly there's a difference. Flac sounds like dog crap. Not my problem.
Yep. With storage finally being pretty cheap, why not? Ultimately, even the streaming services should forego any lossless compression. FLAC and ALAC were and are great, but we are finally to the point they are no longer necessary, at least to convey 16-bit/44.1Khz and even higher. Not sure about how much bandwidth DSD256 will take, but very few recordings I know of are done at those crazy resolutions - so far. Maybe the Internet will keep up.
@@rosswarren436 The reason to not just use WAV is that many players cannot extract metadata from WAV files, whereas this feature is more widely supported where FLAC is concerned (thinking about my car which plays FLAC up to 5.1 channels and my Onkyo DAP, for example).
@@GodmanchesterGoblin yes, that is an issue with wav files not supporting metadata like cover art, track name info, etc., so yes, FLAC would be better for that. I'm not sure about ALAC since Apple uses a separate database in iTunes for all that. I like FLAC just fine and have had no problems with using that encoding. Good points.
@@rosswarren436 it's dumb to waste storage and bandwidth for no gain - smart people really understanding technology still develop transparent compression and de-duplication while fools like you are wasting resources for no gain
@@Harald_Reindl I'm no fool. I'm an aerospace engineer and I work with many electrical engineers. No encoding/decoding scheme is ever perfect, at least until you reach military hardware prices. FLAC, when streamed well, is good, there's no question of that. But it can never be as "clean" as simply giving you the original file without such compression schemes in place. Once you reach a price point you are satisfied you can't hear any SIGNIFICANT difference then you are done. And on the subject of FLAC, I hope you know that there are various levels of compression available. Using one of the less severe ones *might* still allow for less bandwidth taken but less audible artifacts too. Generally for storage, where you know people are going to download the whole thing and then extract it, you can used FLAC8, but for real time streaming, it might be another story.
So you don’t think jitter is a real thing? I would say that not acknowledging the effects of jitter on music is kinda like believing the Earth is flat! But that’s just the opinion of Paul and hundreds of other audio engineers.
I understand that FLAC is an exact copy but what the audiophile purists may say is that the processor works more to decompress the FLAC than just reading WAV and that extra work has an effect on the music. It's mostly BS if you ask me, but that is the argument.
@@RafaelPernia Yes I know that's what they say and they're idiots. We can measure the output and find that there are no measurable changes to the output.
An Acronym is not an abbreviation. It's a word fabricated from the letters of several words... like SCUBA mean Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Appt. is an abbreviation for the word appointment.
@@TheMirolab taken from American Heritage dictionary..... An abbreviation formed by (usually initial) letters taken from a word or series of words, that is itself pronounced as a word, such as RAM, radar, or scuba; sometimes contrasted with initialism.
Yes, but what's the best method to rip CDs?
AIFF predates WAV so it is not correct to say that AIFF is Apples version of WAV. The technologies were developed separately.
They are equivalent in terms of audio data, but the difference is in the metadata support.
Indeed. The A is for audio, not Apple.
I've got to rip some CD's, and holy crap this is a level of information you just don't find on YT anymore. This is going back to the 90's and early Aughts.
All fine with information provided here, only one detail is missed, and it is that we can have metadata in WAV files by using EAC (exact audio copy) software for CD RIP available online. Explanations are on CZcams and EAC software is to be used only online (require internet connection).
Not all fine. Claiming FLAC and ALAC don't sound as good as their WAV or AIFF originals is just nonsense. It's as ridiculous as believing in a flat earth.
I also tagged my .WAV music files with metadata and album art with MP3Tag and it works just fine.
24 bit/48Khz was the sample rate required for film and sync. They are requiring higher now, I think 24/96. And they are wanting things mixed for ATMOS a lot now too (that then can be mixed down to 2.1) Music studio only mix at 24/48 because of film studio requirements. Better to down sample than to up sample. But for demos and such they still mix at 24/44.1. (smaller files)
i am a recording and mixing engineer and i always mix any music at 48khz. the anti aliasing filters don‘t have to be so steep (reason being the gap from 20khz to 24khz is bigger than 20khz-22khz, the nyquist limits for 48 and 44khz) and don‘t influence the high frequency content as much. and the samplerate conversion algorithms have gotten so good that they don’t matter anymore. there is an awesome video on samplerates by dan worrall/fabfilter, which explains the whole topic from an engineers view.
the 2 PCM encoded formats you begin with (WAV & AIFF, including BWF & AIFC) are linear formats, vs. compressed files, lossless or otherwise. You’re right, there’s no upside to re-encoding at a higher sample rate, or greater bit depth than the source when transcoding.
You allude to a 3rd-party utility. Do you mean it bypasses MacOS audio services, as configured in Audio MIDI Setup? That’s nominally dealing with diverse sample rates and bitdepths on olayback..
Great post. Any recommended rippers ? I'm going through my CD collection and want to rip to aiff for DJing, I'm wondering which ripper to either get for free or to buy ? Any recommendations much appreciated !
Windows media player
My aging golden years can distinguish the difference between 320 mp3 and FLAC...no human said this ever
Cymbals, pay attention to the cymbals
I bet I'm considered an antichrist here but what about mp3? I have built a library over the years with 256 kbps mp3 files and they sound fine enough, but I've never understood the difference between bitmapping type 1, 2 or 3, and I don't even know if they affect ripping or just the playback.
You say "best" but everything is always a trade-off. WAV is too large and even half the size is too big with the methods you mention. If I'm not completely an audiophile but want good enough quality for a good enough file size, what about FLAC vs mp3? If I choose mp3, what sample rate etc is preferred?
Life is a trade off. :) MP3 is lossy, meaning musical information is stripped from the file and lost forever. That mostly happens in the loud passages so we don't notice it as much, but the loss is still there. FLAC is about half the file size of WAV and is the opposite. Lossless. In the end, if the MP3 files sound alright then don't worry about it.
FLAC is for shy and afraid people worried about storage.
WAV is similar to "have the CD stored on your device".
MP3 is the choice to listen music in a very wide variety of devices. in USB you can play on SMART TV, boombox or car audio!
which software do you recommend for an excellent FLAC ripping?
czcams.com/video/58RmQsGGbeQ/video.html
why do you want FLAC?
WAV is good, no problem with that and uncopressed "untouched" as FLAC manipulates
🤗 VERY GOOD EXPLANATION FOR THE LAYPERSON 🧐THANKS PAUL 😍😍😍
My pleasure. Thanks for watching.
Paul - I got a fair amount of info on (Apple specific) formats, but not much on ripping "methods". Can you please elaborate on methods - i.e. software, variable bit rates, mp3 compression approaches, etc.? For example, I have used Exact Audio Copy in conjunction with the Lame mpo3 codec for over 10 years...
Merry Christmas!
I have become increasingly convinced over the years that a good ripping program, like that native to my MAC, is really about as good as one needs. I have used EAC (as you) and thought I might have heard a difference but now I am not so sure. Either the basic programs have gotten better or...I don't know. I just use what's native in Apple and make sure my settings are right.
I ended this argument awhile back. How? When I rip a cd using EAC I rip both the wav and flac. I just set it to now delete wav after the rip is done. lol there! Done! Storage really isn’t a problem for me.
Based on the comments in the Mac App Store, Bit Perfect does not play well with the lastest version of the MacOS
I noticed a lot of quack during playback of AFLAC
Merry Christmas to your family, sir Paul McGowan. I'm glad you are in good health.
Thanks Paul. Very interesting video!
But what about pre-emphasis? Some CDs have pre-emphasis, and most RIP tools do not apply de-emphasis.
Modern SOCs or CPUs can decode audio with no noise issue due to the decoding itself. However, there is an actual concern with any PCM decoding and playback and that is sample rate conversion and bit resolution attenuation. A frequent scenario is that your 44.1kHz CD quality bit-perfect stream can be sample rate converted to 48kHz inside your device. Imagine drawing the slope of the sound wave with level values 44,100 times per second and change that to 48,000 times. You will need to interpolate the curve to identify those new 48,000 level values of the sound wave that will exist at different moments in time. Such conversion is lossy even 48,000 is higher than 44,100, and different algorithms do sample rate conversion with different levels of audio fidelity.
and that is why there is ASIO, WASAPI
@@philiptong4978 Problem is that modern operating systems are build to run multiple applications that can all play audio at various sample- and bitrates. To facilitate mixing of the multiple audio channels, one output setting is chosen and all playback sources are resampled to that rate. The biggest concern is resampling and to avoid that, you need to run in some exclusive mode where your DAC follows your media playback. Problem is that nowadays your music streaming might give you 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 96kHz, 192kHz etc. depending on what track you play. I subscribe to Amazon HD music and get music in bit perfect but haven’t found a way to automatically avoid SRC.
@@ThinkingBetter seems a pity DACs can't simply be set to play whatever files at their NATIVE resolution and format without any SRC occurring. That needs to change.
@@rosswarren436 you didn't understand anything said! The problem is when your computer plays more than one source at the same time it will be resampled
Basically, it's best to make sure your PC is not resampling.
So you use wasapi or asio drivers to replace windows default audio mess.
Or on Linux you can now easily edit pulse audio to output the source sample rate only.
95 out of 100 of us would NOT be able to pick the Wave File vs Flac >70% of the time in a controlled ABX Test
95? I would say 100 out of 100
@@net_news I would say 99 out of 100 could not tell the difference between a Wave, FLAC and MP3 320 kbps audio file.
@@joeythedime1838 probly. But MP3 is lossy and FLAC is not. I mean, the data hitting the DAC is exactly the same using FLAC or WAV... not the case with MP3.
@@joeythedime1838 or 320 Kbps AAC....Unless the music was acoustic in nature, perhaps piano or guitar, or had some well-recorded cymbal hits. Even then, only those with young ears hearing to at least 15,000 Hz and knowing what to listen for could tell. Nothing wrong with all this high res stuff, and especially with DSD going forward for future generations to have the "best" possible recording, mastering, and reproduction, but yeah, at the end of the day our ears are our ears.
@@joeythedime1838 , ive done a blind test 10 times... able to discern ALAC from 320k _every time_
Merry Christmas! Any recommendations for full CD resolution (and higher) playback software for us Windows PC users better than VLC or Foobar2000 or even Windows Media Player? How "bad" is the native Groove Music? Or do Windows based PCs not suffer as much as MACs? I really can't hear any difference (currently) between uncompressed .wav and FLAC or ALAC files. If there is jitter my old ears can't hear it.
Lossy compression such as mp3 and AAC arose because storage was expensive per Megabyte and because early slow Internet was barely able to handle it. I remember Apple selling tons of 128Kbps files at full price! Jeez. Ten years ago, storage prices dropped a lot, and that continues to this day where you can get external hard drives in the 4TB to 12TB range for cheap prices. And of course, now the Internet can handle high resolution file transfers.
Are we to the point that it makes sense to forego using any compression at all, even "lossless"?
Sadly, I worked over many months to rip about 1200 CDs at the "best" 320 Kbps AAC rate iTunes could handle, and I know I'll never devote time to doing all that again to "lossless".
Get someone else to do it for you :-D. Or just make it a year long project. dbpoweramp is great for windows. it uses accuraterip which means if the CD is in the global database, it will rip faster when the checksum on first pass is verified with registered checksum. or not...320kbps isn't that bad at the end of the day. may make more of a difference if you plan on upgrading to more "revealing" gear.
@@osirismarbles5177 thanks. I'll look for dbpoweramp. I've been using Exact Audio Copy the last three years or so and ripping CDs bought in that time to FLAC.
I'll be ripping all new CDs I get to FLAC or ALAC, but man all those old ones - well, that WAS a YEAR long project, doing a few nearly every night. LOL. Not something I really want to do again, but who knows, I might go back and say take the "best" 200 CDs that are older and rip them lossless.
Just wasn't sure if what PLAYBACK software I use on a Windows PC would be best or if there would be any that might be more faithful to the bits and have the least jitter.
I've heard USB has less jitter than optical, for feeding a DAC, but I don't know if that is true.
Thanks again!
@@rosswarren436 If EAC is working well for you, no need to switch to dbpoweramp (unless you want a couple extra features). As for playback, Audirvana? I haven't tried it, but it's probably the best (or only) Windows option for audiophiles. Otherwise, get a dedicated streamer that plays nice with dlna :) I'm a biased fan. There are too many on the market at different price points now not to try it out. Simple setup on desktop or in a bigger system.
@@osirismarbles5177 yes, for the most part I use my PC with a digital out into a DAC, into an amp in my computer office and an iPAD feeding a DAC feeding a preamp in my living room. Wanting something more elegant and not as clunky, hence a Bluesound Node might be in my future.
Enjoyment is the main drive for me.
About half? AIFF, FLAC, AFIC and others, in my experience, this includes all Lossless audio file formats, take up MORE drivespace than 128kbps mp3 files. A file that is a long one (Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" 9:08 studio version as the example), in 128 is only 5.9 mb in size whereas in other formats, it will be between 9.8 and 30.5 mb for the same track.
About half the original, uncompressed format which would be .wav or .aiff without any loss of information. MP3 and other lossy file formats are smaller in size because they literally contain less information. Now, the justification for MP3 and others is that humans don't need auditory information above a certain frequency, so they discard some high frequency information. You can confirm this by looking at audio spectrum, you know that jumpy thingy some audio players display. Many audiophiles will contend an MP3 320 sounds worse than a flac or WAV though.
I'm still figuring out how to rip an LP.
There's ways to do that. Good old analog cassettes weren't bad though...LOL...
Audacity is your friend.
@@DarrellS54 indeed, and it is FREE.
You will lose all the ultrasonic frequencies present in vinyl which are not present in flac files How are you going to restore those frequencies to a flac or wav file?
Indeed!
Merry Christmas ⛄
Not being a MAC fan boy I find it interesting that it only costs $10 to stop APPLE from screwing up your music files when you want them. Thanks for the info on file formats. And the hardware issues with needed conversions like decoding a FLAC. Yes it takes some processing in real time. Add some DSP overhead...
I understand that in the open source community they consider themselves to have a strange sense of humor. Such as using recursive naming in internal discussions. e.g. I understood "FLAC" to originally be "FLAC is a Lossless Codec". The "F" not standing for "Free" but standing for FLAC as a recursion. But that is too complicated for the general marketplace. 🙂
Hi. Yes, I lost your FLAC point there, sorry. But I certainly concur with you about Apple. I am not saying they cannot / do not make excellent products in some ways but (a) their high (rip-off, in my view) prices, (b) their resistance to outsiders' (ie the owners) updating the products and (c) some questionable component mixes (though I have forgotten which) led me down the PC route. Sure, that road has plenty of pot-holes and speed-traps but at least I can build my own PC (as I have twice - including the one on which I am typing) and I can adjust the component-mix. And I can save mortgages for the house, not the house and computer. I first used Apples before Macs were produced at college in the early 1980s but, when buying my first computers went: Commodore-64, then a 286-based PC. I have stuck with PCs ever since. Mind you, I wish I could ditch Windows but some of my software does not like Linux and I do not want a duel system. PCs would be unbeatable with a better OS then Windows. But that $10 Mac fix says a lot. Happy Crimble and 2022.
@@sebxiou-lifestyle4465 Yes the way M'$oft used predatory and illegal business practices to lock the PC world into it's OS was actually taken to court and MS lost! But they waited it out a few years until Dubya came in and being Corp owned, dropped the lawsuit keeping us forced in that monopoly! And they illegally bought out a large number of small international businesses to be able to stuff the ballot box to stop the international community from establishing Linux and Open Office standards! So we are stuck here!
And happy NewtonMass!
@@glenncurry3041 Hi Glenn, thanks for your reply and the good wishes. "Dubya" - I'm guessing US President GW Bush? Hope that's right. Of course, the WIMP GUI (Windows, Icon, Mouse-Pointer, Graphical User Interface) environment which has done so much for Windows and Apple originated with Xerox but they did not have the foresight to develop it further.
Are you suggesting corporate greed, combined with political lobbying of the lowest order? Never, surely? :)
Actually some international governments have gone for open-source office software and save quite some cash in doing so. But the big players - eg your Federal Government (USA) and our Her Majesty's Government (UK) and so on have, in the main, stuck with Microsoft etc.
Ah well, all the corporate guys buy is more yachts and big, phallic space-craft which zoom up and down in moments. Premature elation, I call it! Cheers now.
I’m not sure what you mean by “it only costs $10 to stop APPLE from screwing up you music files”.
I have used Macs & PCs for professional audio for many years. I have rarely ever had a problem with Apple screwing up any music files. The exception was when Waveburner had an issue with not applying dither properly, but after I and a number of other engineers reported it, Apple fixed it very quickly. Over the years I have had far more incidence of file corruption on Windows than I have with Mac. That is just a fact. I like both platforms for different things, so I’m not here to defend one over the other.
I also use Linux and BSD type Unix. They all have strengths and weaknesses.
@@waterknot1 Did you watch the video? That is exactly what Paul said. A $10 program to get the data out without DSP corruption.
I am familiar with APPLE being popular in creatives as I sold them to Corps for their media dept and graphics (like HD, Anderson Windows). As well as to graphics and video production companies. But it was always Windows PCs for real time video productions at colleges (like Northwestern U) and Arenas (like Panther). Including entire managed switching systems to dozens of displays. But then I worked for Symbolics selling their graphics systerms (T2, Batman Returns, ...) and then sold SGI (Wavefront, Alias, Xaos Tools,...) including to SEGA. So been at this for a while.
Oh ya and the $1M SCALE hyperconverged network core running KVM I sold a bit before retiring last year. I've shipped leading edge IT around the world.
I remember 20 years ago doing something which I defined as "MP3 Waste". What this means is I wasted 10 CDs by burning lossy music as redbook standard CDs. Basically the term "MP3 Waste" in my terminology means saving lossy recordings as lossless PCM files and having MP3 artifacts in a WAV file. I wanted to mix the music from the albums I got. Windows XP had a really cool program called Windows Media Player. You can rip your music from CD, then make your own mix CDs. I fell for this gimmick and burnt lossy WMA music onto CD. As a child I could tell the difference listening to the CDs vs the original CDs but I didn't care because they sound like the computer. I regret this activity to the fullest. If I ever make my own mix cd, I will ALWAYS use WAV files or FLAC files. NEVER use Windows Media Player to RIP and Burn CDs, or at least make sure you rip as WAV before burning back onto CD.
M4A is another trap I just fell into , I lost the cd so this is the best I got for now.
Thanks Paul!:) Very useful information.
My pleasure. Glad it helped.
16bit/44.1kHz data is for each independent channel
EAC baby.
Several questions, if I may . . .
1) For years I have ripped all my CDs to FLAC format, but specified "uncompressed" or "no compression." Is this better than 50% compressed FLAC? Are they as good as AIFFs?
2) Is Bit Perfect available in Windows? And if I stream all my FLACs using a PLEX Media Server (LAN), will I gain any sound quality improvements using Bit Perfect if it is somehow integrated into the system?
Please advise. Thank you.
What the heck would be the purpose of ripping to "uncompressed" FLAC and why would there even be such a thing? Such a file would be exactly the same size as the source and wouldn't have any benefits as far as optimizing storage.
@@avsystem3142 The ability to store tag information. Storage space is no problem, though "uncompressed" FLACs are 20% small than WAVs. The FLACs were needed on a high-res DAP I sometimes use. The iBasso DAP did not play well with WAVs and I never use MP3s. So, out of habit, I continued to rip CDs to FLACs. I might not need FLACs for PLEX, but all the high-res audio files (24-192) that I download are in FLAC format. I should do a side-by-side comparison of uncompressed FLACs versus WAVs. What do you think the result would be?
The compression factor for FLAC merely determines how much processing effort is put into the compression. Higher factors (up to 8) require more CPU power. These days, there is no point in most cases in using anything other than level 8. The level used for compression has no real effect on the effort required to decode a FLAC data stream. The decoded stream will be 100% identical in every case.
It's only braindead bigger given that lossless is what it is: lossless
An unCompressed .FLAC audio file turns into a .WAV audio file.
It’s 22.05 kHz.
Happy holidays to all.
merry CHRISTmas to you...
Compressed files take much less time to read from the disks, and disks are MUCH slower than CPUs and so compression always saves resources and so no loss in quality can be observed even when using a tinker-board or a modern phone.
At the end of the day, I stick the CD into my Apple drive, set it to rip to WAV format (16 bit), then convert the WAV files to Apple Lossless (m4a) using XLD, with the sample rate and bit depth set to original. Drag them into Apple Music and happy days!
m4a lossless?
@@Harald_Reindl Hi, iTunes uses *.m4a for lossless and lossy.
@@unwantedillusions ok, i forgot that it's Apple aka as "always something different than others because we can" :-)
why don't you just rip as AIFF?
The best way of ripping music CDs is windows XP from 15 years ago.
I miss watching the ASCII progress bars type themselves out as Exact Audio Copy ripped a CD to my eMachines.
That shit can't do anything right hence stopped using it nearly 15 years ago
@@Harald_Reindl That's funny because I ripped hundreds of CDs and even ones I owned as was just easier to have it all as mp3s.
@@HOLLASOUNDS just because it works somehow doesn't make it the technically best way - if Windows is the solution I want my problem back and for rip CDs it's for sure the worst software when it comes to error correction and verification
I think my 16/44.1 wave files sound better than my 16/44.1 or 24/48 flac files.
You may very well think that, but I know that if you analysed the data going into your DAC you would see absolutely no difference. It is very easy to prove the FLAC and ALAC codecs with a bunch of files and then simply doing a binary comparison of the encoded and decoded files. Any file comparison utility should be able to do this, although I would tend to do it from a Windows / DOS command line with the fc command.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin I am sure as you know that bit perfect does not mean sonic perfection (Jitter). Yes I can convert the file to a lossless compressed format and back to wave and the file still sound like a wave file. This leads me to believe that it is something in the inline decompression timing, and it still could be my imagenation. Give it a try for yourself and see what you hear.
@@tebbywafer1665 If it sounds different, the player is doing something it shouldn't. There should be no variability in the timing of the decoded data stream regardless of the source format. Obviously FLAC or ALAC take more time to decode than WAV, but if the decoder works correctly, that time will always be much less than the average time between samples, and output buffering (needed for playback of any digital audio, including WAV) should take care of the variations. If there is jitter present, then that is a hardware artefact and is not a direct consequence of the audio encoding. People often forget, that WAV files are accessed from storage in chunks (a disk sector or network packet at a time, for example) and therefore are also not continuous in nature. Jitter in the timing of successive samples is possible, however decoded, but should be no different in magnitude to the bit jitter within a sample, both being caused by clock jitter. That's only ever down to hardware quality, and better DACs should be able to handle that in my view.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin, I am sure that you are correct. Jitter was only used as an example of something we discovered about digital music post-conversion to CDs. The story was that it could not get any better; it was bit-perfect, and 44.1 was the optimum sample rate. As for equipment, I think that most of us have the sub $300 dacs (somewhere in our different systems) and a lot of us use sub $3,000 DAC as excellent devices, and some of us use $10,000 plus DAC systems (chord et al.) and if they all worked as you describe we would only need the $100 dacs. I am 62, but I try to remember that young physicists make more breakthroughs than old ones because they don't any know better. Did you give it a try for yourself?
Wav files do indeed sound better than flac files. On paper they are the same, but audibly there's a difference. Flac sounds like dog crap. Not my problem.
I use mostly WAV Lossless. Works OK.
Yep. With storage finally being pretty cheap, why not? Ultimately, even the streaming services should forego any lossless compression. FLAC and ALAC were and are great, but we are finally to the point they are no longer necessary, at least to convey 16-bit/44.1Khz and even higher. Not sure about how much bandwidth DSD256 will take, but very few recordings I know of are done at those crazy resolutions - so far. Maybe the Internet will keep up.
@@rosswarren436 The reason to not just use WAV is that many players cannot extract metadata from WAV files, whereas this feature is more widely supported where FLAC is concerned (thinking about my car which plays FLAC up to 5.1 channels and my Onkyo DAP, for example).
@@GodmanchesterGoblin yes, that is an issue with wav files not supporting metadata like cover art, track name info, etc., so yes, FLAC would be better for that. I'm not sure about ALAC since Apple uses a separate database in iTunes for all that.
I like FLAC just fine and have had no problems with using that encoding. Good points.
@@rosswarren436 it's dumb to waste storage and bandwidth for no gain - smart people really understanding technology still develop transparent compression and de-duplication while fools like you are wasting resources for no gain
@@Harald_Reindl I'm no fool. I'm an aerospace engineer and I work with many electrical engineers. No encoding/decoding scheme is ever perfect, at least until you reach military hardware prices. FLAC, when streamed well, is good, there's no question of that. But it can never be as "clean" as simply giving you the original file without such compression schemes in place.
Once you reach a price point you are satisfied you can't hear any SIGNIFICANT difference then you are done.
And on the subject of FLAC, I hope you know that there are various levels of compression available. Using one of the less severe ones *might* still allow for less bandwidth taken but less audible artifacts too.
Generally for storage, where you know people are going to download the whole thing and then extract it, you can used FLAC8, but for real time streaming, it might be another story.
The original complete video:
czcams.com/video/ejE1XDxawMY/video.html
Claiming FLAC and ALAC don't sound as good as their WAV or AIFF originals is just nonsense. It's as ridiculous as believing in a flat earth.
Ahahahahah
So you don’t think jitter is a real thing? I would say that not acknowledging the effects of jitter on music is kinda like believing the Earth is flat! But that’s just the opinion of Paul and hundreds of other audio engineers.
What does jitter have to do with FLAC? FLAC decodes to a bit perfect copy of the WAV. End of story.
I understand that FLAC is an exact copy but what the audiophile purists may say is that the processor works more to decompress the FLAC than just reading WAV and that extra work has an effect on the music. It's mostly BS if you ask me, but that is the argument.
@@RafaelPernia Yes I know that's what they say and they're idiots. We can measure the output and find that there are no measurable changes to the output.
CD? is that still a thing?
Oh, behave yourself.
@@tumenihits5438 Amen.
When you want the freedom decide at your own how music is ripped and encoded yes - typically exactly one time after shipping
In MY house, CDs and LPs really are things!! I touch them and play with them often.
@@TheMirolab well, i prefer listen to music and play with my cigarette while drinking a whiskey
I use scissors when ripping cds. It’s really easy
When you can give the CDs away or resell them!? You’re just losing money🙄
$10. snake oil. 😊
ACRONYM... an abbreviation which can be _pronounced as a word_
An Acronym is not an abbreviation. It's a word fabricated from the letters of several words... like SCUBA mean Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Appt. is an abbreviation for the word appointment.
@@TheMirolab taken from American Heritage dictionary.....
An abbreviation formed by (usually initial) letters taken from a word or series of words, that is itself pronounced as a word, such as RAM, radar, or scuba; sometimes contrasted with initialism.
Boy, Paul sure butchered this one!
Very misleading, no final answer.
Dislike👎 :(
Misleading :(
Misleading
Foobar2000
What about ripping CDs with pre emphasis?