Flac > MP3 or AAC?

[diesel]

well boys and girls, its time to have our own official thread about this new age old question.

i now have at my disposal my very own evil dieselPod, and with it comes a list of questions. the most important being, of course, what to do with my cd collection and all the flac files on my pc.

dan hooked me up the db music converter, but what i should i convert the flac and cds to, mp3 or aac??

maybe we can turn this thread into a sticky for all the ipod/mac/audio format questions

[tim]

maybe we can turn this thread into a sticky for all the ipod/mac/audio format questions

or maybe you could take your ipod questions to an IPOD FORUM.

[diesel]

dont be jealous

now go play with your walkman

[Cleantone]

I just decompress to .aiff and then use iTunes for tagging and mp3'ing. I think "soundconverter" for mac can do it and "riverpast" for PC.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18047

http://www.riverpast.com/en/support/tut ... ac/mp3.php

[Phrazz]

Hey Diesel,

Basically you can only tell the difference on a really good system, so convert anything to MP3. At least 192Kb/s -- but to save space, even FLAC is relatively expensive on a portable unit. Other thing is even a good system (MOSFET, tubes, etc) will "warm up" a crappy digital source, and when you're drinking and driving, do you really need that pristine quality anyways?

I've heard AAC is slightly better compression and quality, but MP3 will soon be MP4 which is also superior (FFTs and math crap like that). The MP formats are more ubiquitous, when you're going from PC to iPod that's more significant than if you have a Mac host. I keep MP3s in a completely separate folder.

One other minor point is the disk-intensive full-time music access will burn your hard drive faster, so spend 50 bucks on a slave disk and backup your system at least monthly. I like the externals for convenience, but it's a few more bucks for the case and power supply. Also since FLACs and WAVs are much larger, they work the disk 5 to 10 times as much as MP3 or other higher compression formats (don't worry about the CPU, no moving parts means these last much longer than the relatively sensitive magnetic drives).

The best way to back up is always to optical (maybe the cheapest, but not the fastest). So trading CDs the old-fashioned way still makes a lot of sense. I just got my list in order and will start doing some 1:1s (no BnP for me) very soon.

Now anyone got the iPod -> iPod "vampire" cables? That is a cool idea, but certainly will make the record companies shudder! It is completely impossible to prevent copies...anyone can just convert to analog and get around any copy schemes. Also the protection schemes can really fuck up your computer (Sony) so don't buy those sources or you are in for a hill of trouble (ie, your PC gets spyware and in some cases won't ever boot normally and will need a full OS reinstall!).

OK, that's more than you wanted to know, but don't expect anything less....

-Phrazz

[diesel]

thanks for the advice

im pretty much in top gear with my audio conversions. im going through my entire collection and converting almost everything from flac to vbr 192 mp3 using db power amp converter. its slow as HELL!

i also got an invite to oinkme.uk. a massive collection of albums very much worth stealing. shh... dont tell the cops.

"Now anyone got the iPod -> iPod "vampire" cables?"

no clue what youre talking about.