I recently decided to re-rip our CD collection. My existing ogg files only represented less than half the albums we own, and I had ripped them at quality level 5 (~160 kb/s). I wanted to get the entire collection ripped, and I figured I would go for higher quality too, what with the low cost of data storage these days.

It occurred to me that there was no longer any reason to be making lossy rips at all. So, I used a gift certificate I got for christmas and picked up a 250 GB SATA drive and started ripping lossless FLAC files from our CD's. Choosing to make FLAC files was easy. The alternatives were WMA-lossless or ALAC-- both proprietary. FLAC is free, well supported (especially under Linux) and makes great sounding rips which require little work to decode.

It took several weeks of ripping to get through all 200 CD's we own. The FLAC collection takes up just over 60 GB of disk space. The nice thing about having lossless files is that I can put together a compilation and burn it back to CD without having to feel silly about making a disc that is lower quality than the original. I can also resample the FLAC files to make OGG's or MP3's or anything else for transfer to an iPod, etc. I intend to write a script or app to do that on the fly, and keep the transfer process easy.

Anyway, for now I just sicked amarok on our new flac files, and set it to random and sat back and relaxed. It's been really cool listening to some of our older CD's that had been somewhat forgotten, and they all sound great.

Posted by ra in computerish at 01:57 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)