FLAC or WAV?

[MajorFubar]

Ok so if Nero is not so ubiquitous for people on this forum then what on earth do you people actually use to burn media, especially audio CDs?

Please not Windows Media Player or some Goddamn equally awful Freeware program. Obviously if you don't regularly burn media (suspect less and less people do now) then the question isn't applicable. The only other media burner even remotely worth looking at is Roxio, but I could never get on with it.

 

[jcbrum]

Burning CDs is so yesterday.

Modern computers don't even have an optical drive.

JC

 

[MajorFubar]

Pitty there's no a suitable, durable replacement though (for optical storage), unless you're one of the lucky few living in an always-connected Utopia where you routinely enjoy bi-directional gigabit connections to a huge cloud-based sky-drive, which companies like Apple presume we all live in. For the rest of us, back in the real world, there's optical storage (plus memory sticks and hard drives, but neither of those are designed for long-term storage. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs aren't exactly perfect either, but they're the best of the three).

 

[jcbrum]

"The government has set aside £530m to ensure that rural areas do not miss out on the faster networks that are being installed in towns and cities."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19882778

JC

 

[BigColz]

Ok so if Nero is not so ubiquitous for people on this forum then what on earth do you people actually use to burn media, especially audio CDs?

Please not Windows Media Player or some Goddamn equally awful Freeware program. Obviously if you don't regularly burn media (suspect less and less people do now) then the question isn't applicable. The only other media burner even remotely worth looking at is Roxio, but I could never get on with it.

I use 'Max' for mac.. Free and have it set 100% paranoia so perfect rips.. To be honest i'd never heard of nero.. But I only started lossless rips a little while ago and my friend at Cyrus recommended Max after I realised how terrible iTunes and all generic media players are for the audiophile..

 

[hammill]

Pitty there's no a suitable, durable replacement though (for optical storage), unless you're one of the lucky few living in an always-connected Utopia where you routinely enjoy bi-directional gigabit connections to a huge cloud-based sky-drive, which companies like Apple presume we all live in. For the rest of us, back in the real world, there's optical storage (plus memory sticks and hard drives, but neither of those are designed for long-term storage. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs aren't exactly perfect either, but they're the best of the three).

Now there we are in complete agreement.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20356760

I use IPlayer and it is very useful, but often it hangs up, especially if I go for a high quality picture (and I have a 20 megabit connection). I would hate to have to rely on that for all my recordings. The idea of storing all my personal data on a system controlled by some huge corporation who can decide to deny me access on a whim over a network which can disappear for several days until the engineer comes out is pretty close to insane.

 

[MajorFubar]

Ok so if Nero is not so ubiquitous for people on this forum then what on earth do you people actually use to burn media, especially audio CDs?

Please not Windows Media Player or some Goddamn equally awful Freeware program. Obviously if you don't regularly burn media (suspect less and less people do now) then the question isn't applicable. The only other media burner even remotely worth looking at is Roxio, but I could never get on with it.

I use 'Max' for mac.. Free and have it set 100% paranoia so perfect rips.. To be honest i'd never heard of nero.. But I only started lossless rips a little while ago and my friend at Cyrus recommended Max after I realised how terrible iTunes and all generic media players are for the audiophile..

Opposite end of the process though...I'm talking burning not ripping. You wouldn't really use Nero (or Roxio) for ripping. They can do it, but it's not their primary role. I know there are lots of rippers, and everyone has their favourite. As a Mac user it's likely you wouldn't have heard of Nero anyway, Nero is not available on the Mac.

 

[pauln]

I don't burn CD's anymore but Foobar and Exact Audio Copy will both do the job.

In the old days I used Windows Media Player with perfectly acceptable results - good enough for the car anyway. Having a car now that can play music from an SD card is just so perfect... to think of the days when cassettes (or even 8 track cartridges) was the only way.

 

[fr0g]

Ok so if Nero is not so ubiquitous for people on this forum then what on earth do you people actually use to burn media, especially audio CDs?

Please not Windows Media Player or some Goddamn equally awful Freeware program. Obviously if you don't regularly burn media (suspect less and less people do now) then the question isn't applicable. The only other media burner even remotely worth looking at is Roxio, but I could never get on with it.

I use a freeware app and it's superb.

CDBurnerXP.

http://cdburnerxp.se/en/home

 

[relocated]

"The government has set aside £530m to ensure that rural areas do not miss out on the faster networks that are being installed in towns and cities."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19882778

JC

Surely to god you do not think that the problems of rural access to decent broadband is going to be solved by £530,000,000?

Even if the whole of this money is made available by The Treasury it will be absorbed by the industry with very limited return for rural individuals and businesses.

The only way to get a more level playing field is for legislation before the 4G licences are granted. That legislation should ensure that if companies want 4G licences then this service should roll-out equally in rural and urban areas, with the least 'connected' communities at the head of the queue.

Fat chance. So many reasonable sized communities still have no access to piped gas and that has been around for @ 200 years. :O

 

[SteveR750]

JRMC has a CD burner. Roxio was the programme I used some years ago as it came bundled with the Dell PC I bought. In any case, Windows XP onwards can write an audio CD? It's not like there is any audio conversion taking place.

 

[MajorFubar]

I use a freeware app and it's superb.

CDBurnerXP.

http://cdburnerxp.se/en/home

If it meets your needs then that's fine I guess. But compared to Nero, in terms of functionality, it, and similar freeware products, are lacking, depending on what you need it for of course. For a start, I've never come across any free software which allows you to drop track-markers (or index markers! remember those?) into one continuous WAV file, which is a very important feature if you want to guarantee seamless, gapless joins in a piece of music you have created. Nero also includes last-minute pre-burn mastering tools like normalisation and EQ, as well as a waveform editor.

I see that CD Burner XP can read Nero .nrg files, which is quite good for free software.

 

[Alec]

I liked Nero (Nero 6). It could edit tracks with half hour gaps before bonus tracks on them, ad fade outs for songs with long noodly outros like Blind Melon's Time...It could be adjusted to play nicely with 90min CDRs which was important to me at the time. I used WMP to make a demo disc a while back, and to make one or two compilations for friends, but if I wanted to make lots for myself again, I'd want something that has Nero's abilities, probably...

 

[manicm]

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

 

[andyjm]

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

 

[BigColz]

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

I don't know if there is a COMPLETELY uncompressed FLAC option but when I rip my tunes I choose the minimum compression possible which generally leaves them around 900-1100 as opposed to 1410 for wav or aiff..

 

[hammill]

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

I don't know if there is a COMPLETELY uncompressed FLAC option but when I rip my tunes I choose the minimum compression possible which generally leaves them around 900-1100 as opposed to 1410 for wav or aiff..

Why? FLAC is lossless so why not take advantage of the space saving?

 

[Anonymous]

[/quote]

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

[/quote]

is that actually true as your steaming bits not audio?

currently I'm running 2 streaming devices ( flac via sqbox), 2 phones, 2 tablets, 3 laptops, PS3, 2 wireless home automation devices and a tv on a standard Orange supplied wireless router and don't suffer dropouts. The only thing I've done is to issue static ip adresses.

 

[andyjm]

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

[/quote]

is that actually true as your steaming bits not audio?

currently I'm running 2 streaming devices ( flac via sqbox), 2 phones, 2 tablets, 3 laptops, PS3, 2 wireless home automation devices and a tv on a standard Orange supplied wireless router and don't suffer dropouts. The only thing I've done is to issue static ip adresses.

[/quote]

A single stream of CD quality data is about 1.4Mb/s, a good quality signal on Wifi will manage 54Mb/s, so at first sight there is no issue. However if signal is poor Wifi can drop back to as low as 1Mb/s, so keeping audio bitrate down can help. Even if signal is strong and you have multiple streams, or want to stream hires it is worth using FLAC.

 

[the record spot]

Burning CDs is so yesterday.

Modern computers don't even have an optical drive.

JC

Albeit you're scuppered if the mastering you want (assuming that is important to you) isn't readily available on the download or streaming site of your choice and you might want for yesterday once more.

(Thanks Karen and Richard).

 

[manicm]

Uncompressed FLAC is precisely what it says - EAC has an option to set the level of FLAC compression, and the lowest level is uncompressed - the file size will be of that around WAV. Thus the file will just have a FLAC wrapper i.e. header and footer etc and allow tagging.

 

[andyjm]

Uncompressed FLAC is precisely what it says - EAC has an option to set the level of FLAC compression, and the lowest level is uncompressed - the file size will be of that around WAV. Thus the file will just have a FLAC wrapper i.e. header and footer etc and allow tagging.

I am not sure you are right. Do you have a link that shows flac '0' is zero compression?. The following link is to the sourceforge official documentation on the flac codec:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison_all_ratio.html

A flac setting of '0' gets around 57% compression in filesize on the music sample used in the comparison.

Increasing the number increases compression at the expense of processing time. '5' is often used as the best compromise between speed of encoding and filesize.

As has been mentioned many times, it doesn't matter what compression setting is being used for audio quality - when decoded, all files produce identical audio data.

 

[JW3]

I know this blog was done some time ago but I must reincarnet it with a question - FLAC or AIFF? I was told AIFF is absolutely bit-for-bit of a recording or from a CD. Yes or no?

 

[The_Lhc]

Yes it is but, here's the point, so is FLAC and ALAC, you effectively rip the PCM and then zip it, when it's unzipped it's the same PCM that you get from an AIFF or WAV file. Nothing is lost, hence the term "lossless".

 

[rainsoothe]

i think AIFF is just Apple's version of WAV. Just because... Apple.