Should I maintain 2 music libraries?

[Oluain]

Hi,
Some advice on organising my digital music library please...

OK, so back when I had a laptop with a huge HDD, my setup which worked well was to basically use iTunes for everything and rip at Apple Lossless.
This gave me the advantage of being able to use apple music and instantly have my music synced across Macbook, iPhone and iPad, and at the same time use my Logitech Squeezebox server to stream lossless quality music to my hifi.

Things started to get messy when I got a new laptop with a small SSD and suddenly I couldn't keep all those large audio files on the computer.

So, what should I do? I'm thinking I might need to start maintaining two different libraries?

I need to keep using iTunes, yes it has lots of faults, but I travel a lot (in normal times!) and having the full library in the cloud synced across all Apple devices with no maintenance is very valuable.
So do I keep this and then manually maintain a folder structure of the full library on a NAS for home streaming? If doing this are there any other applications I should use to maintain this? Is Apple Lossless fine or is there any advantage to converting to FLAC?

As I said, I am currently using Squeezebox but I will probably switch to a Sonos Port at some stage.

Also, as a complete aside, mentioning a NAS, I currently have a WD MyCloud Mirror and it is one of the worst pieces of tech I have ever bought, very unreliable.

Thanks for your input!

 

[jjbomber]

For £100 you can get a portable HDD.

Ironically I've got a WD My Cloud and it's been 100% reliable since day 1. I stream from it every day to the Oppo 105s. Guess is just luck on having a good one out of the factory as opposed to a Friday afternoon one.

FLAC comes in 9 encoder levels. The higher the level, the less the compression, the better the sound. However the files then take up more space. Level 6 and above are loseless. Experiment with a rip in FLAC level 6 and try it against ALAC.

 

[ClarkNovember]

FLAC comes in 9 encoder levels. The higher the level, the less the compression, the better the sound. However the files then take up more space. Level 6 and above are loseless. Experiment with a rip in FLAC level 6 and try it against ALAC.

I don’t think this is correct:

- the higher the level, the greater the compression
- all levels are lossless

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC


To the OP: have you looked at Synology NASs? You can set it up to be a iTunes server and it has a Squeezebox ‘app’. If you do end up going down the Sonos route, I can vouch for it working well.

 

[Gray]

I don’t think this is correct:

- the higher the level, the greater the compression
- all levels are lossless

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

✔FLAC loses none of the music.

 

[jjbomber]

Simple solution. Rip a CD in WAV, FLAC level 0 (fastest), FLAC level 6 and FLAC Uncompressed (biggest file size). Whichever one you prefer is the right answer.

 

[iMark]

FLAC comes in 9 encoder levels. The higher the level, the less the compression, the better the sound. However the files then take up more space. Level 6 and above are loseless. Experiment with a rip in FLAC level 6 and try it against ALAC.

How many more times are you going to write the simply wrong information that there are lossy FLAC encoder levels? There aren't. Lossless is lossless. We have explained that to you already in another thread.

FLAC is lossless. ALAC is lossless. Lossless = lossless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression

 

[jjbomber]

FLAC is lossless. ALAC is lossless. Lossless = lossless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression

You can believe Wikipedia or you can test it for yourself.

 

[iMark]

There is nothing left to test. Lossless compression has been tried and tested by many others. Lossless is lossless.
It's not about "believing" Wikipedia. It's about understanding the word "lossless".

In another thread you said that you have researched this and that there are "independent" websites that support your misinformation. I then asked you to post links to those websites because I would like to read more. You never posted those links.....

In the meantime here's some more information on FLAC and the different compression levels: https://z-issue.com/wp/flac-compression-level-comparison/





Spoiler alert: any compression level in FLAC is lossless. The only difference is the file size and the time it takes to encode a file.