OK. I am going to revive this thread for a question if I may.
I have downloaded EAC and started to have a play with it. I have configured it for the highest quality settings I can and have ripped three CDs to FLAC for the purpose of experimentation.
When I look at the ripped files in Squeezecenter, it reports them all back as FLACS with bit rates of anywhere between 620kbps to 950kbps all with variable bit rate (VBR). A WAV should be in the region of 1411.2 kbps and CBR. Why is the FLAC's bit rate so low even though I have selected 1024kbs in the extraction settings of EAC (and why does this extraction setting go no higher when WAV is 1411kbps?)? Is the bit rate brought back up during decompression and replay? Will it effect sound quality of the final FLAC file?
Would I be better taking the storage space hit and just storing the files as WAVs where there will be no compression at all? Anyone else done this? I know it takes up twice as much space, but storage is so cheap these days, does it matter?
Cheers for any help.
PS: Not got a SB yet, but just getting the storage and software sorted so I can just slip one in at a later date, hopefully soon-ish.
Remember that FLAC is lossless, so the bit rate is not a measure of quality, but of compression
If you start with a WAV that requires 1411kb to store a second of data. Then FLAC comes along, and compreses the data. The compression rate depends on the data, it can't aim for a rate, all it can do is apply its lossles algorithm and what comes out is what comes out. But if a particular second of music is compressed by 50%, then it will consume 705kb for one second, if its compressed by 25% it will consume 1080kb
As the compression ration depends on the data, it will vary throughout the wav file, so its easy from that too see how you can effectivly get what looks like a variable bit rate, and if the FLAC file was streamed compressed over the network, that variable rate would be what controlled the netword data rate, but what comes out once its uncompressed will be the original 44.1ks/s 16bit stereo music.
Whenever an honest man discovers that he's mistaken, he will either cease to be mistaken or he will cease to be honest.
I just took delivery of the Duet today. Wow! Great piece of kit! The packing is _really_ fancy and it just reeks of quality. (and some plastic smell that's quite nice to sniff at too! )
I've been using SB3 for a couple of years and have recently built mine into my DAC case.
The controller is the mutts though, very easy to operate and quick too. Far better than the web interface. It set itself straight up no probs, works all around the house, great!
I can't answer your question on EAC I'm afraid. I use AutoFLAC and yes, it does use VBR. I can't tell any difference between the sound of the FLACs produced and the WAV file. Plus with FLAC you get the tags which you'll need to make SqueezeCentre(er) work well.
I guessed it may have something to do with the compression as it seemed too coincidental to be almost half the bit rate of the WAV and half of the size of the WAV. Cheers for the explanation Nick. I think I will carry on with the FLAC ripping then.
I am probably going to punt for a basic SB3 to get me going and then worry about NAS's, PSUs and DACs at another date. Just need to get this digital music system working to a point where SWMBO can operate it (and realise its potential) without any fuss or bother. Then all things will be harmony and I can tweak to my heart's content.
The controller is the mutts though, very easy to operate and quick too. Far better than the web interface. It set itself straight up no probs, works all around the house, great!
Yes, when I saw one at a show at the start of the year, I would have handed money over on the spot, it had that shiny thing must have quality (and its not made by apple so thats another plus) but as I couldn't have it there and then I never got round to it.
Big question is whats it sound like.
Whenever an honest man discovers that he's mistaken, he will either cease to be mistaken or he will cease to be honest.
Well I've finally shaken off the shackles of iTunes and am currently in the process of using MAX to convert all my iTunes library to FLAC.
The iTunes library remains intact on the iMac, but as the FLAC library is being built up, it is being dropped by MAX onto one of my two 400GB backup drives.
After pointing the SB3 at the new library, the performance has improved quite a bit. Not in terms of sound quality, which is unchanged, but in the performance of the player and the music network as a whole, faster and more efficient are the terms I'd use to describe things.
This is presumably because the SlimServer uses FLAC as its native protocol and therefore is not having to transcode my Apple Lossless files on-the-fly, whilst streaming from the Mac.
I'd been having problems with the streaming of Apple Lossless files in that the first few milliseconds of a track were being cut off, giving an unnatural sudden start to many of my tracks, again probably due to the extra processing the SlimServer was having to carry out. AIFF and Mp3 files gave no problems. However as most of my library is Apple Lossless, the whole thing was becoming very irritating.
An additional problem was that playlist names were becoming truncated and sometimes whole sets of tracks within playlists would be missing after scanning the library. Rescanning did not help matters, and there were quite a few Mac users complaining on the Slim Devices forums about these issues. No problem with Intel Macs, the problem is with the now obsolete PowerPC Macs like my iMac G5
So sick of messing about any more, I decided to bite the bullet and go open source with the music library. MAX is converting everything to FLAC in batches of 500 tracks so should be finished by tonight (I have a big library)
Additionally I'll now be able to take full advantage of MAX's CDParanoia powered secure ripping features for importing CDs to the library.
There have been very few metadata issues so far as MAX seems to be fetching the files and keeping everything intact.
The only thing that is going to be a bit of a re learning job is recreating my playlists using the SlimServer browser interface rather than using iTunes. However my existing playlists were becoming a bit stale so, perhaps that is not such a bad thing.
If you are a Mac user it is a bit of a long winded job to escape the proprietary iTunes environment and go open source with the library but it is well worth doing for the increase in speed it gives to your Squeezebox experience and in terms of sound quality, you can take advantage of secure ripping to get the maximum possible quality from your raw materials.
Steve
Sgt. Baker started talkin’ with a Bullhorn in his hand.
Interesting Steve as I have an ibook and store all my music in apple lossless too. Given the option I would have gone for FLAC from the outset but I've got an ipod and I had to accomodate that. Fortunately I have not had the same Slimserver problems that you have had.
Every now and again a rumour circulates that the next version of itunes will support FLAC, but I'm not holding my breath.
With Nick's help (he must rue the day he replied to that first email from me!) I'm about to move my music files from a QNAP to a networked PC running Linux which will have automatic RAID back up. It wil also run Squeezecenter instead of Slimserver as I've recently acquired a Duet (very nice piece of kit) and the Duet wont work with the latter.
Keep us posted on any further developments with MAX/FLAC, its useful to hear.
I'm running SlimServer 6.5.5. I was running Squeezecenter 7.2 but was getting the same problems and the browser interface was much slower than with 6.5.5.
My G5 iMac is over 3 years old and is getting a bit long in the tooth. But giving SlimServer less work to do seems to have perked the poor thing up a bit.
iansr wrote:I
Every now and again a rumour circulates that the next version of itunes will support FLAC, but I'm not holding my breath.
Keep us posted on any further developments with MAX/FLAC, its useful to hear.
I'm not holding my breath either.
The frustrating thing is that QuickTime has the capability to play FLAC files via it's plugin environment. You can play FLAC files in the Finder but not in iTunes.
Absolutely bloody stupid IMO but then that's Apple for you.
Steve
Sgt. Baker started talkin’ with a Bullhorn in his hand.
I trashed the iTunes library, all 120GB of it, and am now in the process of backing up all the newly minted FLAC files back to the main desktop hard drive so that the SlimServer can use them from there. It's a bit more convenient to have them on the main desktop HDD rather than on a remote USB 2.0 drive.
To be honest.. using the SlimServer to store all the music and MAX as a secure ripper is a much more flexible arrangement than iTunes. You do need to be a bit more computer literate to use the open-source option, so the average iTunes iPod user would be better off sticking with what they know.
I won't be leaving the Mac as a desktop computing environment but would like to set up a Linux music server arrangement sometime in the new year. That is Nick if you wouldn't mind helping out as I am not Linux savvy.
Incidentally I have found another open-source secure ripper for OSX that is faster than MAX and is just as accurate. XLD is the name of the package and an advantage it has over MAX, is that it uses the CDDB database to get its tagging, rather than MusicBrainz, which whilst a worthy effort on the part of the open-source community is still a bit limited in terms of the amount of metadata they currently hold.
Steve
Sgt. Baker started talkin’ with a Bullhorn in his hand.
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