Best settings for lossless rips?

[Decibel2015]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

I very much enjoy reading the testing done by archimago, a forum member at the squeezebox forums (among others). He does very nice work.
One has to click on the years/months to see all the various extensive testing he's done on almost all things digital.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/search...max-results=10

I glanced at your link, it seems similar to something that I found a year or two (or three back) which may also interest you:

https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Some interesting comments from that include:

"there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space".

The author also points out that such high performance settings are really only relevant at the engineering stage of the recording but can be dumped when the
final mix is in.

I have read some hifi magazines where you get people writing letters and saying that they are scientists and that such and such improves the sound quality of
playback. Usually the response is that that there is no science to back up the claim but the counter is that maybe we just haven't devised a suitable test to
measure these perceived differences in quality.

[Decibel2015]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoder
will take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default "5" setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed....changing it might change
the file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.

If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whether
the space savings are worth the longer ripping time.

The best ripping method in most cases is "Secure," as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs. "Burst" is faster, but doesn't have error recovery,
while "Defective by Design" is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings for
Secure ripping HERE.

Thanks for that. I've set my option to "Secure" as per your advice. All the options in "Accurate-rip" are ticked by default, it seems. Any other settings in there which I should
have as default? re "Defective by design" setting...what do you mean by "non-standard" CDs? By "problem CDs" I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristine
condition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?

That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless. Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storage
space? E.g. would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine that
you're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose? What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed? Is there a consensus
on what the default should be? What is it?

[garym]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

I very much enjoy reading the testing done by archimago, a forum member at the squeezebox forums (among others). He does very nice work. One has to click on the years/months to see all the various extensive testing he's done on almost all things digital.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=10

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

respectfully, "people claim" is the key phrase here. And is quite different from "people document with rigorous testing". There is a lot of FUD in the audiophile world. I suppose at least using uncompressed FLAC is better than WAV and satisfies the phobia that some have regarding even lossless compression.

Seriously! It's amazing the stuff people are willing to believe. (There are people who think the coating on the metal prongs on the power cord on their amplifier impacts the "spatial dimensions" of the music they hear.....) It's very telling that you virtually never see true double blind testing of these things that people claim they hear.

The notion that a player works harder because a decoder decompresses data before feeding it into a DAC....at the exact same data rate, mind you, regardless of compression....is somewhat akin to expecting a document that was opened from a zip file to be a little bit blurrier than one that came straight from the word processor.

[garym]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

People claim to be able to hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed because the player is doing the uncompressing and working harder.

respectfully, "people claim" is the key phrase here. And is quite different from "people document with rigorous testing". There is a lot of FUD in the audiophile world. I suppose at least using uncompressed FLAC is better than WAV and satisfies the phobia that some have regarding even lossless compression.

[Spoon]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

People claim to be able to hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed because the player is doing the uncompressing and working harder.

[garym]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

Precisely.

...and not only will you "not be able to tell the difference in sound quality", THERE WILL BE ZERO DIFFERENCE IN SOUND QUALITY BECAUSE THE FILE BEING PLAYED BY YOUR PLAYER IS BITPERFECT NO MATTER WHAT COMPRESSION LEVEL IS USED.

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

I have also just started ripping my CD collection and was confused by the different FLAC Lossless settings so I went for Lossless Uncompressed. Are you saying at default 5 setting I will not be able to tell the difference is sound quality but will save space on my NAS?

Precisely.

[Dat Ei]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

Hey naimconvert,

the compression in the flac format is like the compression in zip - it is absolut lossless. It is just a question of disk space and the cpu time you need to encode and decode the compressed data. The uncompressed data are still the same, no matter what Level of lossless flac compression you choose.


Dat Ei

[naimconvert]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

I have also just started ripping my CD collection and was confused by the different FLAC Lossless settings so I went for Lossless Uncompressed. Are you saying at default 5 setting I will not be able to tell the difference is sound quality but will save space on my NAS?

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Best settings for lossless rips?

It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoder will take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default "5" setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed....changing it might change the file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.

If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whether the space savings are worth the longer ripping time.

The best ripping method in most cases is "Secure," as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs. "Burst" is faster, but doesn't have error recovery, while "Defective by Design" is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings for Secure ripping HERE.

[Decibel2015]

I haven't yet started ripping any CDs but I did open the app for a quick look at it. It's the first such application
that I've used.

Firstly, I see that the FLAC encoding has "Lossless 5" as the default.

Since FLAC is meant to be lossless, I'm not sure why there are degrees of "lossless" in this case.

Just looking for advice on what particular setting I should set my rips for. Yes, I want lossless rips, but if two settings
have the same audio quality but one setting uses a lot more of my hard drive space, well, you'd want to go with the
setting that uses the less space for the sound quality, right?

Also, I see under "Options" at the top of the dialogue box concerning "Ripping method". Again, which is the best option
to choose and why that over other choices?