Howto build a sound library ?

Looking to build a sound library.

What are the pro/con's of Buying cd''s vs storage, i.e. Ipod or computer ?

For instance, storing music on an Ipod has advantages like, just getting the songs you want vs the whole Cd, plus portability to computer etc...

But how is the sound quality in this format vs original Cd ?
Can the music be pumped into a home system, and how is the quality there ?

If you are going with and ipod or computer and you don't have a hard copy like a cd then you should have two hard drives for storage. For eventually one will fail to work and you will lose all your music (its happened to me).
As for sound quality. The difference between cd and mp3 at 192 wma or 256 mp3 probably could not be discerned unless your an audiophile with a revealing system.
An Ipod or computer would be more convenient and flexiable in its use. And yes you could hook it up to a home stereo.

Personally, I find the sound quality of MP3's and iPod's to be horrendous and those two things are completely useless to me. I could see where an iPod has it's place (at the gym, at the beach, on the go) but I'd just rather do without music for those few minutes rather than hear it all compressed and swishy sounding with zero dynamics.

Basically, I don't think an iPod or a computer could replace a CD player if sound quality is of any concern. If you don't care about the quality, a computer with the music compressed with WMA (NOT MP3) would be the wiser choice.

I think hard drives are very promising, and capable of good sound. The convenience, easy access, and flexibility of HD based music libraries are awesome. THe trick is doing it right, which can be expensive.

Ideally you want two very large harddrives, one as back up. Rip your music to lossless compression files (such as Apple Lossless or FLAC). Then get an external USB soundcard with a power supply independent of your computer, or a wireless music server such as the Airport Express. Find a nice high-end Digital-to-Analog Converter, and hook your soundcard or wireless device to the DAC. Voila, you've got great sound.

I covered a lot of the basics in these two articles, check them out:

Digital Compression Article

Build A Quick Music Server

-Eric

OK so it sounds like we have differing opinions here. Are there
any hard facts to go by like numbers or stats that could shed light on either opinion ?

I thought the MP3 format was more dense therefore better sound than others WMA ...etc ?

So is there some loss with all the compressions and transfers ? and if so how much ?

Did you read the articles? There is NO loss when you use lossless compression. Also, the sound is indistinguishable from its uncompressed WAV counterpart. N Abstentia's experience appears to be with MP3, and he does not say what compression rates he listened to, or if he's tried Lossless. What do you say N.A.?

No I have not tried any lossless compression so I know nothing about any of them. What are the file sizes like?

I am very familiar with MP3 and WMA and I much prefer WMA. Even an MP3 encoded at 320kb sounds like crap to me. Both are lossy formats but I'll take WMA any day over MP3. I actually use WMA quite extensively to make huge compilation CD's where sound quality is not a priority (where I'm not sitting and doing critical listening). I couldn't even stand to listen to MP3 for background music!

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Originally Posted by cowboy

OK so it sounds like we have differing opinions here. Are there
any hard facts to go by like numbers or stats that could shed light on either opinion ?

I thought the MP3 format was more dense therefore better sound than others WMA ...etc ?

So is there some loss with all the compressions and transfers ? and if so how much ?

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I seen graphs a few years ago when wma first came out comparing 192 wma to 160 to 256 mp3. It was as good or better than 256 mp3 but didn't show any higher mp3 comparison. Basically what the compression does is chop the high frequencies above 16khz and chops the low frequencies. Like I said before on a crap stereo you are not likely to tell the differences to a real cd even at 160 mp3. For myself I could only tell the bass was better on a cd compared to 192 wma. But my system has gotten better since then and I now store mp3's at 320 which to my ears is as good as a cd.

damn massive, that's what the file sizes are like. I tried flac and apple lossless and ape convinced that it would once and for all erradicate crappy sounding cymbals and muddied midrange from my life, only to find out that a full length CD in ape is only about half the size of a regular CD. For the record a perfect lossless copy of MFSL sgt peppers econded in APE is 240mb, and the original wav is 395mb.
Lossless is just that, lossless. its just like compressing a wav file with zip, but theoretically the lossless sound codecs are "audio optimized"
just for the record, the same sgt pepper wav file compressed with winrar is 261mb and it took just over 5 minutes to compress on a 1 ghz p3 with 512 megs of ram while doing other stuff (including decoding mp3). while the computer was more or less idle decoding the ape took just under 4 minutes.

buy cds, then convert them to whatever format you want (preferebly flac or something like that) onto a couple of 400 gb (or so) hard drives in a raid 1 array on a dedicated computer (aka a server). have the server networked in your home or wherever and give some sort of limited (password access) on the internet. something like direct connect would be nice. that way you could access the library from any internet computer. assuming you had a direct connect client or whatever installed.

that would make a nice sound library :D

Lossless compression reduces file size about 2 to 3 times. I figure uncompressed music is roughly about 10MB/minute or 1GB/1hour40min. Compressed lossless you'd get about 3 to 5 CDs per 1GB. If you have a large CD library (>200CD), and want CD quality sound, the most cost effective storage is hard drives. 160GB hover around $100. 3 times the storage at 1/3 the price of an iPod.
You can get sound cards that output digitally (optical e.g.) if you have a receiver that accepts digital connections. I think Apple's Airport Express has an optical out and can let you wirelessly stream music from your computer to the Airport (which is physically connected to your stereo)

Downloaded music is typically encoded at a low bit rate (~128kbs) which sucks, IMO, and upon comparison noticibly worse than CD quality on just about ANY system you can imagine. That doesn't mean it's bad, just that the difference is noticible. The better the system, the more likely you'll notice. But if you don't ever compare the two, maybe you'd never know. I'd like to go all hard drive someday with my CD's.