In the case of sites like what.cd, I think that FLAC 16/44 rips of CDs and vinyl are useful for creating distributed backups of our cultural corpus. But I agree that 24/192 FLACs of vinyl are ridiculous.
Aren't there benefits other than listening quality to having the music available in this format? Imagine 200 years from now, finding an old, lost stash of music in the attic. What would you prefer, a bunch of CDs or some drives with 24/192 FLACs on them?
Pointless conflation of quality and storage capacity.
CDs are stereo 16-bit @ 44kHz PCM with an upper limit of about 80 minutes. That's 80 * 60 * 2 * 2 * 44100 = 846,720,000 bytes = ~807 MiB / 80 minutes.
I can get a 1 TiB thumb drive and put 1200 CD audio ISO images on it. Of course, that's pointless because one can rip tracks as FLAC to get lossless compression.
Blu-Ray audio has options including 24-bit PCM @ 192 kHz. 2 channel stereo is 60 * 60 * 2 * 3 * 192000 / hr = 4,147,200,000 bytes/hr = ~4 GiB/hr. Even with FLAC, I wouldn't expect more than 500 albums per thumb drive.
I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
Having CD's that go back to their launch (plus records/cassettes from before), I had to rip a couple of thousand CDs to FLAC so I'm totally with you on this one. Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand what's thrown away when converting to a lossy format, and the consequential horrible degradation that comes with converting from one lossy format to another. It's not like storage or bandwidth is an issue now (soon even the 2:1 or 3:1 lossless with FLAC won't be worth it). Just save the raw data and move on.
Of course it's more 'convenient' to trust cloud service X but (as recently discussed here) 'convenient' services can turn out to be pretty venal - not to mention short-lived (Microsoft Zune,various google services, random shuttered startups etc).
Having built a rather large CD collection (over the decades since there were like 5 albums available on CD), eventually I used a rack of old computers to rip them all to FLAC - storage cost is way less than the original CD cost.
Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC (from Bandcamp etc.). Storage keeps getting cheaper, bandwidth is cheap, and my bet was always the price of both will keep decreasing to where it's not worth the quality/transcoding issues of using any lossy format. It's now pretty much at the point where it's possible to stream lossless audio from the home server to whereever I happen to be (with a backup of an MP3 player with a big SD card whenever there isn't bandwidth).
I keep 3 copies of every CD I own (4 if you count the CD itself). A FLAC copy ripped using EAC that lives on my NAS and gets streamed in my home. An MP3 copy at a 192 bitrate for use in our cars. And a 128 bit OPUS file that lives on my phone.
It's a pretty easy workflow. EAC to rip. FlacSquisher to convert to MP3 and OPUS. Then copy the files where they need to go and delete them from my laptop. CD then goes into a bin in the garage until I need it again or want to admire the artwork.
> If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files.
Actually, it annoys me how it's widely accepted that MP3 is an acceptable format to pay the same price for as CDs, while you could rip lossless FLACs from CDs. Either MP3s should be cheaper, or switching to FLAC should be an option, (like Bandcamp does it).
> The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.
All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC).
The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic.
3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards).
Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.
CDs are massively inconvenient. When I get a music cd, I just rip it to FLAC.
From that point on, I have a file. Much more convenient to work with, and easily backed up with all the other files. Having a good backup strategy, I'm more likely to be hit my lightning than lose a flac file.
As for buying DRM'd music online, I haven't so much as considered it. It just won't happen, ever.
I'm a passionate music enthusiast, buying about 5-10 releases a week, often rare stuff. While I really disaprove of using it as exclusive source of music, what.cd has always been my last-resort-source for music that would otherwise be lost or only available on 3-digit-priced vinyl. There were still a lot of gaps in the catalogue but it's probably the most complete collection of lossless music, organized in a way that is rare for user provided content online. A sublime experience.
My kids laugh at me because I still buy CDs and rip them and some bandcamp. I rip to flac, not for some audiophile reason, but because I can rip a single file for the album with metadata included and space is cheap.
I never have to worry about an internet connection or if an artist drops from a platform.
If you really just want a FLAC rip of a CD to play over a media center, then consider simply downloading the FLAC rip from a filesharing community, but then buying the vinyl release for the sake of owning the physical artifact. That way, you both get high-quality digital audio and you financially support the artist, but the vinyl release has larger artwork and is more satisfying as a collector item.
And you misunderstood me, if you've got a good LAME rip you will not be able to distinguish it from a FLAC rip off the original CD. You'll be using several times the storage for no perceptible improvement. While disk storage is cheap the physical storage of those CDs is not nor is the time required to handle the CDs to rip.
Too bad the CD format makes it difficult to get a perfect rip. I prefer a FLAC (or WAV as I occasionally see) download over CDs, but CDs are my second choice, especially for older albums with used copies available.
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