Reaching for a higher calling…. for music in the box

I have been ripping MP3 320kbps from music CDs for many years. The main reason why i am ripping at the highest bit rate offered was to optimise the playback quality.

Ripping music CD has some benefits & conveniences in terms of:

• music CD dont get scratched easily
• jukebox function
• no need for those higher-end dedicated CD player (S$350 to >S$1000). Just a very very good music sound will do (S$200 – >S$400).

However, recently i noted that there was a trend of music lovers going towards the way of using FLAC format in ripping their CD.  FLAC was introduced a few years back and has gain popularity due to its lossless format, promising true CD-reproduction in music playback. I was kinda of slow to pick this up as i already have my means to storing my media in my favourite format and not knowing how good FLAC actually sounds.

So in my free time, i tested out the MP3, CD, and FLAC version of a particular song. Damn! I was blown away! The music reproduction from FLAC almost sounded the same as CD. Clarity is so damn good especially for those CDs that were 24bit processed (HDCD). The files are actually coded at a higher bit rate of 700++ kbps which resulted in bigger file size as well. We are talking about a normal 320kbps MP3 song could be at 10.7mb but a 737kbps FLAC song could be at 28.5mb. This is like 2.66x more from the normal MP3.

With the advances of storage technologies, even 1Terabyte HDD seems to be a commonplace now. This huge file size requirement might not be a major concern anymore. However, there is another problem……

FLAC ripping doesnt come with the intuitive tagging of albums unlike the MP3. Either that or i am struck with old CD titles that nobody bothered to keep a record in the database anymore. This means that i might have to rename all the titles in my CD collection….. This sucks! *looking at the collection*