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Direct conversion of audio files on CD

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vuitreviejo
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Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#1 Post by vuitreviejo »

This may be an obvious question, but haven't been able to find a direct answer. I'm running Debian 10 with LXDE desktop. I have a large audio collection and have been using Asunder to rip CDs to FLAC, put the files on a server and use MPD to play them. I use Sound Converter to convert FLAC to MP3 for portable play. When I look at the files on most of the newer CDs using Thunar, a few have .flac extensions, but most are displayed with .wav extensions. Sound Converter appears to have no issues converting them to other formats, and they play in those formats. A ripper does all manner of things to assure high-quality playback from the tracks encoded on the CD, but it's quite slow. My question is, would converting directly from CD source with Sound Converter compromise the quality of the converted file?

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#2 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

vuitreviejo wrote:would converting directly from CD source with Sound Converter compromise the quality of the converted file?
Yes. MP3 is garbage, don't use it.

The bitrate of a Red Book CD (16 bit, 44.1KHz) is 1,411 kbit/s, accept nothing less. I suppose lossless codecs are alright but I prefer .wav files.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#3 Post by eriefisher »

CD's? WoW! I don't think I own anything that will take a CD any more. Might be something in the garage :lol: .

I think .wav is the default with most rippers if you don't interfere in any way. IDK it's been so long since I've even looked at a CD.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#4 Post by CwF »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:1,411 kbit/s, accept nothing less
Ha! says the storage salesman!

Yes, I remember contemplating having wav or even iso's all on hard drives. That was when I still used pioneer 6 packs and nakamichi slot changers. A kick but hard drive of the time was 18.2GB. Yep. So when I decided on mp3 @ 320 using an original fraunhofer codec under NT4 while testing on some decent electrostatics, then turned it down, I decided 13 scsi drives whirring away is actually pretty loud. Ridiculous.

Now with silent storage so cheap, why not.

So since it is a totally deprecated function, I still use the original formula to rip opticals. I do think accuracy fell with modern iterations of the tech. My Debian doesn't have an optical anymore. I have ripped a few in a XP vm, under debian with an optical. Now just fire up that one, pure xp, and there are a few other choices for fun. The used CD shops have dried up a bit, to bad, otherwise I'd be happy to continue buying cd's.

As far as the codec quality in debian I don't know. MP3 is fine, most compatible, and now public domain.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#5 Post by sunrat »

CwF wrote:MP3 is fine, most compatible, and now public domain.
Sorry, I agree with HOAS, mp3 is garbage. It's a legacy codec released 27 years ago. There have been huge advances in audio compression technology since then. The only reason you should use mp3 is if you have a device which won't play anything else.
Personally I store everything as FLAC and play that at home, and use Ogg Vorbis for portable which is compatible with many devices including Android phones.
The newer Ogg Opus is even better and I may change to that for future portable use; it's also compatible on Android. And it's the primary codec on YouTube these days. Notice how YT audio sounds much better than it did a few years ago? That's Opus, and at amazingly low bitrates. 8)

PS. It's pointless storing anything as .wav. A FLAC file can be converted back to an identical wav any time you need and it takes only 50-60% of the storage space.

To answer your question, a ripper like Asunder should rip directly to .wav and then internally convert to FLAC. Manually doing it as a 2-step process is just avoidable extra work. Quality will be the same either way.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#6 Post by pylkko »

Not only is mp3 garbage, it was replaced by aac 23 years ago. Citing wikipedia: "Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate."

Also, nowadays all mobile devices play flac straight out of the box. Makes no sense to have multiple versions of the files, in my opinion. Just convert them all to flac and forget about it (i.e throw away the physical disks).

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#7 Post by sunrat »

pylkko wrote:Makes no sense to have multiple versions of the files, in my opinion. Just convert them all to flac and forget about it (i.e throw away the physical disks).
Makes sense to me. I store and play FLAC at home. The difference between lossy and lossless is quite evident and quite easy to pick in ABX test. Disclosure - I listen on $3,000 studio monitor speakers (ADAM Audio A5X + Sub 8).
For portable playing it's mainly Ogg Vorbis Q7 as I can fit about 7,000 songs on a 64GB MicroSD card which is maybe 3 times as many as if they were FLAC. When out and about, the environment is noisier so it's harder to pick the small reduction in quality.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#8 Post by pylkko »

yes, but they do not need to be on the phone physically...so why bother making multiple versions? just stream them from your home or use a cloud. how much more time and space are you wasting makeing 2 versions of them 7000 songs???? Well, to each their own, i guess. I don't even have that much music...

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#9 Post by eriefisher »

Streaming is an excellent solution if you can afford the cost of bandwidth/cell data. Data plans here in Canada are a lot more expensive then they are in the U.S. Even if you were to use a lossy codec the costs add up quickly.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#10 Post by sunrat »

pylkko wrote:yes, but they do not need to be on the phone physically...so why bother making multiple versions? just stream them from your home or use a cloud. how much more time and space are you wasting makeing 2 versions of them 7000 songs???? Well, to each their own, i guess. I don't even have that much music...
When I say "phone", I mean my old G3 I use as a music player. It doesn't have a sim card so no streaming.
I'm no fan of the cloud and have little trust in storing data on other people's computers. My collection takes up a very small percentage of the currently 12TB of storage I have.
There's also the consideration that so many people streaming takes a considerable amount of internet capacity which forces more expansion, less bandwidth for everyone, and contributes more to power usage and therefore climate change. Taylor Swift has 33 million views in 6 days on Youtube for "cardigan" off her new album! That would take a few megawatt-hours by itself.
You can thank me for my little bit towards saving the planet. :mrgreen:
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#11 Post by pylkko »

Sorry, I live in a location where all the available data plans are unlimited, so it may still be a valid strategy in some parts of the world. Yes, obviously if you have to pay for moving data, then it may be worth your free time to double convert 12 TB of stuff. But it's not going to save the world.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#12 Post by vuitreviejo »

So, only one response even came close to actually answering the question. Just FYI, started recording music from vinyl to tape in the 70s and switched to CDs when they came out. I have a couple of thousand at this point, in a number of genres, and keep them for redundant back-up to digital back-ups on servers and cloud storage. Keep buying them because it works for me, will continue to do so until they cease to be sold. Changing formats at this juncture would be time-consuming and wouldn't improve the perceptible quality of FLAC playback on my home system. A CD-quality VBR MP3 is fine for portable use - it's certainly better than Bluetooth streams played on portable speakers, and headphones are a nuisance. Generally listen while while driving. My car audio system indexes and displays files tagged in a structure I prefer, and a 64GB flash drive holds a lot of MP3s, so I can play whatever I'm in the mood for rather than fiddle around with streaming services. Playback of a CD is indeed a mechanical process and a ripper is supposed to assure max fidelity from tracking and conversion of the data. Yes, all the ones I know about render to .wav, then convert to another format. There are a few FLAC and AIFF discs. Asked what I did because directly converting the .wav files in the discs would save time, and wanted to know if it would affect quality. Guess I'll do A/B listening tests to determine if I can tell the difference.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#13 Post by sunrat »

vuitreviejo wrote:...Yes, all the ones I know about render to .wav, then convert to another format. There are a few FLAC and AIFF discs. Asked what I did because directly converting the .wav files in the discs would save time, and wanted to know if it would affect quality. Guess I'll do A/B listening tests to determine if I can tell the difference.
Audio CDs do not actually contain files in the conventional sense, rather two-channel signed 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz. A WAV file is the same PCM data with an added header. I haven't heard of any ripper which doesn't copy that PCM data to a temp file before converting.
A/B listening should yield absolutely no difference as FLAC is the same data as in it's source WAV or AIFF file, just compressed. I actually did a test one day just for fun and encoded a FLAC file from a WAV file then uncompressed the FLAC file back to WAV. Comparing the MD5sum of the original and compressed/decompressed WAV files showed they were identical. Note that may not work depending on the software used as some will change the header and thus the MD5sum but the audio data will still be the same.
I've been using Asunder CD ripper lately, very simple but effective. It can rip to WAV file and/or any number of compressed files, lossy or lossless, simultaneously.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#14 Post by Mr. Lumbergh »

vuitreviejo wrote:Generally listen while while driving. My car audio system indexes and displays files tagged in a structure I prefer, and a 64GB flash drive holds a lot of MP3s, so I can play whatever I'm in the mood for rather than fiddle around with streaming services.
I'm right there with you. I have almost my whole collection ripped to some combination of MP3 and AAC, depending on when I did the conversion, just for putting on an old iPod Classic. It's still able to interface with the head unit in my truck so almost everything I own I can listen to when I'm on the road. If you're at home listening to a setup in a quiet room with a discrete amp, DAC, and carefully-EQ'd Martin Logan speakers, yes, those formats will be found pretty lacking. But in the car with engine noise, tire noise, wind noise, traffic noise, gear noise, not to mention the challenges of getting audio to sound good in a car in the first place and the limitations of the equipment... They're fine. Formats are just a tool, use the one most appropriate for the job. If you need to put a bunch of songs on limited storage media for portability and that's your main concern, the compressed formats are good for that. If you want to listen at home on a high-end rig, put on the original media or a lossless conversion of it if you don't want to mess with the media.
I'll curious to hear about your results, but as others have said I doubt you'll be able to notice in an instance like this since a copy will need to be made in memory for the software to act on in the first place, so no matter what you ultimately wind up converting to it's coming from a copy.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#15 Post by pylkko »

Yes, the answer to why all rippers rip to a temp file in wav is essentially explained in Surat's response. Reading the disk to RAM or a temporary file on disk is fast and simple and as the files are large, the software usually reads to disk. Then this is converted to whatever format into a new file, using the processor. If you have a really slow possessor this can take much longer than the reading of the file for the disk, at least in theory. I have an old laptop with a 24X DVD reader that can read the raw data at 24X but if you convert it to some formats it can be as slow as 1X (one hour film takes one hour to rip) because the conversion is so slow.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#16 Post by pendrachken »

pylkko wrote:yes, but they do not need to be on the phone physically...so why bother making multiple versions? just stream them from your home or use a cloud. how much more time and space are you wasting makeing 2 versions of them 7000 songs???? Well, to each their own, i guess. I don't even have that much music...

Calling MP3 ( which can be played on a toaster with a half shorted out home made CPU ) garbage, then recommending streaming from cloud crap? Are you insane?

Mp3 is also quite fine at bitrates > 300. The only reason AAC was created was you could get away with adequate quality at about half the bitrate. Thus slightly smaller file sizes within video containers like MP4 or matroska.

How much time would I waste converting 7000 songs? All of the 5 seconds it takes to fire out a bash one liner to do the job for me.

How much space would I "waste"?None, I wouldn't notice the couple of gigs of extra songs compared to my TB's of archived photos and video I have.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#17 Post by pylkko »

What is it with this forum and all the ad hominems? In the last two weeks I have posted in but two threads. In the first I am called a "fanboi" in order to discredit my request for evidence to pretty radical factual claims. Here I'm called "insane" because I offer another solution to managing an audio collection. Do people really think that their points of view will appear more intelligent an well-informed if they call other people names? Like:"let's see, I think there are use cases for mp3 still. I will now argue this point convincingly by calling a person - that I do not even know - 'insane'. Yes, then I will feel happy about myself as a communicator and rational human being".

And to be fair, it wasn't me that called mp3 garbage originally, and my main point in that post was that other formats have superseded mp3 in any sense imaginable.

I personally really don't like the idea of having large music collections in multiple formats. It's not just the extra work converting them. In my experience, those files often need other things to be done. Maybe the tags need to be edited, for example. Then the different container formats have different meta-data layouts and maybe you even need different software to edit them. It's just simple to keep it in one format and flac - in my opinion - as the best of all worlds, since the quality is perfect, it is compressed, and it is hard to find a machine that cannot play flac (although, I do admit that mp3 may be more universal on legacy hardware). Flac also allows the easy reconstruction of the CD (CUE file) and the encoders/decoders are free software, although there are other license free codecs with FOSS decoder/encoder.

I have a small music collection in flac ripped from CD's. I have it on the LAN, so any machine can listen to it, and on the router I have installed a VPN server, which allows me to connect to it using mobile from anywhere in the world. In my view the advantages here are that I convert the library into one format and never touch it again once it is ready. There are no multiple copies, there are no files taking up space on the phones that use the library. It works over 4G mobile, but it also works because I mostly listen to music at work, where I have fiber optic/WiFi

For anyone interested, there is a node.js music player/library software called "Stretto". It will create a player and library interface in a browser and serve your music, album art and a library user interface. Obviously you can also use native music clients to do the same.

One more point, when I said "cloud", an earlier point was: "I don't like other people controlling my data". Well, you can also host your own cloud. Just connect that music hard drive to an owncloud container hosted on a RPi or whatever, if you do not want some commercial company "seeing what music you listen to"... But, yes, this only works if you have unlimited internet.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#18 Post by CwF »

Yep, this is a good thread to demonstrate the quality of these boards.

"MP3 Sucks" is little strong, and stupid, and misses a point. Are we asking about a suitable archive format? I don't think so. 320mp3 is a storage savings about 5:1, and you can't tell. If you can perhaps you should go analog and argue with them types. Since space isn't an issue I do have audio DVD's in ISO, for convenience and to keep the menus. For mp3 it's a good chance it could go into some device already paid for, still working, made years ago. If played through the computer, you can't tell. It fits the need or it doesn't. - you can't tell.

Again, I don't know and would like to know how good the mp3 codec is on debian. There is not 'ONE', and lame does suck. If it hasn't been redone in the last two years (?) then maybe it is junk, ie 16khz roll off, etc. So I just peeked into the issue,...Fedora says they have Fraunhofer codecs, does debian? Lame is not mp3, it's compatible. It was cool for 'nixers' to shout down mp3, that's so 2000's...where's oog?

Starting from now, mp3 is obsolete. As stated I'm 25k+ into the process, all done from source many not digital, done before lame existed. I choose to continue the way and not reinvent the wheel. No, you can't hear the difference. With all of that understood, should we talk about the actual optical device? They are not all equal you know? And where did DVD-A go?

Maybe I'll put the pieces together and test myself. I'll see if Debian can create a full sweep mp3 that scopes out and can reproduce the bit perfect match every time...

Hope the OP finds a good answer! Starting now, I would archive the iso and rig it up to fully emulate a changer stack with animations and mech sounds and full dewey index. For the gizmo I wanted to transcode the music to, I'd do it on the fly per circumstance. I've spent much to much time outside the reach of the internet to rely on streaming, a johny come lately

I'll add, just looked
Well I can't find it...So at this moment the answer is no, Debian does not have an unencumbered, finished, fraunhofer mp3 codec. So Debian does not have real mp3. It has lame.

There is a 'real AAC' though!

Next order of business, what qualifies as Debians' EAC clone for the one step rip to tagged file? On todays stuff that should be easy. My ancient box does it in one step at 10x.

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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#19 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

pendrachken wrote:Mp3 is also quite fine at bitrates > 300
CwF wrote:320mp3 is a storage savings about 5:1, and you can't tell
Sorry but you both need to upgrade your £10 soundbars and get the wax removed from your cloth ears :mrgreen:

EDIT: lossy codecs strip out over ¾ of the data and throw it away. That information cannot be recovered without access to the original source.
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Re: Direct conversion of audio files on CD

#20 Post by CwF »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:nothing
..and you need to learn to read.

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