Let The Conversion Begin

Stepping outside the house to embark on my walk to work this morning, I simultaneously confronted the single-digit-temperature air and popped on the iPod. Up came, believe it or not, the title track from Laurie Anderson's seminal 1982 (or thereabouts) Big Science album.

The first line: "It's cold outside ..."

(Then I remembered that I had pulled some Laurie Anderson CDs from the shelf last night, while I was testing and tweaking and messing with my new "project", and had checked to see if any resided on the iPod.)

And it was even colder last night, reported variously as minus seven and minus ten. A good night to stay home, as Kim was off to the Elgin Opera House with Ivi, three of her musician friends and Grandma Janet, affording me an opportunity to initiate a long-overdue project -- creating a FLAC library of my CDs.

Why FLAC? Like MP3, it is a compression format, but unlike MP3, it is "lossless" and (theoretically) does not result in degraded sound quality.

I decided to use an old favorite, Exact Audio Copy, as it has been my most successful tool over the years when I wanted to rip CDs to WAVs and/or MP3s. The version of EAC on a couple of my computers is about five years old, so I downloaded the current -- v.099prebeta4; yes, it is still in some sort of beta state. Turns out that, although I had separately downloaded the latest FLAC codec package, this latest EAC comes rigged with an option to directly install an included FLAC.

EAC/FLAC then got installed in my MacBook under its Boot Camp partition running WinXP (sorry, no Mac or Linux version for EAC, but FLAC comes in all those flavors ... and I briefly considering running EAC under WINE on one of my Linux boxes). The MacBook became the weapon of choice, mostly for its portability and convenience, but also because it is definitely the best Windows machine I own.

SIDEBAR: While I have experienced Parallels, VMware Fusion and Crossover inside a Mac partition, I definitely prefer using a separate Boot Camp partition. Why? Because having to boot into Windows separately is not really an issue for me when most of the operations I do under Windows need to be running solo -- like ripping DVDs and CDs or rendering video -- without interference from other processes, anyway. Plus I get to maximize my access to all available RAM. And, like I said, Windows on an Intel Mac is likely to be the best Windows experience you will ever have in terms of stability and robustness of drivers; it sure has been for me.

EAC is slightly perplexing to set up, as it is a power user's dream with screens and screens of configuration options but lacks any formal documentation beyond a simple FAQ! However, you can piece together some guidance with the help of your friend, Google. FLAC's own site points at some HydrogenAudio documents, among others, which seemed to cover an earlier, somewhat different version of EAC, but they helped a bit. Before I go too far into this project, I will probably try to do some empirical testing of the results with varying EAC configurations.

Anyway, I did throw some Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir CDs at EAC for an initial go.

The results so far? My FLAC file sizes are running about 50 - 60% of the ripped WAV files. It looks like I will be able to store about three CDs-worth of tracks on a single 700MB CD disk. This probably translates into a few thousand CDs on a one terabyte hard drive. And today's prices for a 1TB drive at a supplier like Newegg or at my company's store, aren't much over $100. For the time being, I am moving the FLACs to my Linux NAS box, but I will probably build a newer, bigger one to serve up these files. And, of course, a mirror backup drive will also be in order.

I can't really distinguish between the WAVs and the FLACs as to sound quality. Haven't done any real rigorous testing yet. But, so far, they sound pretty darn good using a USB-connected HeadRoom BitNet head amp with my old Sennheisers. I have some Grado phones on the way, so we shall see how those work out. This FLAC business may entirely ruin me for MP3s (although I encode most of mine at bitrates of 256 or 320). Maybe I will need to pick up a larger capacity iPod and run it with RockBox so it will handle the FLAC format ... C'mon, Apple, your lossless format isn't the center of the universe.

What player software for the computers? The piece of software in use on all of my machines -- whether Windows, Linux or Mac -- is VLC, the open-source player from VideoLan.org. It will handle almost any format, audio AND video, you throw at it. I also like and use Winamp (latest version is around 5.5.4) on some of my Windows boxes. I find iTunes to be rather unpleasant, and now use it only for some podcast/videocast subscriptions. And I find Windows Media Player even less useful. My daughter is fond of Media Monkey, as am I -- it is a great freeware player of FLAC, et.al. and is a great substitute for iTunes. Songbird has been recommended to me as a good open-source, cross-platform music player/manager, so I am starting to spend some time with it as well.

Haven't yet figured out how I want to deal with making my FLACs accessible throughout the homestead (and playable through standalone audio systems, as well as just on computer). For now, everything will go on the Linux network-attached-storage (NAS) box, which can be seen by any computer in the house. I also have had a Hauppauge MediaMVP (bolted into my main stereo system) for a few years, but it only knows MP3 and WMA, audio-wise.

In (necessarily) keeping this as a poor man's solution, I will definitely not be investing in something like the McIntosh 750 music server ($6K) or even Sonos ($1K and up) or Olive Opus (just under $2K). Maybe I will look at the (now Logitech-owned) SqueezeBox Boom $300-$400?) for a bedroom adjunct to stream music to fall asleep with, wirelessly.

This project is going to take forever, probably, as EAC -- or at least the way I have it set up now -- is no speed demon. So I will be feeding the MacBook CDs as I watch the NewsHour, read the newspaper, eat my dinner, visit the bathroom, and so on. Will report progress and observations as warranted. That is, unless global climate change or the predictions of James Howard Kunstler haven't overtaken us by then.