@@cjsvega Do not use an Intel Celeron CPU, they are junk mainly for office use, like documents, spreadsheets, etc, you need a Pentium D or Pentium 4, Dual Core ideally a 2.0GHZ CPU or higher, or an i7 quadcore CPU such as i7 920 CPU.
@@speedyboishan87 no you don't, a music server playing FLAC ,wav or even mp3 will run just fine on just about any PC ever made to run Windows 95. and that's prehistoric technology, but would still work. winamp was free music server software thats still beats newer aps.
Newbie viewer; first-time comment... Enjoy watching your Q&A. I especially valued today's episode having to do with audio codec and sampling rate. Also wanted to say how much I enjoyed the episodes regarding building the new studio and unboxing of the Infinity Reference Speakers. Thanks again, Paul.
sädle he didnt know if his chippäir amp wöz 200? ör 2k. well was ja maybe it was 2k 4k 42 ? but almost 5050 it was an extra diggit v$v 1:15 nö aströhöbbyy well nö ge xD
I intensely stare at the cd for about an hour and then write 1s and 0s in notepad++, save, and rename to wav. (Edit:2020) During the lockdown i have mastered the art of engraving CD by hand. I have now achieved replica quality of the original content. If the lockdowns get extended i might go so far to manually magnetize hard drive platters in order to achieve faultless source migration. P. S. You people are one helluva community
@@arthurwatts1680 WAV files do not include checksums (beyond that provided transparently by the media hardware such as disk sector CRCs), but when they are encoded for transfer to an audio CD, error detection/correction data is added.
@@marianneoelund2940 Thanks for the clarification, Marianne, but I think you'll find that Mr Jerkovic (!) and myself were just trying to inject a little humor into what is a very dry topic. There was a time when I agonized over what EAC was doing with my CD rips but it's been 6 years since I've purchased a CD so its all a bit beyond me now. I know - flat-earthers and all that - but it is what it is. MQA and DSD are equally irrelevant in my little world, fwiw, but I realise that the world doesnt revolve around moi.
@@arthurwatts1680 I appreciate that. But I often take opportunities like this to post trivia which might be interesting to someone. The lack of checksums or CRCs in most audio files makes them rather easy to hack or modify at the bit level - something I've been taking advantage of recently.
What a pleasure to watch informative videos presented by someone mature who's not trying to impress or be cool. Just straight down the line engineering. You are the duck's nuts of UA-cam Paul 👏
I Rockbox'd my old mp3 players, in order for it to play FLAC & other lossless format. The weak processors in these device most certainly decode FLAC in real time, even huge merged audiobook files. The open source firmware let's user peek the computation as the file plays. One has to be running something ancient to not practically decode level 8 FLAC
The correct answer is FLAC. I really don't think there is merit to the argument that a FLAC will sound worse than a WAV. I don't buy the argument about power supply fluctuations. FLAC doesn't take much more CPU to play than a WAV, especially on relatively modern hardware. Honestly a high bitrate MP3 will be almost indistinguishable from the FLAC or WAV anyway. I wouldn't use ALAC because there's no benefit to that over FLAC and it locks you into the Apple ecosystem.
What everyone here seems to be missing is the fact that even Paul said the decoded bits are identical. In other words, he agrees with most of these arguments in the comments. I believe the confusion comes from the fact that he is often digressing to address the entire signal path from the media to the speaker output rather than the differences in the file format. Even though the decoded bits are identical, it is easily possible for the final analog waveform to vary noticeably. The differences people can hear are not due to changes in the bits. Like everyone (including Paul) keeps saying, the bits are identical. The difference in sound comes from other factors. First, there can be minor changes in the amount of time between the bits during the playback. (Not decoding.) These tiny differences actually DO alter the final analog output signal which is created from the bit stream. An extremely accurate waveform comparison between the analog output signals being sent to the amplifier would show those differences. When the width of the pulse changes, the waveform changes. That's the entire premise of Pulse Width Modulation. Another contributing factor is the hardware and software involved in processing the identical bits. Most audio circuitry does some level of filtration at various stages during the conversion process back to analog. These filters assume that the amount of time between the bits conforms to the sample rate perfectly, which would (in theory) produce an exact replica of the original waveform. This is often not the case. Digital filtration, in particular, is highly timing dependent. If the spacing changes, the effect of the filter will also change. Analog filtration can also change the sound since it is based on the controlled attenuation effect of capacitors and inductors responding to varying frequencies and amplitude within the signal. Then, there is the fact that the actual values of electronic components vary randomly within a specific tolerance range, which will also affect the output. I'm quite certain that there are myriad other factors along the signal path which can slightly alter the analog output in a way that affects the fidelity of the output waveform to the originally recorded waveform. So, the bottom line is that, although the bits are precisely identical, the output can indeed be physically (and even audibly) different due to the influence of other factors. What really matters is whether you enjoy what you hear, and that is purely subjective. So, why pick on others who love music as much as we do?
Thank you, but having said all this, surely there is a process which would ensure all these errant bits remain in or can be returned to their correct positions ?
First time i've watched some of these video's from here in the UK and i have to say that I am very impressed by the methodical way that Paul explains everything. Peoper old school with no bull shite! Will bewatching more regularly as I'm very passionate about good sound quality. Especially at Home and in my Car.
Hahahaha... you are serious that you care about audio quality in your car? I care about sound quality in the shower, in underground tunnels and when traveling by train.
4:20 I would love to hear an elaboration on this concept. Especially, "a revealing system." I find this incredibly interesting. Thanks for the information :)
WAV files are composed of RIFF chunks, and they most certainly do provide for metadata. They also accommodate compressed audio data, although this capability is rarely used. Header, Format and place-holder chunks found at the top of the file are generally quite small, 8-32 bytes. As a rule, metadata chunks in any audio file format are placed at the end of the file, following all of the playable audio data, as they can be fairly large if they include cover art, etc.
Nice to know, thanks Marianne... but after I've clicked on "Properties" to see song (or metadata) info, it won't let me type anything into the boxes !!
I use FLAC stored on my NAS drive which I cast to my Chromecast Audio, plugged into my Cambridge audio DAC. I use Hifi Cast on Android to play the files and it's true gapless playback. The lights change accordingly with different sample rates on the DAC.
I thought to mention that there is an old file format called IFF that was used on the old Amiga computers back in the 80’s and 90’s, mostly for graphics, but also audio. If you look at the headers of AIFF and IFF, you will see that it is clearly built around the same system, hence it is not entirely correct to say that Apple made AIFF when Electronic Arts laid the foundation with IFF.
Secure ripping is the most important, as the CD was designed to conceal and not report reading errors. For Windows the best program for it is CUETools. It can verify already made copies against other submissions to its online database. Then you can re-rip the ones that do not match with a secure and slow reader like EAC. Upsampling is best done on the fly, with whatever output requirement you currently have, without inflating the file size on disk. WAV does have metadata, but it doesn't map quite well to music tags. Sonic Foundry regions and markers seem to be well supported. I had Nero write CD index points from regions that existed in the Wav file. Current players may stick an ID3 block into the WAV file for unlimited metadata. The RIFF format can serve as a container for anything. WAV is a good format for editing. Programs that support compressed files will either convert to WAV proxy beforehand, or be laggy as they do seeking in the compressed file on the fly. Back in the old days WAV could also be compressed with any CBR codec. That is bad because you can't see in the file manager the codec when all files have the same extension. In the Apple system this still happens, as ALAC and AAC will have the same extension. For de-emphasis, SoX works well. You can process the CD as a disk image to avoid clicks on track boundaries, remove DC offset and boost the level while in 32-bits accuracy. Old CDs are rather quiet, and theoretically there is a reduction in SNR while de-emphasizing.
Do you think that different programs sound different (assuming it's not doing any processing to the file)? I've heard people say that they do but I haven't been able to hear a difference in my own testing and I don't see how it could if the program is just feeding identical data into a buffer for the audio driver. I assume that there isn't any sort of clocking involved at that stage. I can see how using a different driver could make a difference but not a difference playback program.
I'm not talking about resampling or any other processing. Just playing a file bit transparently. Some people say that some players like JRiver still sound better.
As a computer scientist i can say flac and wav are identical... if you are worried about the size reduction, dont be. As for the possibility of sounding worse due to the extra processing to uncompress, i see your reasonining, but i see that as an extremely rare case! If that happened to you, your dac has a really really major flaw, because decompressing the flac is super simple stuff, just throw away that dac!
Since we are discussing ripping CD's in this video, I thought I'd give a shout-out to the Linux users. "Whipper" is an excellent cli tool, and flacon is a good GUI tool for Linux (I use Arch) bit-perfect CD ripping. Nice alternative to Sound Juicer.
I've been ripping with Sound Juicer to FLAC for years. It works great, but I'm always open to trying new tools. I'll definitely check out Flacon. Thanks for the tip. Rubyripper is another one I've had good results with.
When I RIP cds on my Samsung laptop with the iTunes app, I use the Apple Lossless Encoder. The ripped cd sounds identical to the original and the disc will play in all players. For my phone, I use aac files. Nearly all the songs are cd quality.
Bill Crane : Why ? is this EAC so good ? does it provide anything better ? Does it make 100% identical copies and other softwares can't ?? I mostly use the windows to rip a cds in the hard drive or CDBurnerXP and it's all good Currently stil using windows 7 64bit To be honest yesterday i've installed this EAC in my pc and except a few interesting features it has,, the sound quality is the same for uncompressed files , i mean i didn't notice something different for the better .
44.1Khz was selected because originally the audio was processed in one unit and storage was a video tape recorder. Originally 3/4" Umatic. Then 1/2 with Beta being most popular. 44.1Khz fits mathematically with the video signal/ line rate.
hey im wanting to rip some sacds to play on sacd player i been told to use normal dvd -R discs any thoughts.
6 років тому
I normally play sound system on mac at 16/44 no dolby and when I use 24 bit files I use my mackie firewire mixer and audio technica headphones. ... but bitperfect sounds like a neat solution so you don't have to keep switching .
I have found always that EAC is the best ripper, I have also found that once you do a full install of EAC and perform all the tests and verify that you system(and drive) is 100% with EAC. Then other programs will also rip with this 100% which I found to be the case with Itunes. I did test it by comparing the wave files each program produced with EAC
On Linux, I compressed my entire cd collection to FLAC using abcde when I moved countries a few years ago. I sold all my CDs to a second-hand store and no longer keep physical media. Abcde stands for Another Bloody CD Encoder. Once you have configured the app, you stick in the CD and type abcde in the terminal, and it does the rest.
EAC to rip the CD to WAVE, TLH to convert WAVE to FLAC. Anyone who says they can hear the difference only thinks they can hear it! Don't listen to tech too much, just enjoy the music!
The real trick is how to properly rip a CD that was mastered with pre-emphasis and save it in a digital format that then always will play as originally intended.
i am sorry you might have a very very small delay on flac compared to wav , no jitter no power supply stuff, if you use flac. why the hell wont you play it with a computer that is able to play flac without any problem or 100 flacs at the same time for all that matters. the computing power to do so is rather low, especially nowadays. a phone could play multiple at one time
he needs to sell u $2000 power supplies; you cant get better power supply stabilty than with Li Ion batteries, but hey, he needs to sell you his toroidal custom transformers at gold price
There is not even anything processed. The "Audio Chip" in your gear has hardware acceleration for it. If aany it uses micro amps on the power supply. The power supply could not care less.
One interesting thing about AIFF/ALAC is that if you rip stuff in ALAC and down the road decide you don't want to have to decompress it on the fly you can tell iTunes to decompress all your files and it's like you ripped them that way. No losses so no difference at all. If you're caching them to say an SSD and actually playing your music from that there's no need.
paul i use a 2012 imac 20"(2)Electro-Voice sentry 100 A studio speakers Crown Straight line preamp (2)cd recorder/players -Sony 10 band E-Q electro-voice interface BC EQ (2)tape cassette record/player (1)Crown 50w Power line amplifier
What happened to CDA? Isn't the format of the data on an audio CD recorded as CDA as in compact disc audio format? With the size off modern drives being so huge what is the matter with just recording it as a CDA file? That way the bits are exactly the same as on the compact disc, right?
Hearing the difference between AIFF and FLAC is the same discussion as saying there is an audible difference between a $5 and $500 USB cable. Many people claim they can hear a difference but there is no proof to back it up. Like Paul mentions the processing can introduce "something" but that has nothing to do with the format. The same goes for data cables. If bits arrive in the correct order, and all bits arrive on the other end, the signal was perfect. Whether that's over a cheap or expensive cable and yet people perceive a difference. It's the same as hooking up a new $200 power cable to the same outlet as before, with the same crappy wiring inside the walls and the same circuit breaker but yet, many claim to hear a difference. These perceived improvements (or snake oil, depending on the person you talk to) are scattered around in the audiophile community. In the end it doesn't matter I guess. If you think your DIY $20 speaker cables sound great on your overnight sensations DIY speakers, good for you. If you invested >$2000 in cabling alone but are sure it improved the soundstage, good. Whatever makes you happy about your setup.
I would say most records would be fine sampled at 16 bits. There are some records that actually have a wider dynamic range than will fit within the old CD digital standard however. yes the noise floor on the record can be easily heard during the quiet passages, but so can the music. Recording to 16-bit, setting the peak of the recording to match to the maximum level of the digital standard, the quiet passeges drop to dugital silence with an periodic soybd here and there as the music and surface noise raises up to the lowest level allowed with 16-bits. I do not know what the dynamic range is with 24-bits... Another thing to consider is if you plan to do any processing to the audio after recording a record to digital, is that processing can negatively alter the audio very quickly with the low resolution of 16-bit. 24-bit allows the audio to be processed with little errors created while processing with digital filters, equalizers, noise processors, or even simple digital volume adjustments.
One possible advantage of ripping vinyl with a higher bit rate would be the increased headroom before aliasing. I've transcribed over 600 LP's to digital and use the standard 44.1 KHz/16-bit CD format. The main issue I had to deal with is that it can be very time consuming to preview every second of an LP to determine the maximum audio amplitude and set the digital recording device to the highest possible level (for the best resolution) without clipping (anything over 0 dB), which ruins a digital recording. My solution was to try to quickly find the loudest passages and set the recording level appropriately (for maximum resolution) but use a soft-knee limiter with look-ahead delay just ahead of the A/D conversion to knock down any unexpected peaks that would cause clipping. I use a tc electronic Finalizer Express (A/D/A converter) which has the limiter on the analog input. Absent a limiting function on your A/D converter you could just buy an analog limiter and place it ahead of the converter and then digitally record at the sampling rate you use for playback.
Rip to wav using dBpoweramp. Then do the conversion to Flac after. That way jitter can not enter due to the simultaneous demand of the psu and computer processor. I also close all apps and background tasks. Use the securerip feature (which checks your rip against there database of rips) for errors and if there are any it re-rips multiple passes at lower drive speeds till to improve it. Not add cd's are flawless and it isn't long before you have the odd scratch. Personally what I do if I cannot rip at 99% or greater accuracy I will torrent the audio cd. ( I own the album on at least 2 formats).
I just ripped all my moms cds to 128kbps MP3 files and I'm wondering what the difference is? Playing the song from the cd in windows media player sounds the same to me as playing the song from the rip (in WMP not grove music)
there are differences, yes. 128 or WAV yes, and it depends the speakers or component audio system you have to play the audio. my sellected playlists with my favourite music commonly is in CDs I record - sometimes the original is mp3, I convert ot to WAVE, I make some improvements if it was necessary and I get my personal CD witth good quality. sometimes the USB with mp3 is enough and I enjoy it too.
@@Ephemeral2023 some songs or videos from youtube (and other different formats I could have) are a mess with poor quality. I have songs since Audiogalaxy or Napster times, even some iTunes that I've purchased need some "restoration": to apply some filters and saving them as WAV files.
@@Ephemeral2023 in 40 years I've listened music, MP3, WAV, AAC, cassette, LP, Minidisc, I enjoy my music. My mother and my neighbor enjoy this or those and their music, but there is a difference between listen in Mono AM RADIO mode than FM Stereo, _it is better to enjoy more_ commonly it is said as _it sounds better_ songs I ENJOY sound better, a few times I save the file as MP3. similar to the movie on TV, "the important is to enjoy the movie" yes, but with a better high quality format is better than VHS. 🤷✈🔊
@@Ephemeral2023 no. really I don't. when I heard the difference between a youtube file and a WAV file after enhance the waveform, and sometimes cleaning up the original file (even from CD tracks), I get a cleaner and better audio file, and I see majoroty of tracks are clipped. of course, I like the process, I have the time and tools to do it with music I'm intereted and I enjoy, because I see the difference between a pig with lipstick and without it. form yuour own point of view to you, it is useless, because you aren't interested, you don't have the ABCD and you don't need it. if you have a different way to listen whatever, I like mine.
I agree with keeping CDs as 16bit x 44.1kHz, but my reasoning is a little different--since that's the native CD format, you can't gain resolution that isn't in the source, but you can introduce additional errors recoding. We can always mess with resolution and sampling rates later! So I say the best thing to do is to keep it "as is", then if future DACs or software can do a better job of interpreting the signal to get back information lost in the recording/mastering process, you have the original digital stream to work from. It's been .flac for me for over 10 years now. I've ripped almost everything from CD now with artists tagged and album covers in the files. It's all on 2 machines at home, plus a cloud server. Don't want to lose it :-)
I agree with your reasoning. Also, I've got a PLEX server on my NAS and if i playback my music with an internet browser it plays back lossless no matter the lossless file format but if i playback ALAC or APE on my android mobile, it gets converted to lossy AAC, this is why i stick to FLAC
WAVE file is my choice. I record CDs with the music I like or sellected playlists. play WAVE files is my choice. - for some general music I like mp3 192 bitrate is enough to me
@Rob C I know. I just wanted to ask Paul a question about something else. But i couldn't find out where to drop it, so i just threw it here and hoped for the best :)
I use FLAC uncompressed it sounds great. I have compared it with WAV and hear no difference on a highly resolving system. I have heard FLAC is a better choice for long term storage .
I agree with using EAC, particularly if your drive has the "accurate stream" feature. It guarantees jitter/artifact/error correction if it does. You don't need to bother with anything else, and it's free.
jfbaquero that's ripping software. Bitperfect software on the mac is more than that. It helps to avoid mixing/up-sampling done within OSX's audio API. It bypasses any OS processing of the audio on its way to your audio renderer.
ripped 10-50 cd's at 192k mp3 years ago. ripped 100's of cd's at 320k mp3 in the past 10 years. ripped 1000's of cd's in FLAC in the past few years. guess i will re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rip a few thousand cds in wave files. nothing like decades of ripping cds to play on other things, then playing the cd itself in a cd player.
I did the exact same thing, except no way I'll convert to wav. If I did, I would use a program like dBPoweramp to convert the FLAC to WAV (and thus lose the file tags). I can't imagine there's a difference in playback unless it's player related, I use Foobar2000.
personally i use a program called audiograbber and rip the files in .wav . it's an older program but performs in a very efficient manner. it will also compress into .mp3 but i don't use that feature nor the"normalize" function as i prefer to store and playback the way that the engineer and artist created the stored content.
There is such thing as "non destructive replay gain" where the gain values are stored in metadata on a track and album level. This has no effect on the encoded files audio. You can turn of this "replay gain" function within your playback/decoder software.
Audiograbber is all I use myself. I paid for it years before it was turned into a free program and development stopped. It still works great, basic and easy to use. It is really fast on newer computers, compared to the old top of the line 286, 386 and 486 computers when it started.
AIFF is actually "Audio Interchange File Format" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Interchange_File_Format and is essentially a container for the actual data bits that represent the music. It was intended for uncompressed PCM and is mostly used for uncompressed PCM, so its a lossless format that retains all the original music quality. That said, AIFF behaves as a container and can be used to transport many different compressed audio files and each one can have different levels of compression. This is an additional reason why a few folks thought that they heard poor audio quality when listing to an AIFF file when in reality that file had been processed and compressed to a lower quality standard than the original uncompressed PCM file. Of course, where humans are involved there is always some sort of corruption of the original lofty goals and intentions. LOL Upsampling to 16/96 or any other sample rate does nothing to improve sound quality because you can't create sounds that weren't on on the CD to begin with. Of course playing back files through an audiophile grade audio system will sound better (with no changes at all) so I suspect that this is why some folks swear that that can hear clear improvements when none can actually be possible. Just play the bits without changing them on the best grade gear you can get and you're all set. BitPerfect is an outdated player that doesn't seem to perform any function anymore since iTunes doesn't change the bits (sample rate or dynamic range) any more. iTunes did change the bits in the past because we used to go into the Preferences pane and muck around with small rates there. That dates back to the old days where storage systems were tiny and putting an entire library of CDs on your personal computer would fill the drive yup completely. Obviously that is not a problem any more so that reasoning is moot. iTunes now handles FLAC files natively so that reasoning is also moot. In fact if you look in the Preferences pane of any reasonably modern Mac you'll see thither is no longer a setting to change the bit rate of any music when you import it, so whatever bits you get it will be the bits that go out. Save the $10 and out it towards some good music tracks instead.
@E. O. Well FLAC is still not an international standard and it still uses contested IP, so its not standard and can be shut down with a single lawsuit. That is why iTunes has Apple Lossless which is reliable and cannot be shut down.
Hi there PS Audio Team, please consider high pass filtering your audio on these vids. Some of us do listen to youtube on our systems :) and with a sub there is a constant low rumble in nearly all your videos.
dBPoweramp is the program to use to rip your CDs or batch convert your digital files of any kind. Exact Audio Copy is OK, but isn't quite as good at giving you exceptional "Bit Perfect" results as consistently as dBPa is able to .
On a computer @ 192kbps if you have a lot of songs I find I get more on my Sony 64gb device at that ripping bit rate, and I recommend using the SonyMediaGo app and with all that Sony give in their sound settings on my device there is not a massive loss in detail by ripping at a lower bit rate👍😃👍 Flac this Flac that blah blah better sound etc etc but like I said before at that vastly high bit rate your MP3 player is going to fill up pretty quickly if you like a lot of songs, so beware go down to 320kbps or do as I do 192 or a happy medium at 256 the choice is yours 👍
Comment section here is interesting, and full of a lot of odd conclusions. I wonder how many people here have actually written de-compression code, and understand what exactly happens during compression and decompression. In a nutshell, the bits in a WAV file are in the correct order, and in theory can be streamed directly from the source to the amp. The bits in a compressed file and re-ordered, essentially, you have a couple of bits that say "play the next x-number of bits in the order they are in", then another couple bits that say "play the next x-number of bits y times," then another couple of bits that say "the next x-number of bits are exactly the same as the bit string you played z-times ago, so go back and use those bits." This process uses more processing power than people seem to think it does. The end product is exactly identical in every way to the WAV file, but the bit stream must be held in a buffer. So, yes, hardware and programming matter. If the player starts streaming a flac file, there potential for problems when it has to go back and re-use historical bits (what people seem to call power-supply jitter). If the bit stream is read into memory, then streamed, it will be exactly the same as a WAV provided there are no physical problems with the RAM chip and socket. The downside of this is you have to wait for the entire track to decode, which extremely fast from SDD, and pretty fast from HDD.
If the end result after processing sounds any different for any reason, then the problem is the DAC and filter. A proper DAC and filter should produce the same output regardless of what the PSU is doing as long as the PSU is operating within normal parameters. But as I've said before, there is no such thing as a perfect filter.
Many folks simply use their Windows Media Player to rip and archive CD's to 'lossless' form. They choose 'highest quality' to rip to WMA lossless. I do that as well, especially when I sync my portable FiiO player to my PC, in order to transfer lossless files to it. What are the advantages or disadvantages to simply using the Windows Media Player for ripping CD's in lossless?
Hi Jeremy. Sometime, on some of my PC's, it does! But lately, I have been using my laptop with Win 7, and The sync only takes a few seconds. On my other Win 7 and XP machines, it takes much longer, and sometimes doesn't even sync up at all. I also use an FiiO X1, and love it! That said, I may just try 'Media Monkey'. Thanks.
If there were a few bits missing in the copy you may not notice it, but it does in fact happen, especially if the disc is damaged or deteriorating. I had several that had to be ripped several times to pass the verification check, and several that were damaged and never did, one of which I had to repair the dropouts. I mistakenly said EAC before but it's it's actually AccurateRip that Foobar2000 uses now, though I think I had to install EAC to get that feature. See also www.accuraterip.com/ DVD players in computers (maybe not all, I don't know) can't even play CDs slow, so it's even a bigger problem now. I'm pretty sure I switched to AccurateRip/EAC when I eventually noticed a dropout in one of my CD tracks.
I have been ripping CD's using the Mac Finder and getting the AIFF files instead of using an actual ripper from iTunes or some other player. Amongst the agreements and disagreements smoke over AIFF vs FLAC I figured storage is cheap so just go with AIFF. Furthermore, compared to WAV I can store meta data and album art in each track and customize that.
I'd like to see any proof that anyone can hear AIFF sounding different from ALAC. Those folks you alluded to saying ALAC is too complex to get the best result need to be named, and we need to see their research.
Interesting to see the comments that decompressing FLAC only uses a small processing overhead, and that a phone could deal with loads of tracks at once. Also disappointed that Apple will only allow it to run in the OS on iPhone 7 and above as it drains the battery too fast on a weaker chip.
I can play FLACs on my 6s+ with FE File Explorer, I also use it to load my mp3's, FLACs, and MKV/MP4 videos from my NAS to the phone/iPad for travelling
Err..EAC is NOT necessarily the best, but does tend to get the most detail from the disc. Depending on how that info is outputted will determine whether it soundstoo digitally harsh, for me, when streaming 16/44 EAC wavs, it totally did. BUT, for re-burning CD's all that top end information is a hella good, as the process itself will incur some loss just by the burning process being largely mechanical (but huge gains else where). For ripping to stream 16/44, I personally only use XLD on MAC, much more forgiving on the ears, on my system in my room. Try it, they sound waay different.
For anyone that wants to compare audio file formats, you CAN confirm identicality or difference between MP3 (at varying rates), FLAC, ALAC, AAC, WAV, etc. This is done through audio differencing. It is a tried-and-true, mathematically proven methodology to check for differences in files and also equipment. Audio Diffmaker is a FREEWARE program used widely in the audio industry by both professionals and lay people. The differencing program was developed by Bill Waslo of Liberty Instruments, Inc., one of the industries finest contributors. The White Paper given at the 2008 AES Convention is available for FREE download here: www.libinst.com/AES%20Audio%20Differencing%20Paper.pdf
Storage is cheap, Paul - even for a cheap bastard like me. I use AIFF for archiving but I'll listen to ANYTHING : unlike the snobs, I don't turn up my nose at the 320K Spotify Premium downloads on my laptop. At 60, the worst link in the chain is always going to be my ears - as much as it pains me to admit that - and 30 seconds with a frequency sweep confirms that I just cant hear what I could when I did the initial hearing tests for the Army as a youngster. IMO, the best way to rip CDs is with Exact Audio Copy - ymmv. Thanks for the video.
When I play wav ripped cd, it shows the bitrate as 1411 but when I play flac rippes cd, it never shows as 1411. It shows as variable bitratea but never reaches 1411.why?
Are you confusing bit rate with sample rate? The bit rate varies because it's compressed, it doesn't change the sound but it changes the speed of the decoding.
Ye, and one thing that wasn't mentioned. Transporting wav files is slower due to the size. So id someone has slow discs, bad wfi etc. It takes a bit more time. So could cause stutters. Also, it is twice as expensive to store!
should I keep ripping my CDs to Apple Lossless or switch to AIFF? I recently tested both and can hear a subtle difference, in drums and vocals, but not sure if I'm tripping
Use AIF most of the times and other files ,Flac ,high resolution some DSD and use ROON which is by far the best software for music and can play any files and is regularly up-grated (best investment I ever did) As external hard disks became reasonable in price I do not see the need to use Flac or ALAC .
Thank you so much for explaining why FLAC doesn't quite sound the same. So many people deny this. If you want a smaller format to store files and still want your quality, you can always zip/rar your wavs and unzip them before you put them on your player.
The difference in processing power required for WAV vs FLAC is almost inexistent. This isn't an opinion, you can measure it yourself. For both files it is a tiny fraction of your CPUs power. The idea that FLAC would cause power issues or incur in insuficient processing power is ridiculous. People deny that FLAC sounds different because it simply is factually wrong. If you hear a difference it is either comfirmation bias or you are using a TI-82 to process your files.
Love the electric fly squatter. It stuns rather than killing, perfect for feeding that wonderful american plant, the Venus Flytrap. Like vampires, they don't like feeding from the dead.
nice video Paul, i've been ripping all my music in .wav format and playing it with vlc. it sounds great through either of my dacs one runs 44.1/16b native the other is locked 192/24b (proprietary async usb driver) there is no improvement from up sampling from native resolution in my experience the real improvements stems from the hardware.
YAYVIDEOGAMES wav sucks at metadata. i recommend you store in flac. or if you are concern about listenable differences,play around with 5 of your favorites songs you ha in wav and conert them into flac. listen to them for a couple of days. i doubt you would here anything. then you can convert the rest to flac and onward start keeping everything in flac. size and flexibility is much better in flac. trust me. i ve been there and i regreted i ripped my whole collection to wav. its a 30 years format. its obsolete to say the least
Then again you can go and A/B test your system to check if you can hear any difference between FLAC and 320kbps MP3. I know I can't, so FLAC is waste of disk space for me.
i don't care about meta data, i like to have a format that can be converted easily to any other format and be played in any player. besides as long as the album and song title are correct along with the correct track order i don't care. as for space used my main pc has like 5tb of hdds and another 1tb of ssd storage so like it matters. we don't use 500gb hdds these days. and yes you can hear a difference between a .wav file and any mp3 format with decent gear, treble gets pretty scratchy and the drums meld into the bass.
Define decent gear ;) I try many DACs, sound cards and plenty of headphones ranging from crap to Beyerdynamic DT990 Premium or Sennheiser HD600 and couldn't hear any difference. Not even once. Today I will receive AKG K701 but I don't expect to hear a difference either. Just do me a favour and run yourself through blind A/B test. Use Foobar + this www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx. Pick your favoret song in FLAC/WAV and compress it to MP3 320 kbps and then tell me there is a difference.
denon amplification, rotel and littledot dacs, sony mdrv6 headphones q acoustics speakers qed and kimber cables for my pc setup, been in this game a long time over 10 years to be exact. i have used foobar its good but i prefer vlc. i have tried every format under the sun so i don't bother going over ground i have already covered, i actually prefer cd player to coax to dac over the pc any day but its nice to have music available everywhere you if know what i mean.
If you system is having difficulty decoding FLAC, you have an abacus for a CPU.
Furthermore, if your abacus processor taxes your power supply you have another problem.
My decoding abacus uses Mpingo beads, thank you very much. Much more analogue sounding.
@@cjsvega Do not use an Intel Celeron CPU, they are junk mainly for office use, like documents, spreadsheets, etc, you need a Pentium D or Pentium 4, Dual Core ideally a 2.0GHZ CPU or higher, or an i7 quadcore CPU such as i7 920 CPU.
@@speedyboishan87 no you don't, a music server playing FLAC ,wav or even mp3 will run just fine on just about any PC ever made to run Windows 95.
and that's prehistoric technology, but would still work.
winamp was free music server software thats still beats newer aps.
Or apple
WOW I'M FAMOUS :) !!!..this is my request, thanks Paul, if I haven't thanked you already.
Thanks for asking him
Newbie viewer; first-time comment... Enjoy watching your Q&A. I especially valued today's episode having to do with audio codec and sampling rate. Also wanted to say how much I enjoyed the episodes regarding building the new studio and unboxing of the Infinity Reference Speakers. Thanks again, Paul.
Paul, I can not honestly count the number of free tweeks & improvements you’ve supplied me with! A big Thank You! Sharing is caring.
Excellent yet easy to understand answer. The kind I was looking for a long time without sounding too technical.
Paul has got to be one of the most engaged CEO's I've ever seen. What a great place PS Audio must be to work.
seems a very nice guy
Thanks! I hope you have the chance to visit someday.
paul has the best job in the world.
Michael B. Paul is generally not at his desk.
sädle he didnt know if his chippäir amp wöz 200? ör 2k. well was ja maybe it was 2k 4k 42 ?
but almost 5050 it was an extra diggit v$v
1:15 nö aströhöbbyy well nö ge xD
I intensely stare at the cd for about an hour and then write 1s and 0s in notepad++, save, and rename to wav.
(Edit:2020)
During the lockdown i have mastered the art of engraving CD by hand. I have now achieved replica quality of the original content. If the lockdowns get extended i might go so far to manually magnetize hard drive platters in order to achieve faultless source migration.
P. S. You people are one helluva community
Of course, I expect that there is a checksum for verification ? I'd really hate to end up with a dud copy of my Barry Manilow catalog.
@@arthurwatts1680 LOL, you idiots!
@@arthurwatts1680
WAV files do not include checksums (beyond that provided transparently by the media hardware such as disk sector CRCs), but when they are encoded for transfer to an audio CD, error detection/correction data is added.
@@marianneoelund2940 Thanks for the clarification, Marianne, but I think you'll find that Mr Jerkovic (!) and myself were just trying to inject a little humor into what is a very dry topic. There was a time when I agonized over what EAC was doing with my CD rips but it's been 6 years since I've purchased a CD so its all a bit beyond me now. I know - flat-earthers and all that - but it is what it is. MQA and DSD are equally irrelevant in my little world, fwiw, but I realise that the world doesnt revolve around moi.
@@arthurwatts1680
I appreciate that. But I often take opportunities like this to post trivia which might be interesting to someone.
The lack of checksums or CRCs in most audio files makes them rather easy to hack or modify at the bit level - something I've been taking advantage of recently.
What a pleasure to watch informative videos presented by someone mature who's not trying to impress or be cool. Just straight down the line engineering. You are the duck's nuts of UA-cam Paul 👏
I’ve been looking for this answer for years! Thankyou.
I haven’t had a problem decoding flac files since the early 2000s.
I Rockbox'd my old mp3 players, in order for it to play FLAC & other lossless format. The weak processors in these device most certainly decode FLAC in real time, even huge merged audiobook files. The open source firmware let's user peek the computation as the file plays. One has to be running something ancient to not practically decode level 8 FLAC
The correct answer is FLAC. I really don't think there is merit to the argument that a FLAC will sound worse than a WAV. I don't buy the argument about power supply fluctuations. FLAC doesn't take much more CPU to play than a WAV, especially on relatively modern hardware. Honestly a high bitrate MP3 will be almost indistinguishable from the FLAC or WAV anyway. I wouldn't use ALAC because there's no benefit to that over FLAC and it locks you into the Apple ecosystem.
Accurate.
Putting aside power, there are other factors involved when "on the fly" decoding happens. It also depends on how hardware/amplifier perceives it.
What everyone here seems to be missing is the fact that even Paul said the decoded bits are identical. In other words, he agrees with most of these arguments in the comments. I believe the confusion comes from the fact that he is often digressing to address the entire signal path from the media to the speaker output rather than the differences in the file format.
Even though the decoded bits are identical, it is easily possible for the final analog waveform to vary noticeably. The differences people can hear are not due to changes in the bits. Like everyone (including Paul) keeps saying, the bits are identical. The difference in sound comes from other factors. First, there can be minor changes in the amount of time between the bits during the playback. (Not decoding.) These tiny differences actually DO alter the final analog output signal which is created from the bit stream. An extremely accurate waveform comparison between the analog output signals being sent to the amplifier would show those differences. When the width of the pulse changes, the waveform changes. That's the entire premise of Pulse Width Modulation.
Another contributing factor is the hardware and software involved in processing the identical bits. Most audio circuitry does some level of filtration at various stages during the conversion process back to analog. These filters assume that the amount of time between the bits conforms to the sample rate perfectly, which would (in theory) produce an exact replica of the original waveform. This is often not the case. Digital filtration, in particular, is highly timing dependent. If the spacing changes, the effect of the filter will also change. Analog filtration can also change the sound since it is based on the controlled attenuation effect of capacitors and inductors responding to varying frequencies and amplitude within the signal. Then, there is the fact that the actual values of electronic components vary randomly within a specific tolerance range, which will also affect the output.
I'm quite certain that there are myriad other factors along the signal path which can slightly alter the analog output in a way that affects the fidelity of the output waveform to the originally recorded waveform. So, the bottom line is that, although the bits are precisely identical, the output can indeed be physically (and even audibly) different due to the influence of other factors. What really matters is whether you enjoy what you hear, and that is purely subjective. So, why pick on others who love music as much as we do?
Thank you, but having said all this, surely there is a process which would ensure all these errant bits remain in or can be returned to their correct positions ?
Only problem vaporising inspects is when the cooked bits land in your coffee and you don't notice.
Great summary of formats... much appreciated
First time i've watched some of these video's from here in the UK and i have to say that I am very impressed by the methodical way that Paul explains everything. Peoper old school with no bull shite!
Will bewatching more regularly as I'm very passionate about good sound quality. Especially at Home and in my Car.
Hahahaha... you are serious that you care about audio quality in your car?
I care about sound quality in the shower, in underground tunnels and when traveling by train.
4:20 I would love to hear an elaboration on this concept. Especially, "a revealing system." I find this incredibly interesting. Thanks for the information :)
this seems like an awesome company. Knowledge is always key.
WAV files are composed of RIFF chunks, and they most certainly do provide for metadata. They also accommodate compressed audio data, although this capability is rarely used. Header, Format and place-holder chunks found at the top of the file are generally quite small, 8-32 bytes.
As a rule, metadata chunks in any audio file format are placed at the end of the file, following all of the playable audio data, as they can be fairly large if they include cover art, etc.
Nice to know, thanks Marianne... but after I've clicked on "Properties" to see song (or metadata) info, it won't let me type anything into the boxes !!
I use FLAC stored on my NAS drive which I cast to my Chromecast Audio, plugged into my Cambridge audio DAC. I use Hifi Cast on Android to play the files and it's true gapless playback. The lights change accordingly with different sample rates on the DAC.
I thought to mention that there is an old file format called IFF that was used on the old Amiga computers back in the 80’s and 90’s, mostly for graphics, but also audio. If you look at the headers of AIFF and IFF, you will see that it is clearly built around the same system, hence it is not entirely correct to say that Apple made AIFF when Electronic Arts laid the foundation with IFF.
roygalaasen
Sounds iffy ;-D
Amiga is still alive, ! and steadily being upgraded through its trap door, or add on processor interface.
Secure ripping is the most important, as the CD was designed to conceal and not report reading errors. For Windows the best program for it is CUETools. It can verify already made copies against other submissions to its online database. Then you can re-rip the ones that do not match with a secure and slow reader like EAC.
Upsampling is best done on the fly, with whatever output requirement you currently have, without inflating the file size on disk.
WAV does have metadata, but it doesn't map quite well to music tags. Sonic Foundry regions and markers seem to be well supported. I had Nero write CD index points from regions that existed in the Wav file. Current players may stick an ID3 block into the WAV file for unlimited metadata. The RIFF format can serve as a container for anything. WAV is a good format for editing. Programs that support compressed files will either convert to WAV proxy beforehand, or be laggy as they do seeking in the compressed file on the fly.
Back in the old days WAV could also be compressed with any CBR codec. That is bad because you can't see in the file manager the codec when all files have the same extension. In the Apple system this still happens, as ALAC and AAC will have the same extension.
For de-emphasis, SoX works well. You can process the CD as a disk image to avoid clicks on track boundaries, remove DC offset and boost the level while in 32-bits accuracy. Old CDs are rather quiet, and theoretically there is a reduction in SNR while de-emphasizing.
Que ??
EAC wouldn’t run on my Linux desktop. It kept crashing.
As allways great tech explanation in a very simple way!
Do you think that different programs sound different (assuming it's not doing any processing to the file)? I've heard people say that they do but I haven't been able to hear a difference in my own testing and I don't see how it could if the program is just feeding identical data into a buffer for the audio driver. I assume that there isn't any sort of clocking involved at that stage. I can see how using a different driver could make a difference but not a difference playback program.
I'm not talking about resampling or any other processing. Just playing a file bit transparently. Some people say that some players like JRiver still sound better.
I love mastering then exporting in pcm 16 bit 44khz uncompressed loseless 💿 it plays on almost anything from 1980 to now and sounds great :)
As a computer scientist i can say flac and wav are identical... if you are worried about the size reduction, dont be.
As for the possibility of sounding worse due to the extra processing to uncompress, i see your reasonining, but i see that as an extremely rare case! If that happened to you, your dac has a really really major flaw, because decompressing the flac is super simple stuff, just throw away that dac!
Since we are discussing ripping CD's in this video, I thought I'd give a shout-out to the Linux users. "Whipper" is an excellent cli tool, and flacon is a good GUI tool for Linux (I use Arch) bit-perfect CD ripping. Nice alternative to Sound Juicer.
Yay for Linux............
I've been ripping with Sound Juicer to FLAC for years. It works great, but I'm always open to trying new tools. I'll definitely check out Flacon. Thanks for the tip. Rubyripper is another one I've had good results with.
There's a bottle of smart water on the desk to help with the math . :)
When I RIP cds on my Samsung laptop with the iTunes app, I use the Apple Lossless Encoder. The ripped cd sounds identical to the original and the disc will play in all players. For my phone, I use aac files. Nearly all the songs are cd quality.
For PCs use Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs.
Bill Crane does exact audio copy rip cds fast?
EAC is the best tool for rip accurately
And it can convert to FLAC also when ripping.
Bill Crane :
Why ? is this EAC so good ?
does it provide anything better ?
Does it make 100% identical copies and other softwares can't ??
I mostly use the windows to rip a cds in the hard drive or CDBurnerXP and it's all good
Currently stil using windows 7 64bit
To be honest yesterday i've installed this EAC in my pc and except a few interesting features it has,,
the sound quality is the same for uncompressed files ,
i mean i didn't notice something different for the better .
@@Residentombraider1000 Yes.
44.1Khz was selected because originally the audio was processed in one unit and storage was a video tape recorder. Originally 3/4" Umatic. Then 1/2 with Beta being most popular. 44.1Khz fits mathematically with the video signal/ line rate.
I put on protective eyewear (use a full-face shield if you've got one) and gloves and use 2 pair of Vice-Grips.
hey im wanting to rip some sacds to play on sacd player i been told to use normal dvd -R discs any thoughts.
I normally play sound system on mac at 16/44 no dolby and when I use 24 bit files I use my mackie firewire mixer and audio technica headphones. ... but bitperfect sounds like a neat solution so you don't have to keep switching .
Don't rip with itunes, argh... Rip with EAC or foobar into 16/44.
why?
@Alex X i dont get it
@@bnhintz You want to use a secure rip program for greater accuracy.
@@Slammy555 thank you
I have found always that EAC is the best ripper, I have also found that once you do a full install of EAC and perform all the tests and verify that you system(and drive) is 100% with EAC. Then other programs will also rip with this 100% which I found to be the case with Itunes. I did test it by comparing the wave files each program produced with EAC
Great video Paul, thank you
Great info, thanks!
On Linux, I compressed my entire cd collection to FLAC using abcde when I moved countries a few years ago. I sold all my CDs to a second-hand store and no longer keep physical media. Abcde stands for Another Bloody CD Encoder. Once you have configured the app, you stick in the CD and type abcde in the terminal, and it does the rest.
Not good, now you no longer have ownership rights and essentially have bootlegged music. If asked. How would you prove you bought the music?
Good Vid and Informal Thank You
I used to use video decrypter and encoder suites to copy dvd/on tascam burner for copying cds
EAC to rip the CD to WAVE, TLH to convert WAVE to FLAC. Anyone who says they can hear the difference only thinks they can hear it! Don't listen to tech too much, just enjoy the music!
Why not EAC to FLAC? It's the same.
The real trick is how to properly rip a CD that was mastered with pre-emphasis and save it in a digital format that then always will play as originally intended.
ooh wee!
Rip the image.
Use Imgburn or PowerISO and make an image of the disc. No ripping needed.
Have you tried treating the original and blank CD with Auric Illuminator before making a copy?
sample rate matters
i am sorry you might have a very very small delay on flac compared to wav , no jitter no power supply stuff, if you use flac. why the hell wont you play it with a computer that is able to play flac without any problem or 100 flacs at the same time for all that matters. the computing power to do so is rather low, especially nowadays. a phone could play multiple at one time
he needs to sell u $2000 power supplies; you cant get better power supply stabilty than with Li Ion batteries, but hey, he needs to sell you his toroidal custom transformers at gold price
There is not even anything processed.
The "Audio Chip" in your gear has hardware acceleration for it. If aany it uses micro amps on the power supply. The power supply could not care less.
I use music center for PC to rip my CD to flac. It is the best software and most intuitive software I have used.
@E. O. EAC? Is that the new format or the software?
One interesting thing about AIFF/ALAC is that if you rip stuff in ALAC and down the road decide you don't want to have to decompress it on the fly you can tell iTunes to decompress all your files and it's like you ripped them that way. No losses so no difference at all. If you're caching them to say an SSD and actually playing your music from that there's no need.
paul i use a 2012 imac 20"(2)Electro-Voice sentry 100 A studio speakers Crown Straight line preamp (2)cd recorder/players -Sony 10 band E-Q electro-voice interface BC EQ (2)tape cassette record/player (1)Crown 50w Power line amplifier
Do different CD drives sound different when ripping CDs? (even if i use the same software, Foobar, Exact Audio Copy etc.).
lol no
What happened to CDA? Isn't the format of the data on an audio CD recorded as CDA as in compact disc audio format? With the size off modern drives being so huge what is the matter with just recording it as a CDA file? That way the bits are exactly the same as on the compact disc, right?
FLAC is more supported for playback. And has better metadata. And each song is a regular file so programs can recognize them better.
Very good advice
Hearing the difference between AIFF and FLAC is the same discussion as saying there is an audible difference between a $5 and $500 USB cable. Many people claim they can hear a difference but there is no proof to back it up. Like Paul mentions the processing can introduce "something" but that has nothing to do with the format. The same goes for data cables. If bits arrive in the correct order, and all bits arrive on the other end, the signal was perfect. Whether that's over a cheap or expensive cable and yet people perceive a difference.
It's the same as hooking up a new $200 power cable to the same outlet as before, with the same crappy wiring inside the walls and the same circuit breaker but yet, many claim to hear a difference. These perceived improvements (or snake oil, depending on the person you talk to) are scattered around in the audiophile community. In the end it doesn't matter I guess. If you think your DIY $20 speaker cables sound great on your overnight sensations DIY speakers, good for you. If you invested >$2000 in cabling alone but are sure it improved the soundstage, good. Whatever makes you happy about your setup.
isolating your equipment from the grid and building wiring does make a difference. Not only in sound quality but it makes your equipment last longer.
Could you also address the issues in ripping CDs with pre-emphasis?
Good CD ripping software will take pre-emphasis into account.
What's the best DA converter to use on my turntable to get the least loss of information?
Brad Tomlin uu
Now if you have a vinyl and you want to put the vinyl on a hard drive, what would you sample it bit at 24bit or 16bit?
I would say most records would be fine sampled at 16 bits. There are some records that actually have a wider dynamic range than will fit within the old CD digital standard however. yes the noise floor on the record can be easily heard during the quiet passages, but so can the music. Recording to 16-bit, setting the peak of the recording to match to the maximum level of the digital standard, the quiet passeges drop to dugital silence with an periodic soybd here and there as the music and surface noise raises up to the lowest level allowed with 16-bits.
I do not know what the dynamic range is with 24-bits...
Another thing to consider is if you plan to do any processing to the audio after recording a record to digital, is that processing can negatively alter the audio very quickly with the low resolution of 16-bit. 24-bit allows the audio to be processed with little errors created while processing with digital filters, equalizers, noise processors, or even simple digital volume adjustments.
One possible advantage of ripping vinyl with a higher bit rate would be the increased headroom before aliasing. I've transcribed over 600 LP's to digital and use the standard 44.1 KHz/16-bit CD format. The main issue I had to deal with is that it can be very time consuming to preview every second of an LP to determine the maximum audio amplitude and set the digital recording device to the highest possible level (for the best resolution) without clipping (anything over 0 dB), which ruins a digital recording. My solution was to try to quickly find the loudest passages and set the recording level appropriately (for maximum resolution) but use a soft-knee limiter with look-ahead delay just ahead of the A/D conversion to knock down any unexpected peaks that would cause clipping. I use a tc electronic Finalizer Express (A/D/A converter) which has the limiter on the analog input. Absent a limiting function on your A/D converter you could just buy an analog limiter and place it ahead of the converter and then digitally record at the sampling rate you use for playback.
What do you think of ATRAC?
Rip to wav using dBpoweramp. Then do the conversion to Flac after. That way jitter can not enter due to the simultaneous demand of the psu and computer processor. I also close all apps and background tasks. Use the securerip feature (which checks your rip against there database of rips) for errors and if there are any it re-rips multiple passes at lower drive speeds till to improve it. Not add cd's are flawless and it isn't long before you have the odd scratch. Personally what I do if I cannot rip at 99% or greater accuracy I will torrent the audio cd. ( I own the album on at least 2 formats).
Does this mean that early PC's in the 1988 could not play CD's ?
I just ripped all my moms cds to 128kbps MP3 files and I'm wondering what the difference is? Playing the song from the cd in windows media player sounds the same to me as playing the song from the rip (in WMP not grove music)
there are differences, yes.
128 or WAV yes, and it depends the speakers or component audio system you have to play the audio.
my sellected playlists with my favourite music commonly is in CDs I record - sometimes the original is mp3, I convert ot to WAVE, I make some improvements if it was necessary and I get my personal CD witth good quality. sometimes the USB with mp3 is enough and I enjoy it too.
@@Ephemeral2023 some songs or videos from youtube (and other different formats I could have) are a mess with poor quality. I have songs since Audiogalaxy or Napster times, even some iTunes that I've purchased need some "restoration": to apply some filters and saving them as WAV files.
@@Ephemeral2023 in 40 years I've listened music, MP3, WAV, AAC, cassette, LP, Minidisc,
I enjoy my music.
My mother and my neighbor enjoy this or those and their music,
but there is a difference between listen in Mono AM RADIO mode than FM Stereo,
_it is better to enjoy more_
commonly it is said as
_it sounds better_
songs I ENJOY sound better, a few times I save the file as MP3.
similar to the movie on TV,
"the important is to enjoy the movie"
yes, but with a better high quality format is better than VHS.
🤷✈🔊
@@Ephemeral2023 no. really I don't.
when I heard the difference between a youtube file and a WAV file after enhance the waveform, and sometimes cleaning up the original file (even from CD tracks), I get a cleaner and better audio file, and I see majoroty of tracks are clipped. of course, I like the process, I have the time and tools to do it with music I'm intereted and I enjoy, because I see the difference between a pig with lipstick and without it. form yuour own point of view to you, it is useless, because you aren't interested, you don't have the ABCD and you don't need it. if you have a different way to listen whatever, I like mine.
Separation. You don't hear separation on a compressed file like on a CD. But you'll need high quality headphones (not earphones) for that.
I agree with keeping CDs as 16bit x 44.1kHz, but my reasoning is a little different--since that's the native CD format, you can't gain resolution that isn't in the source, but you can introduce additional errors recoding. We can always mess with resolution and sampling rates later!
So I say the best thing to do is to keep it "as is", then if future DACs or software can do a better job of interpreting the signal to get back information lost in the recording/mastering process, you have the original digital stream to work from.
It's been .flac for me for over 10 years now. I've ripped almost everything from CD now with artists tagged and album covers in the files. It's all on 2 machines at home, plus a cloud server. Don't want to lose it :-)
I agree with your reasoning. Also, I've got a PLEX server on my NAS and if i playback my music with an internet browser it plays back lossless no matter the lossless file format but if i playback ALAC or APE on my android mobile, it gets converted to lossy AAC, this is why i stick to FLAC
WAVE file is my choice. I record CDs with the music I like or sellected playlists.
play WAVE files is my choice. - for some general music I like mp3 192 bitrate is enough to me
What makes the best audio quality: 192 kbps/24 bit or 384 kbps/16 bit both in 44.1 KHz?
@Rob C I know. I just wanted to ask Paul a question about something else. But i couldn't find out where to drop it, so i just threw it here and hoped for the best :)
I use FLAC uncompressed it sounds great. I have compared it with WAV and hear no difference on a highly resolving system. I have heard FLAC is a better choice for long term storage .
I used Exact Audio Copy to rip and FLAC. Works for me.
I'd still use 128kbps MP3 and play UA-cam through any hifi speaker I have though :)
Rennie Ash what’s the compression
Quality through songs on UA-cam?
Great, very well.
Totally awesome video Paul.. I wish that Bitperfect would work for a PC as far as I know it doesn't... Please tell me if i'm wrong..
You can use EAC on Windows which stands for exact audio copy: www.exactaudiocopy.de/
I agree with using EAC, particularly if your drive has the "accurate stream" feature. It guarantees jitter/artifact/error correction if it does. You don't need to bother with anything else, and it's free.
Such software isn't necessary on a PC if you are using WASAPI.
jfbaquero that's ripping software. Bitperfect software on the mac is more than that. It helps to avoid mixing/up-sampling done within OSX's audio API. It bypasses any OS processing of the audio on its way to your audio renderer.
OK - I ripped a CD to iTunes on Mac and set it to AIFF. I now see the files say AIFF-C
What the heck is AIFF-C and how does it compare to AIFF or WAV?
looks like aiff-c used some compression accordig to wiki
ripped 10-50 cd's at 192k mp3 years ago.
ripped 100's of cd's at 320k mp3 in the past 10 years.
ripped 1000's of cd's in FLAC in the past few years.
guess i will re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rip a few thousand cds in wave files.
nothing like decades of ripping cds to play on other things, then playing the cd itself in a cd player.
I did the exact same thing, except no way I'll convert to wav. If I did, I would use a program like dBPoweramp to convert the FLAC to WAV (and thus lose the file tags). I can't imagine there's a difference in playback unless it's player related, I use Foobar2000.
No need to re-rip any, just decode your flac back to wav.
So what's the best way to rip a CD to FLAC on a Mac? Freac?
personally i use a program called audiograbber and rip the files in .wav . it's an older program but performs in a very efficient manner. it will also compress into .mp3 but i don't use that feature nor the"normalize" function as i prefer to store and playback the way that the engineer and artist created the stored content.
There is such thing as "non destructive replay gain" where the gain values are stored in metadata on a track and album level. This has no effect on the encoded files audio. You can turn of this "replay gain" function within your playback/decoder software.
Audiograbber is all I use myself. I paid for it years before it was turned into a free program and development stopped. It still works great, basic and easy to use. It is really fast on newer computers, compared to the old top of the line 286, 386 and 486 computers when it started.
7:16 is dither the same as interpolation?
Thanks, thanks big LIKE from me.
bit perfect the best $10 I've ever spent even with my less than audiophile basic system.
AIFF is actually "Audio Interchange File Format" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Interchange_File_Format and is essentially a container for the actual data bits that represent the music. It was intended for uncompressed PCM and is mostly used for uncompressed PCM, so its a lossless format that retains all the original music quality. That said, AIFF behaves as a container and can be used to transport many different compressed audio files and each one can have different levels of compression. This is an additional reason why a few folks thought that they heard poor audio quality when listing to an AIFF file when in reality that file had been processed and compressed to a lower quality standard than the original uncompressed PCM file. Of course, where humans are involved there is always some sort of corruption of the original lofty goals and intentions. LOL
Upsampling to 16/96 or any other sample rate does nothing to improve sound quality because you can't create sounds that weren't on on the CD to begin with. Of course playing back files through an audiophile grade audio system will sound better (with no changes at all) so I suspect that this is why some folks swear that that can hear clear improvements when none can actually be possible. Just play the bits without changing them on the best grade gear you can get and you're all set.
BitPerfect is an outdated player that doesn't seem to perform any function anymore since iTunes doesn't change the bits (sample rate or dynamic range) any more. iTunes did change the bits in the past because we used to go into the Preferences pane and muck around with small rates there. That dates back to the old days where storage systems were tiny and putting an entire library of CDs on your personal computer would fill the drive yup completely. Obviously that is not a problem any more so that reasoning is moot. iTunes now handles FLAC files natively so that reasoning is also moot. In fact if you look in the Preferences pane of any reasonably modern Mac you'll see thither is no longer a setting to change the bit rate of any music when you import it, so whatever bits you get it will be the bits that go out. Save the $10 and out it towards some good music tracks instead.
@E. O. Well FLAC is still not an international standard and it still uses contested IP, so its not standard and can be shut down with a single lawsuit. That is why iTunes has Apple Lossless which is reliable and cannot be shut down.
Hi there PS Audio Team, please consider high pass filtering your audio on these vids. Some of us do listen to youtube on our systems :) and with a sub there is a constant low rumble in nearly all your videos.
dBPoweramp is the program to use to rip your CDs or batch convert your digital files of any kind. Exact Audio Copy is OK, but isn't quite as good at giving you exceptional "Bit Perfect" results as consistently as dBPa is able to .
In my day we just had wav files. That was it. When flac, aac, ogg, wma, alac, etc.. came out we was like what the hell is this crap?
Back in my day we didn’t even have computers. LMAO
@@speedythecat07 I doubt you are 200 years old. LOL
On a computer @ 192kbps if you have a lot of songs I find I get more on my Sony 64gb device at that ripping bit rate, and I recommend using the SonyMediaGo app and with all that Sony give in their sound settings on my device there is not a massive loss in detail by ripping at a lower bit rate👍😃👍 Flac this Flac that blah blah better sound etc etc but like I said before at that vastly high bit rate your MP3 player is going to fill up pretty quickly if you like a lot of songs, so beware go down to 320kbps or do as I do 192 or a happy medium at 256 the choice is yours 👍
just get a bigger sd card for your player
Comment section here is interesting, and full of a lot of odd conclusions.
I wonder how many people here have actually written de-compression code, and understand what exactly happens during compression and decompression.
In a nutshell, the bits in a WAV file are in the correct order, and in theory can be streamed directly from the source to the amp. The bits in a compressed file and re-ordered, essentially, you have a couple of bits that say "play the next x-number of bits in the order they are in", then another couple bits that say "play the next x-number of bits y times," then another couple of bits that say "the next x-number of bits are exactly the same as the bit string you played z-times ago, so go back and use those bits." This process uses more processing power than people seem to think it does.
The end product is exactly identical in every way to the WAV file, but the bit stream must be held in a buffer. So, yes, hardware and programming matter. If the player starts streaming a flac file, there potential for problems when it has to go back and re-use historical bits (what people seem to call power-supply jitter). If the bit stream is read into memory, then streamed, it will be exactly the same as a WAV provided there are no physical problems with the RAM chip and socket. The downside of this is you have to wait for the entire track to decode, which extremely fast from SDD, and pretty fast from HDD.
Can you convert FLAC and ALAC to aiff and others and sound same vs being done in it originally
But of course.
If the end result after processing sounds any different for any reason, then the problem is the DAC and filter. A proper DAC and filter should produce the same output regardless of what the PSU is doing as long as the PSU is operating within normal parameters.
But as I've said before, there is no such thing as a perfect filter.
@Taco How do you listen to your copies?
@Taco how do you think you hear the music? you need a DAC.
Many folks simply use their Windows Media Player to rip and archive CD's to 'lossless' form. They choose 'highest quality' to rip to WMA lossless. I do that as well, especially when I sync my portable FiiO player to my PC, in order to transfer lossless files to it. What are the advantages or disadvantages to simply using the Windows Media Player for ripping CD's in lossless?
Hi Jeremy. Sometime, on some of my PC's, it does! But lately, I have been using my laptop with Win 7, and The sync only takes a few seconds. On my other Win 7 and XP machines, it takes much longer, and sometimes doesn't even sync up at all. I also use an FiiO X1, and love it! That said, I may just try 'Media Monkey'. Thanks.
How does WMP verify the integrity of the CD data? Try ripping the CD several times and I bet you end up with slightly different files.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by 'integrity of the CD data', but if my ears are any indication, the ripped music sounds true to the original.
If there were a few bits missing in the copy you may not notice it, but it does in fact happen, especially if the disc is damaged or deteriorating. I had several that had to be ripped several times to pass the verification check, and several that were damaged and never did, one of which I had to repair the dropouts.
I mistakenly said EAC before but it's it's actually AccurateRip that Foobar2000 uses now, though I think I had to install EAC to get that feature. See also www.accuraterip.com/
DVD players in computers (maybe not all, I don't know) can't even play CDs slow, so it's even a bigger problem now. I'm pretty sure I switched to AccurateRip/EAC when I eventually noticed a dropout in one of my CD tracks.
Interesting, to say the least. Thanks for the quick education on the subject!
dBpoweramp serves me well.
Software von Bob ( Nvidia ) ?
My dad has that button as well! This video is the only other place I've seen it
I have been ripping CD's using the Mac Finder and getting the AIFF files instead of using an actual ripper from iTunes or some other player. Amongst the agreements and disagreements smoke over AIFF vs FLAC I figured storage is cheap so just go with AIFF. Furthermore, compared to WAV I can store meta data and album art in each track and customize that.
I'd like to see any proof that anyone can hear AIFF sounding different from ALAC. Those folks you alluded to saying ALAC is too complex to get the best result need to be named, and we need to see their research.
Interesting to see the comments that decompressing FLAC only uses a small processing overhead, and that a phone could deal with loads of tracks at once. Also disappointed that Apple will only allow it to run in the OS on iPhone 7 and above as it drains the battery too fast on a weaker chip.
I can play FLACs on my 6s+ with FE File Explorer, I also use it to load my mp3's, FLACs, and MKV/MP4 videos from my NAS to the phone/iPad for travelling
Err..EAC is NOT necessarily the best, but does tend to get the most detail from the disc. Depending on how that info is outputted will determine whether it soundstoo digitally harsh, for me, when streaming 16/44 EAC wavs, it totally did. BUT, for re-burning CD's all that top end information is a hella good, as the process itself will incur some loss just by the burning process being largely mechanical (but huge gains else where). For ripping to stream 16/44, I personally only use XLD on MAC, much more forgiving on the ears, on my system in my room. Try it, they sound waay different.
For anyone that wants to compare audio file formats, you CAN confirm identicality or difference between MP3 (at varying rates), FLAC, ALAC, AAC, WAV, etc. This is done through audio differencing. It is a tried-and-true, mathematically proven methodology to check for differences in files and also equipment. Audio Diffmaker is a FREEWARE program used widely in the audio industry by both professionals and lay people. The differencing program was developed by Bill Waslo of Liberty Instruments, Inc., one of the industries finest contributors. The White Paper given at the 2008 AES Convention is available for FREE download here:
www.libinst.com/AES%20Audio%20Differencing%20Paper.pdf
Thanks for sharing Darin.
Storage is cheap, Paul - even for a cheap bastard like me. I use AIFF for archiving but I'll listen to ANYTHING : unlike the snobs, I don't turn up my nose at the 320K Spotify Premium downloads on my laptop. At 60, the worst link in the chain is always going to be my ears - as much as it pains me to admit that - and 30 seconds with a frequency sweep confirms that I just cant hear what I could when I did the initial hearing tests for the Army as a youngster. IMO, the best way to rip CDs is with Exact Audio Copy - ymmv.
Thanks for the video.
When I play wav ripped cd, it shows the bitrate as 1411 but when I play flac rippes cd, it never shows as 1411. It shows as variable bitratea but never reaches 1411.why?
Are you confusing bit rate with sample rate? The bit rate varies because it's compressed, it doesn't change the sound but it changes the speed of the decoding.
Wouldn't FLAC be less demanding on the server as well?
Ye, and one thing that wasn't mentioned. Transporting wav files is slower due to the size. So id someone has slow discs, bad wfi etc. It takes a bit more time. So could cause stutters. Also, it is twice as expensive to store!
Going from 44.1kHz to 48kHz or 96kHz or vice versa will cause aliasing.
how do you compete with offshore?
Ross Bergeron the same happened in my home in the past and cops refuse to investigate vandalism theft illegal surveillance
should I keep ripping my CDs to Apple Lossless or switch to AIFF? I recently tested both and can hear a subtle difference, in drums and vocals, but not sure if I'm tripping
First rip and save them in WAV formation (exact original CD quality) now you can rip any formats from that WAV files
rip to uncompressed FLAC
Use AIF most of the times and other files ,Flac ,high resolution some DSD and use ROON which is by far the best software for music and can play any files and is regularly up-grated (best investment I ever did) As external hard disks became reasonable in price I do not see the need to use Flac or ALAC .
Hello sir what is a good external cd burner I can use my old Plextor gave out
LG WH16NS60. You need an enclosure for it though.
there are a lot of brands, even a laptop gives you the chance to record your own cd's. there are cd burners cheap, expensive, nice, ugly...
@@estusflask982 learn to read: he asked "EXTERNAL" cd burner.
don't you know what is an EXTERNAL unit?
Thank you so much for explaining why FLAC doesn't quite sound the same. So many people deny this.
If you want a smaller format to store files and still want your quality, you can always zip/rar your wavs and unzip them before you put them on your player.
The difference in processing power required for WAV vs FLAC is almost inexistent. This isn't an opinion, you can measure it yourself. For both files it is a tiny fraction of your CPUs power. The idea that FLAC would cause power issues or incur in insuficient processing power is ridiculous. People deny that FLAC sounds different because it simply is factually wrong. If you hear a difference it is either comfirmation bias or you are using a TI-82 to process your files.
He’s wrong and only feeding your confirmation bias. Thanks for playing, though.
@E. O. No one talked about processing power though :)
I hear a differnce between flac and wav. I thought it was just me, but now some are discussing this topic, so i know I'm not the one going nuts.
AIFF is Audio Interchange File Format. It’s a pure pcm codec without compression it’s not apple related.
It is Apple related. It was developed by them in the late 1980s.
Love the electric fly squatter. It stuns rather than killing, perfect for feeding that wonderful american plant, the Venus Flytrap. Like vampires, they don't like feeding from the dead.
nice video Paul, i've been ripping all my music in .wav format and playing it with vlc. it sounds great through either of my dacs one runs 44.1/16b native the other is locked 192/24b (proprietary async usb driver) there is no improvement from up sampling from native resolution in my experience the real improvements stems from the hardware.
YAYVIDEOGAMES wav sucks at metadata. i recommend you store in flac. or if you are concern about listenable differences,play around with 5 of your favorites songs you ha in wav and conert them into flac. listen to them for a couple of days. i doubt you would here anything. then you can convert the rest to flac and onward start keeping everything in flac. size and flexibility is much better in flac. trust me. i ve been there and i regreted i ripped my whole collection to wav. its a 30 years format. its obsolete to say the least
Then again you can go and A/B test your system to check if you can hear any difference between FLAC and 320kbps MP3. I know I can't, so FLAC is waste of disk space for me.
i don't care about meta data, i like to have a format that can be converted easily to any other format and be played in any player. besides as long as the album and song title are correct along with the correct track order i don't care. as for space used my main pc has like 5tb of hdds and another 1tb of ssd storage so like it matters. we don't use 500gb hdds these days. and yes you can hear a difference between a .wav file and any mp3 format with decent gear, treble gets pretty scratchy and the drums meld into the bass.
Define decent gear ;) I try many DACs, sound cards and plenty of headphones ranging from crap to Beyerdynamic DT990 Premium or Sennheiser HD600 and couldn't hear any difference. Not even once. Today I will receive AKG K701 but I don't expect to hear a difference either. Just do me a favour and run yourself through blind A/B test. Use Foobar + this www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx. Pick your favoret song in FLAC/WAV and compress it to MP3 320 kbps and then tell me there is a difference.
denon amplification, rotel and littledot dacs, sony mdrv6 headphones q acoustics speakers qed and kimber cables for my pc setup, been in this game a long time over 10 years to be exact. i have used foobar its good but i prefer vlc. i have tried every format under the sun so i don't bother going over ground i have already covered, i actually prefer cd player to coax to dac over the pc any day but its nice to have music available everywhere you if know what i mean.
Exploding flies... WOW!