I have a load of cd’s and a 1tb NAS on which I will store pics, home vids, music and possibly a few (not many) films.

my music equipment isn’t high end (in fact for the foreseeable future will be sent to a Bluetooth receiver although one day i’d like to upgrade to Sonos or similar), i’m not an audiophile and it’s rare I sit down specifically to listen to music… also from now on music is likely to be downloaded.

so is it worth the time and space on the NAS drive? alternatively I was thinking of buying a separate HD ripping the cds to FLAC on that (for long term storage) and then pulling the tracks from that to the NAS at 320kbps, or is that doubly, triply a ball ache way of doing things?!

Always rip at highest possible format for home use. Storage gets cheaper all the time and you can always buy more but the process of ripping takes forever (especially if you have a big library), and you definitely only want to do it once…

Ideally you rip music to two formats, say FLAC and MP3 @ 256kbps. One for the home and one for mobile. You either do this manually or buy a system to do it for you. See here for an example

Also. A CD is about 800Mb but in reality most albums are about 500Mb. So ripping with zero compression means about 2000 albums on a 1TB drive, probably more. That’s an awfully big library.

If you use dbpoweramp you can make two copies simultaneously – one to FLAC and one to MP3 (or other format). It’s definitely worth ripping to FLAC

so I end up with two copies of the same song on the same drive? Or will poweramp send one copy to the nas and one to another drive?

if that was the case then the nas could be used for home audio and the other driver could be plugged into the car… maybe?

Yep, if youre going to do it rip to a lossless open format e.g. flac! Any future requirements can be transcoded on mass from that.

dbpoweramp allows you to rip different formats to different locations at the same time –

I do FLAC for archiving and AAC for convenience with phones, iPods etc.

ta!

I did some Northwind-ear-testing and found that I couldn’t tell any difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless. So, I went up to 320kbps on general principles and just used that. Difference I can’t hear is no difference at all.

I’ve got about 2400 albums ripped as WAV, it’s about 1.25Tb in total. I did start transcoding but it was going to take about a month so I’ve decided to tidy up the library.Compression wise I’ll go to 192-256k mp3 as it’s just for portable use.

oh.

okay.

wondering whether to archive cds as flac on a separate hd and store them on the nas as 320kbps mp3 then I can use them easily with the ps3 and android stuff.

if I get some decent hifi then I can replace the mp3s on the NAS at a later date.

thanks… think it will take some time but will be bullet proof!

question – why compress at all. why not use wav?

porter_jamie – Member
question – why compress at all. why not use wav?

Disk space isn’t free, plus FLAC has a well defined standard for tagging, ReplayGain, album art etc.

i’ve been ripping to flac and mp3 for years now. i used to do it manually but now have it virtually all automated.
its a bit complicated to setup to be fair but worth the hassle and time to set it up. once done then its one button to start and another to choose your album art, wait a while and its all ripped, tagged and on the nas and then serviio dlna server just picks it up and its ready to share.

i use EAC combined with the react script on hydrogen audio, it only works with the older eac, but it rips, tags, adds album art and puts all my flac in one place on my nas for dlna and hifi use and then another exact copy but in mp3 for use on my mp3 players and mobile, again all tagged, with embedded and external art in the folder and all in neat folders.

cant see any reason to rip to just wav for a music library is, your missing out on some great features like replaygain, album art, tags etc

some great tools out there for doing this kind of thing

I’m with northwind here. I just rip to 320Kb, because frankly I can’t hear any appreciable difference between tracks at that bitrate, and those I’ve compared to as FLACK or Apple Lossless. And that’s through Shure SE215’s, and UE TripleFi 10 Pro IEM’S, which, at around £300 or so ought to reveal any significant deficiencies.
I just can’t hear enough of a difference to give a toss; the music still gives me shivers where appropriate, and gives me full enjoyment the rest of the time, and that is all that matters.
😀

The way I see it is, people with better hearing than me must love music less than I do- I’ve sacrificed mine on the altar of volume. So everyone who can distinguish differences that I can’t, I feel for you 😉

Northwind – Member
The way I see it is, people with better hearing than me must love music less than I do- I’ve sacrificed mine on the altar of volume. So everyone who can distinguish differences that I can’t, I feel for you

Phil Lynott’s Grand Slam – chuffing loud, my ears are still ringing.
Absolute gospel, gave me tinnitus. Maybe I could sue. Oh, wait… 😆