Format and Bitrate: Choose Once and Choose Correctly
In my previous article I suggested three good CD rippers for digitizing your music collection. I used MP3 as the default format (and I’ll explain why) but there are actually a plethora of choices. Today I’ll be discussing which ones make the most sense and why.
There are literally dozens of digital music formats. This article could be ten thousand words long and still not cover all the options. I’m going to save everyone a lot of boring reading and cut to the chase. Only two formats make sense: FLAC and MP3. Choose the former if you are an audiophile purist and want a perfect duplicate of your CDs, utterly and objectively indistinguishable from the original. You’ll need more hard drive space, but space is cheap these days. Choose the latter if your hi-fi gear cost less than $2,000, you are humble enough to admit that you do not have golden ears, or are willing to take a simple test to tell whether you can hear the difference. You may also want to opt for mp3 if you have an mp3 player, as maintaining two separate music archives is a huge pain in the butt.
I can hear a lot of you Pod people screaming at me, but what about Apple Lossless? What about AAC? Sure, that’s what Apple wants you to use, but why? How many other pieces of gear can you name that support Apple Lossless? (And if you have an iPod Nano, even that won’t support it.) You think your next car will come with a built-in AAC player? FLAC and MP3 are open source, more or less (MP3-compression is a patented, technically speaking, but licensing is loosely policed). Which means manufacturers don’t have to pay anyone to build compatibility into their gear. Which means a heck of a lot more hardware on the market capable of handling those formats than the narrowly defined ones Apple promotes. With respect to all the hard work that went into developing Ogg-Vorbis, Monkey’s Audio, Real Audio, WMA, Musepack, and all the rest — the same Occam’s Razor applies. FLAC support is far from universal, but it’s a lot more common than any other open-source, lossless option, and FLAC supports tagging — a critical difference (see tomorrow’s article for why).
The truth is I used to be a lossless snob. I saved everything in FLAC and made the hardline decision that any compression was evil and mp3s were not sophisticated enough to feed my cultivated ear. It took me a few years before I realized the prejudice I had against mp3s was based on the few, low bitrate examples I had heard. By that time, I had also acquired an mp3 player and hated the inherent inefficiency of maintaining all my music in two different formats. So I took a simple A/B test, easily conducted with the excellent, free, and very low-overhead player Foobar2000. The results proved that I simply could not reliably hear the different between a lossless FLAC file and one encoded in VBR (variable bit-rate) mp3. To err on the side of caution, I opted to use a constant bitrate of 320 kpbs — the highest setting available. The end result? Over a thousand albums, comprising about 140GB of space, and an archive that is as easily accessible by my mp3 player(s) as it is by my whole house audio system.
Now, a few disclaimers: If your needs dictate a possible future conversion to another format, or are approaching CD ripping as an archiving process, and are saving this music for posterity, do not use mp3. There’s no going back without degradation. But for most of us, mp3 is the right choice.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Tech Checks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
