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Linux-Based Audiophile CD Archival System
cporter writes: "My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats (MP3, Ogg, WMA, the list goes on ...) and playback hardware has so far forced me to stick with the good ol' aluminum coated plastic discs. However, Linn has created the Kivor Knekt multi-unit linux-based hard disk system for archiving CDs in uncompressed form for cataloging and playback (yes, it does support ripping to MP3). It includes the Tunboks storage system, the Linnk control interface, the Oktal D/A converter, and the PCI Musik Machine sound board. The system can support up to 11 hard drives for storing audio. Stereophile magazine has a review in their current dead-tree issue, not available online, during which the reviewer hooked up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and found an AMD Duron system running Linux. The price is a mere $20,000, plus installation. Guess I'm sticking to CDs for the moment." Looks amazing despite the price. They should send me a review model :)
different formats will likely make you happier. wma, mp3, ogg, and the like are all lossy compression schemes, so they discard some audio information when you encode the sound into their format.
.wav files to each other.
there are other options, though, that use lossless compression, so what you get from the file is the same as what's on the cd. there are a few out there, but shorten is the only format i can remember. it's widely used for trading live recordings where the fans want the best possible quality without sending
Beyond just sticking to the CDs, if you don't like the quality of WMA, Vorbis, mp3, ect, you could try using a losless codec.
Basically the difference is this- a lossy codec, such as mp3, in order to shrink the filesize as small as possible, "throws away" less relevent information, to focus on what you will hear.
A lossless codec, such as Flac, does not lose any information. You could, if you wanted to, restore it to the original WAV file.
Think of it as zipping the wav file, but with special routines that encode tighter.
Flac can be found at http://flac.sourceforge.net/.
It might be possible to modify this system to use such a format? It would save HD space, which would allow you to archive more onto it.
Be well.
Colin Davis
Why aren't you at least using Shorten? It's lossless audio compression and it'll at least double the amount of stuff you can archive.
I'm doing it now on a 300 GB RAID 5 partition, and things are sweet.
Read about SHN here, and then use it.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Also, check out Etree if you are interested in getting or distributing live shows in Shorten format from bands that allow taping and trading.
There is a plugin for XMMS called Crossfade that helps a lot with this. You have to fiddle with it a little to get acceptable results. If you're really picky the results may be noticable but I can listen to Zappa albums again without wanting to throw my machine through a window. It's on the plugins page at www.xmms.org.
A lot of people in this thread yakkity yak about blind tests, and the answer in my case is "yes". My friends and I love to sit around on a weekend conducting controlled tests. We conduct controlled tests of cables, components, and source formats. In some cases we detect differences, in others we don't. In our tests the listener has consistently preferred CD to MP3. Further, in tests using ONLY CDs, the listener has indicated no preference. We are using a cheapo JVC DVD player that handles MP3 CDs. For this test we encoded using lame and iTunes (fraunhoffer). If there are better encoders I'm all ears. As for your other swipes, as with most personal attacks, they are all false. I haven't spent a lot of money on audio equipment because I mainly build it myself. A few hundred dollars will build what sells for thousands. Also I don't hear above 19khz, but 44khz recordings audibly distort signals well below the Nyquist frequency. This distortion is in the form of phase errors. For a lot of consumer playback gear, the result is that, at 22khz, the signal is 90 degrees out-of-phase. Blech. A 96khz recording has loads of headroom.