Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux-Based Audiophile CD Archival System

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-remember-good-audio-fidelity dept.

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 :)

2 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Archiving Audio by E1ven · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. uncompressed? hello? by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?"