portable/electronic music storage & players

[jsbarber]

For some time I have been interested in getting my CDs stored on a hard drive, and being able to pay them through a stereo or download them onto a portable player.

There are products, like Sonos, that will connect to your computer network and extract music files and transfer them using wireless technology to your stereo for playing. This product also comes with a remote control to browse your collection, and control the playback. I haven't tried this system but it looks quite good, and the feedback I've heard is positive.

But there are some issues with the Codecs, storage and portable players, at least for me.

1. music format (Codecs): I am inclined to go with something like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) as it provides about a 2:1 compression (relative to red book audio, or some other PCM audio format) and does not, in principle, degrade the music. MP3 contains audible artifacts and I am not interested in taking all of my music and storing it in a degraded format. There may be lossy compression algorithms that provide much better fidelity than MP3, the old AAC used to, but nevertheless, with storage costs declining and storage capacity increasing, I think I'd rather stick with a lossless format. Are any of you using FLAC or any other high quality Codecs?

2. Storage: I suppose you could just store the music on the hard drive, and get a USB drive for backups. One thing is for sure, if you create a library of any size you don't want to loose it. The other option would be to get some kind of protected storage - RAID or something. Are any of you doing this?


3. Portable Players: I find the fact that you can't change the rechargeable batteries in iPods very annoying. Once the batteries can no longer be charged you can send it to Apple and pay $100 for them to install a replacement - what nonsense! Apple doesn't support FLAC either, they have some proprietary Codec. (FLAC is open source, and can be had for free.) Plus I'm interested in high quality playback. What are you folks using, and how do you like it?

I'd be interested in hearing how my bass bretheren have handled the transition to the new age of music storage/playback.

Jim

[relacey]

Well, I just went through this process although I elected to use some options that you rejected.

1. music format (Codecs):

Right now I have everything in either mp3, aac, or ogg format. For stuff I download it's in usually in mp3. My listening locations are through headphones at home (decent but not audiophile quality), through a better that average set of computer speakers at work at a lower volume unless my coworkers are out, or in my truck, where I play it loud enough to drown out the squeeky springs. My logic in choosing the lower quality format was that I was usually not going to be listening where I could discern the higher quality and that I always had the original CDs, so I was only risking the time it took to rip them. Incidentally, I've probably spent more time cataloging and correcting the disk information than ripping. So, it turns out that the time I'm risking is a lot more that just the time to rip.

In retrospect, I do hear the mp3 artifacts on some cuts over the headphones. The ones I hear sound like a bass played through a bad reverb unit (weak and nasally) and they're really annoying. I may have to go to FLAC and get rid of them. I don't notice them in the ogg format. I'd concur that you should rip them into the best format possible.

2. Storage:

Part of the rationale in going with mp3 when I started this I didn't have a lot of storage space. As you've noted it's gotten a lot less expensive. So far everything I've ripped or downloaded adds up to about 30 gb for a little over 8,000 items (mostly 3 to 5 minute cuts, although some jazz or classical cuts at 10+ minutes per item. Everything is either 192 or 256 kbps. I've got them stashed in several places - on a dedicated 60 gb USB drive at home (mp3 or acc format), on a dedicated 250 gb hard drive at work (ogg or mp3 format), and on an 80 gb iPod in the truck. I started out with just my laptop and iPod but as I realized how much time and effort were involved, I've spread out the risk.

3. Portable Players:
I share your frustration with Apple but I went with an iPod anyway. I watched my son and his buddies go through several of the other brands only to have one failure after another. The iPod, for all its shortcomings, seems to be a more robust piece of hardware. The other decider is that I put a CD/radio/iPod ready unit in my truck and so the iPod plugs in digitally and is neatly hidden in the glovebox. The interface is limited so I have to set up playlists to keep from endlessly searching through the library while driving. I don't consider the portable player as my primary storage media. If I go to a FLAC codec I'd have to transform them to mp3 or acc to put into the iPod, but it may come to that.

Good luck, be sure to let us know where you end up. - Ron

[jsbarber]

Ron:

Thank you for sharing your experiences. WRT Codecs, I think that if I was only going to listen on a portable player I'd probably go with whatever combination of convenience/quality works best. But I'd really like to leverage the digital library/collection with something like the Sonos. This product can tansfer the digital music directly into the stereo, (my CD player has digital inputs), so this should be equivalent to listening to a CD, if the Codec is lossless. As far as storage is concerned, I'll probably just buy an external USB drive and do my own backups, although I'd really prefer to do some kind of automated mirror-imaging.

I have also heard complaints about the portable players, mostly by reading reviews on Amazon. Things like: "I bought this unit and after a month it stopped working. After a half-dozen phone calls eventually I shipped it back to the manufacturer but the problem still isn't resolved and/or and they claim that I must have damaged the unit." If apple had FLAC I'd probably buy an iPod, and just deal with the battery issue. [Edit: Now that I think of it, there is a 3rd party firmware modification, Rockbox, that is available for some iPod models that enables FLAC usage. I should look into this some more...]

Thanks again for your input Ron,

Jim