Storing WAVs on Computer?

[dashford]

As I've been ripping VBR MP3 tracks to my iHP-140, I've been saving the uncompressed WAVs on my laptop's hard drive, mirroring the folder structure on my 140. That's so I can easily change bitrates and/or codex for my collection down the road, should I want to.

That's all fine, but of course I'm fast filling up the laptop's 80 Gb hard drive, and I'm far from finished filling the 140. What are other people doing? Is there any alternative to buying a 200+Gb external hard drive just for my WAVs?

[necroGL]

try using lossless as the music will be at 60 -70 % the size of the WAVS and at no loss of quality

[sabaisabai]

Have you tried compressing the WAV files losslessly with zip/gzip/bzip or the like? I'm sure it would reduce the file sizes somewhat, but they may take a while to compress. Try searching for lossless audio compression. If I'm right there are probably some lossless audio compressions out there.

[necroGL]

yea there is FLAC, Apple lossless, optimfrog, WMA losslss jst to name a few

[sabaisabai]

Just as a guide, what kind of compression ratios do you get with those negroGL?

[necroGL]

it depends on the song but usually around 20 Mb per track although it depends

[necroGL]

try that site as well as it has a lot of good info on them http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/

[i-Ripper]

For best compression use ape from www.monkeysaudio.com. It is freeware and the source code is now opensource. It is a windows application that works under Wine in Linux.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)is also very popular due to being fully open source from creation and working equally well on Windows and Linux. It doesn't compress as much as ape but it is a lot less demanding on your system when you decompress/decode and play. This can be important for portable devices and those using a lower spec PC. You can learn about FLAC at FLAC's sourceforge home

Personally I use Monkey's Audio for my own storage/back-up needs due to its excellent compression, but flac if I am sharing a CD with people who might want to use all kinds of PCs or music players.

I find Monkeys Audio might reduce a wav by around 50% while flac maybe manages a 35 - 40% reduction in size. These are rough estimates off the top of my head.

Both these codecs have the advantage of being free and open source, they are constantly under development, often improved and updated and are not ever going to cost you a penny or tie you to any particular company or other software.

[sabaisabai]

There you go Dashford, you only need a 100MB external drive

[necroGL]

Gigabyte dnt ya mean 100 Mb does about an album if that

[sabaisabai]

You know what, I reckon GB is the right one. Well observered superstar!

[i-Ripper]

Originally Posted by sabaisabai

There you go Dashford, you only need a 100MB external drive

And the rest

I have 360GB of storage. My music stays compressed/archived on one HDD with the playable mp3/Ogg Vorbis/mpc etc are on another drive so i can enjoy them with Winamp or Foobar. Movies, photos and software get burned to DVD-R. I have a large DVD-R collection!
Buy the biggest high quality HDD you can afford. In fact buy two of them and start saving for your next one

[cloudscapes]

I personally use SHN, completelly lossless. Although it might not be the best out there.

[Jonny]

I don't see the point in keeping the wavs if you own the music. Compressing them is much more hassle than reripping the wavs.

[i-Ripper]

Originally Posted by Jonny

I don't see the point in keeping the wavs if you own the music. Compressing them is much more hassle than reripping the wavs.

Who said anything about owning the music?

edit: I've actually bought a lot of music online recently from Magnatune. It's all downloaded, flac, ogg, wav, mp3, aac whatever you like, so in this case I buy the music (the artists get 50% of purchase price) and mostly it never makes it onto a CD. I download the flac, make my own recodes to whatever I like and then just store the archive until I need it again. Soon the CD will be totally redundant.

[Jonny]

Originally Posted by i-Ripper

Who said anything about owning the music?

That's OK then

[sabaisabai]

Originally Posted by Jonny

I don't see the point in keeping the wavs if you own the music. Compressing them is much more hassle than reripping the wavs.

Re-ripping the waves means you've got to keep your CD collection with you.

I don't know about others, but reading from my CDs took much longer than the ripping process.

[Jonny]

Originally Posted by sabaisabai

I don't know about others, but reading from my CDs took much longer than the ripping process.

What do you mean by reading?

[i-Ripper]

Originally Posted by sabaisabai

Re-ripping the waves means you've got to keep your CD collection with you.

I don't know about others, but reading from my CDs took much longer than the ripping process.

I agree. Unpacking an archive takes a minute. Ripping in secure mode I might rip a CD at between 2 and 10 X depending on condition. But once I have a cue and wav I can either mount it as a virtual CD and rip at 40 x error free using any ripper or enqueue in foobar/winamp etc and encode to mp3 or Ogg etc. It's the best way if you want to make different rips for different devices/purposes.

[sabaisabai]

Originally Posted by Jonny

What do you mean by reading?

When I rip from CDs the program I use takes a two-step process - reading the music from the CD into a temporary WAV file, and then encoding it (into OGG Vorbis). The reading part takes perhaps two or three times as long as the encoding. I think that is largely due to the CD drive taking extra care to pick up every digital bit that it can.

[Jonny]

Originally Posted by i-Ripper

I agree. Unpacking an archive takes a minute. Ripping in secure mode I might rip a CD at between 2 and 10 X depending on condition. But once I have a cue and wav I can either mount it as a virtual CD and rip at 40 x error free using any ripper or enqueue in foobar/winamp etc and encode to mp3 or Ogg etc. It's the best way if you want to make different rips for different devices/purposes.

What I meant was, creating and unpacking an archive takes longer than ripping or 'reading' a wav. But as you've explained, you downloaded the music so that's that.

[i-Ripper]

Originally Posted by Jonny

What I meant was, creating and unpacking an archive takes longer than ripping or 'reading' a wav. But as you've explained, you downloaded the music so that's that.

Creating an archive takes some time but unpacking an archive is very quick. Ripping from a virtual CD is extremely fast and should be error free.

Ripping is not the same as reading. There's some confusion over terminology in this thread which has led to other misunderstandings.

Ripping means extracting the audio data from the CD. This can be from a physical CD or from a CD image mounted on a virtual drive (Nero Image Drive/Daemon Tools and so on). Sometimes people talk about grabbing or extracting, it's the same thing.

Reading, in the context of audio CDs, is almost always going to mean playing the CD, listening to it.

Most of my music is not downloaded, but the proportion is growing. I have bought an awful lot of CDs over the years and I still buy music. I will never ever pay good money for lossy compressed audio like from iTunes or Napster or any of the other gross music biz rip offs. For the same price or much less I buy the original CD, or the wavs, or the wavs compressed losslessly and do with it as I like. I rent many CDs from the city library, if I like what I hear I make a copy. I also download a lot of music, mostly lossless but high quality mp3/mpc/ogg as well.

[Jonny]

Originally Posted by i-Ripper

Reading, in the context of audio CDs, is almost always going to mean playing the CD, listening to it.

That's what I thought but sabaisabai thought otherwise

Originally Posted by sabaisabai

reading the music from the CD into a temporary WAV file