Neil Young on MP3s—and other options

[Ron Thorne]

Scott, since you've recently upgraded your home music system, you (and others, of course) might enjoy the comments of Neil Young on the subject of MP3s and other forms of music distribution. iTunes and Steve Jobs are mentioned in direct fashion, too. This is from 2 years ago.



http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... hates-mp3s

[Ron Thorne]

[BFrank]

Neil after his Pono Music presentation at SXSW in March.

[jtx]

I have to say I agree with you Scott. A well-tuned high bitrate lossy format audio file will hold up to tight scrutiny. As mentioned in the Neil Young article, a MP3 encoded at 320kbps CBR will be scarcely different from the original lossless WAV, FLAC, ALAC, etc. That is the format used for most if not all MP3 downloads from Amazon now. I have been using Musepack for all of my ripped and compressed audio for the last several years, along with the occasional AAC, MP3 and OGG Vorbis, and have experienced the same thing: satisfaction in the final audio quality to the extent that I no longer worry about it. And I always have the original ripped FLAC file if I change my mind.

[jtx]

That is indeed an optimal setup. Because the iPod I use in my car has a noticeable design flaw due to its age—no support for gapless playback—I have to combine tracks that have zero gap between them, so I end up making one set of AAC files for the car iPod, and gapless MPC/OGG files (with ReplayGain data embedded) for the Rockbox iPod I use for personal listening.

I thought about using ALAC for my lossless collection, but wanted to remain free of iTunes, so went with FLAC instead. I use Foobar2000 for all my transcoding and PC playback. I still need to back up my FLAC files, though. One hard drive is not safe enough for me. I had to re-rip nearly my entire CD collection when then previous hard drive failed.