C'mon
Greg
Careful, or we will try this on you at the next listening session.
SandyK OUT.
I use FLAC for my lossless collection. It's smaller than .wav, it stores metadata, and a good number of things play it - my Empeg, my rockboxed Sansa MP3 player, etc.
I'll also second the dBpoweramp recommendation - it's a fantastic piece of software for ripping and converting music. The batch converter application is the best part - with less than a minute of setup, I can have it convert my whole FLAC collection to OGG or MP3, keeping the directory structure and file metadata and everything intact. And it'll do the conversion multithreaded on my quad core CPU. Can't beat that.
Normally I tend to use free software for everything, but this one's good enough to pay for.
I'll also second the dBpoweramp recommendation - it's a fantastic piece of software for ripping and converting music. The batch converter application is the best part - with less than a minute of setup, I can have it convert my whole FLAC collection to OGG or MP3, keeping the directory structure and file metadata and everything intact. And it'll do the conversion multithreaded on my quad core CPU. Can't beat that.
Normally I tend to use free software for everything, but this one's good enough to pay for.
So... where does .WAV files store the error checking?Originally Posted by davidsrsb
WAV does not have any error checking, so a file can easily get damaged without you knowing
I think you are confused.
Resource Interchange File Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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However the host file system will flag up that the file has been corrupted to due the inherent file system checksum.
Say the file system had errors, a check disc would report them yes (in a general way), and attempt to fix, you would them be left with lots of .chk files (made up of parts of the wave files), but potentially could not be sure which of your 10,000 wave file were repaired, and if they had errors. Atleast that is my understanding of it.
Not something I would like to depend on for a generation copy from one machine to another (maybe with a new OS). Having a built in crc check makes it very quick and easy to validate your flac encoded library on a new machine.
Commodity PC hardware is not reliable beyond 2-3 years these days, so your library has got be transferred to new media that often.
I also do not trust DRM obsessed Microsoft not to start adding a low level watermark to my wav file at some point in the future
I'm sorry, but this is total nonsense. Data transfers between PCs and disks are very, very safe. If PCs were as unreliable as you and some people claim, you wouldn't be reading this, and most coudn't post here. The amount of error checking and the level of error correction that is possible is absolutely unbelievable, and it's in everyones drive. And second: you do realize that the flac checksum isn't checked by the OS during or after a copy?
Hardware is much more reliable than in the past, it's the virusses & other trash that brick PCs and kill most libraries. If you think the reliability is lower, that's most likely caused by power line problems. Those certainly have increased around the globe, and the past years those have lead to an increase in PSU failures. A possible solution is either going for active PFC in the PC as those PSUs handle spikes and surges more gracefully, or simply start using an UPS to eliminate problems entirely. It'll double your figure for reliable operation.
But isn't this checksum calculated from the overall content in the FLAC's rar container? ie the WAV file, cover, tagging mm?
One could also use native OS file system compression and have your music collection saved in WAV with little overhead in storage space.
Have you ever zipped a WAV file? Compression ratio's are terrible compared to FLAC. Since file system compression is often comparable to zip like compression schemes, it it fairly useless.
Agreed about PC to PC as the protocols all use crc32 and very robust.
Disk sector reading is only crc16, a left over from ancient IBM technology. CRC16 is not foolproof. Recent disk filing systems can introduce a crc32 layer on top, but I don't think this is the case for devices like usb keys
That's because the sector size hasn't changed. The optimum CRC length is tied to the message blocksize. Using 32 for a 512 byte sized block was and still is a bit overkill. The newer 4K formatted drives will change that. Even with 16, the bit error rate is below 1 on 10^14 or 15, or less then 1 bit for every 1.4 million CDs you play. That's good enough for me to call them very, very safe.
A newbie to the forum with a follow-up question about this:
I'm using Exact Audio Copy to create WAV files from audio discs. EAC has an error check function -- would this compensate for the lack of error detection inherent in the WAV format, or should I start re-ripping everything as FLAC?
In advance, thanks!
I'm using Exact Audio Copy to create WAV files from audio discs. EAC has an error check function -- would this compensate for the lack of error detection inherent in the WAV format, or should I start re-ripping everything as FLAC?
In advance, thanks!
It wouldn't make any difference, if the error occurs during the rip then FLAC won't know.
The "lack of" error detection within WAV is not a problem, the file system deals with it.
Though there would be an advantage of ripping to FLAC in that the song metadata could be incorporated. And you would use less disk space. But you could just convert your WAVs to FLAC and achieve all of this anyway.
The "lack of" error detection within WAV is not a problem, the file system deals with it.
Though there would be an advantage of ripping to FLAC in that the song metadata could be incorporated. And you would use less disk space. But you could just convert your WAVs to FLAC and achieve all of this anyway.
Of course there is.
Starting with the official front-end (kind of spartan, but works).
And many other plug-ins or stand-alone converters.
Starting with the official front-end (kind of spartan, but works).
And many other plug-ins or stand-alone converters.
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