Music storage and organization

Mvsic
41

I think the problem is more with how computers list numbers, they see 014 as being after 01 and before 02. It is up to the program writers to correct for that in their UI for human readability. Not all software has bothered with this. The disc naming structure used to then serve two purposes: represent the physical media you were ripping from and correct for human legible order. Now that music is disassociated from physical media the legibility problem remains and so the fudge of harking back to disc number remains even though the nominal reason for it has faded.

I always get round this by using a separate tagging software to music player so I have more control over the tagging so I can create a consistent hierarchy.

2 Likes
42

Was wondering, is uncompressed flac uncompressed? Or is it that it is the least compressed?

I don’t typically use flac so it’s a bit weird to have different compression options when it’s supposed to be lossless anyway.

43

Not all compression is lossy.
If you Zip something and unzip it, you get the exact same bits back

Flac isn’t lossy compress/uncompress gets you the original bits back, but it is generally compressed. They use an audio specific codec that exploits the fact that multiple channels aren’t completely distinct and music is generally smooth, so you get about a 50% reduction in size. Decompression ought to require sone minimal amount of additional CPU.

Wav is probably the simplest PCM format, it’s basically 2 raw interleaved channels with a header on the front.

If you read enough internet you’ll find threads suggesting that Flac is superior/inferior to Wav in playback for various streamers, in both cases the same bits will be played, but CPU usage and Network/Disk usage will vary, whether that has an actual audible impact who knows.
If your using Roon it’s all decompressed on the Server rather than at the streamer, most other protocols the streamer decompresses it.

5 Likes
44

Be cautious of many older posts on this. I think a lot of this came from the thought of much older (think 2000’s) low powered devices needing more to decompress flac and that extra noise being audible in some way. Everything modern shouldnt break a sweat, or even a care over flac.

I think going off an old post Flac 6 or 7 had the most economic compression of time vs space. But tbh both time and space issues are so minimal now I use the default.

1 Like