Category — Software

This is a follow up to last week’s post on 5 Reasons You Should Use Lossless File Formats. There are many good reasons to use lossless compression to store your digital media, but there are also many good reasons why you shouldn’t bother. Here are a few of the main points:

1. Hard Drive Space is Expensive

Although hard drive space is fairly cheap, there is also the cost of maintaining backups in case your main drive fails. A backup can be contained both onsite and offsite, which increases the cost even more. Furthermore, if you’re listening to audio on a portable player you may not even be able to find one with a hard drive large enough to fit your collection.

If you’re using a digital camera, using RAW mode can take up a significantly larger chunk of memory, which means more memory cards to juggle.

2. You Probably Won’t Notice a Difference in Quality

If your main source of listening to music is a $5000 stereo, you should look into the best lossless formats. If you’re listening to your music on an iPod with the standard iPod earbuds, you’re probably not going to notice a difference between .mp3 files stored at a high bit rate over a lossless file. And if you can’t tell a difference, then what’s the point of taking up more space?

For picture files you will probably edit the files once, and then never worry about them again. You will lose some quality when editing .jpg files, but will you notice it?

3. You Probably Don’t Care If It Lasts Forever, Either

Photos can be stored as jpeg files fairly easily, which takes up relatively little space compared to giant .tiff, .psd, or RAW files. Once you’ve done an initial editing of them, it’s unlikely you will revisit them again, so why not store them in a smaller format so they can be backed up offsite easily.

As for your digital music collection, if you were to lose your Duran Duran CD collection to a fire or theft, would you really care that much? Most likely insurance would cover the loss, and then you could just buy new copies of the CDs anyway.

4. It Can Waste Your Time

When you transfer media to and from your computer, the larger a file is the longer it takes to transfer. So when you’re uploading large RAW files from your camera to your computer, you have to wait longer. When your computer pulls them up to look at or to edit, it takes longer.

When you are backing up your media files to another disk, the more data you have to copy the longer your backup can take. This is especially true if you are doing offsite backups online. Copying over a few gigabytes of data could take a very long time.

5. Many Tools Are Not Compatible With Lossless

When I first switched to lossless audio files I started by encoding everything in FLAC files. That was fine for playing them on my computer, but I also use a Macbook laptop, and iTunes is not compatible with FLAC. So I had to re-encode everything into Apple Lossless, which took a few days. FLAC files are also not compatible with my Microsoft XBox 360, so I had to maintain one copy of lossless WMA files on my PC for streaming, as well as a copy of Apple Lossless files to use with my laptop when I am home.

If I had just used .mp3 files though, I could have easily shared a copy of every file across all of the platforms I have at home. This also goes back to #4, since it took a bit of time to re-encode over 100GB of music twice (once to WMA and once to Apple Lossless).

Conclusion

So there are 5 reasons you should store your files using lossless compression ratios, and 5 reasons you shouldn’t. Personally I store most of my files using lossless, but I don’t have so much that it is difficult to back it up on and offsite. Hopefully these ideas will give you a better idea of how you want to maintain your own digital library.

Multimedia is increasingly being stored on computers. Audio on the computer has been around for years. Digital cameras have drastically overthrown film in popularity. So does it matter how you store those files on your computer? I think it does. Lossless compression formats, while larger, are often superior to their lossy counterparts.

But what does lossless mean?

When files are stored on your computer, the digital bits are typically compressed to take up less space. A lossless compression will keep all bits and squeeze them together. Think about a deck of common playing cards all laying face up so you could read the numbers and suits. If you were going to store those cards, you wouldn’t store them laying side by side face up. You would pick them up, stack them on top of each other, and store them. This is a lossless compression. When you are ready to view the cards again you would simply take them out and line them up again. All of the data, the faces of the cards, would still be there for you to see.

Now if you were short on room and you couldn’t store a full deck of cards, you might discard some of the cards. At first you would get rid of the instruction card, then maybe the jokers. That would save you a little bit of room. This is how a lossy compression works. It takes the information that it thinks you probably won’t need, and gets rid of it permanently.

What type of file formats are available?

Photos and music are the two big media types that people store on their computers. Movies and video are becoming more popular, especially with Apple’s iTunes store becoming more popular. But the limited ability to get video from a PC to a big screen television limits the usefulness of keeping video on your computer.

audio

For music fans there is a wide variety of lossless audio codecs. The two big ones though are FLAC and Apple Lossless. If you are using iTunes and an iPod then Apple Lossless is your go to file format. If you are using a program other than iTunes for ripping your CDs and playing music I highly suggest using the open source FLAC. For more about lossless audio codecs, check out my prior post Protect and Backup Your Music Collection.

photos

The major type of lossless photo format is RAW, which is a family of formats used by camera makers for storing the RAW information on a file before being formated. Most cameras take a picture and then process it in-camera to pop out a jpeg. The theory behind RAW is that a home computer has much more processing power than a computer, so processing a photo on the computer should produce a better picture than doing it in-camera. If your camera can shoot in RAW it can be a great way to create quality photos. If you mess up a shot due to an incorrect exposure or an incorrect white balance, it can often be saved in post processing.

And without further ado, here are the top 5 reasons you should be using lossless formats to store data on your computer:

1. Hard Drive Space is Cheap

New hard drives holding a terabyte of data can be found for close to a hundred dollars. One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. That’s a lot of data. If one song stored in Apple Lossless averages around 25 megabytes, a one terabyte drive can hold 40,000 songs. Compared to the cost to actually acquire that much music, the storage space is fairly insignificant.

For photos, if your camera is capable of shooting in RAW, a 12 megapixel RAW photo is about 15 megabytes. If you shoot mostly in RAW you could shoot over 66,000 photos before you fill up a 1 TB drive. If you’re using jpegs (not a lossless format) it’s going to take a long time before you fill up that much space.

2. There’s a Huge Difference in Quality

mp3 files are compared by their bit rate. The most common rates are 128 kbps (kilobits per second), 256 bps, and 320 kbps. 320 kbps is typically considered the best bit rate by most. Newer formats, such as AAC, store files in a similar file size, but promise better performance from similar compression ratios. Lossless audio files on the other hand are using bit rates close to 1000 kbps.

For most picture takers, jpeg will be the only file format you ever use or need, since most consumer cameras only use jpeg. The problem with jpeg is the the loss of quality every time you edit the photo. So if you’re using the jpeg file format and doing a lot of editing you should try to save your files in another format such as TIFF or PSD.

3. Digital Media Lasts Forever

Once you store your files on a hard drive, they could theoretically last forever with proper backup. If one hard drive fails, you can quickly recover your files from a backup drive and have everything ready almost instantly.

I have heard stories of people losing precious photos of loved ones in fires. A 1 TB external hard drive takes up almost no room and could be left at a friend or family members house as an off-site backup to prevent against loss in a fire. You could also keep it in a safe deposit box, a small fire proof safe, or even back up online using a service like Amazon’s S3. Compare this to trying to store a copy of 66,000 actual photos. I don’t know anyone that would let me keep that much stuff at their house, just in case.

The same can be said for CDs. If you were to lose your CDs in a fire, it could be very costly to replace them. A more likely scenario is someone stealing your CDs out of your car. A solution to this is to rip all of your CDs using a lossless format, and then if your CDs are stolen or damaged they can be easily replaced.

4. It Can Save You Time

Technology is always advancing. There is always going to be new software that can do something better. In the audio world mp3 is a standard file format, even though other lossy codecs like AAC can sound better. If you choose to follow these types of things, you could spend a lot of time ripping and re-ripping your CD collection for better sound. Or suppose you upgrade your music player and decide that you want to re-encode all of your CDs. If you had maintained one master collection on your computer’s hard drive, upgrading would be as easy as making a second lossy copy of your lossless files. Unfortunately that does require you to maintain two separate libraries, but as we saw above, space is cheap.

5. The Best Tools All Use Lossless

Common music software like winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Player, all have support for lossless files. Even the iPod can use Apple Lossless, although you may be better off maintaining a lossy copy of your library since hard drive space on the iPod is significantly more expensive, or even impossible to get if you’re looking at something like an iPod Touch or an iPhone.

For photos, if you have a camera that uses RAW files, you probably received a converter tool that can read and edit RAW files. If you are on a Mac, iPhoto can store and edit RAW files also, so there’s no need to upgrade to an expensive tool like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. Unless you want to of course.

So there are 5 good reasons you should start using Lossless formats to store your digital files. As storage gets cheaper, and especially as online bandwidth gets cheaper, you will see increasing quality in your digital files. It may seem a little strange that a personal finance author is encouraging you to spend money on hard drives to store your digital files. But for me the cost of storage is worth the peace of mind and convenience of having all of my files stored on my computer.

Stay tuned though, in the works is 5 reasons you shouldn’t use lossless file formats. I’ll update with a link when that’s ready.

For anyone using a Mac, Macheist is giving away free software on Christmas day at The Giving Tree.

You can pick up two free aps now, and four more on Christmas day. I hope the aps are good!

For the past year I have been running Windows on my Mac using Apple’s Boot Camp in OS X Leopard. After a few months I decided to give Fusion a try since it lets you run a Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. I felt like I was getting the best of both world - the convenience of booting into Windows from OS X whenever I needed it, or the ability to run Windows at full speed under Boot Camp when I needed it. Over time however I found myself booting using the virtual machine more often and almost never booting into Windows.

About two weeks ago I finally decided to convert my boot camp partition into a full virtual machine under Fusion. This actually had a few benefits, some of which I planned on, some I didn’t plan on. First is the hard drive space usage. When you use Boot Camp you need to choose how much space you would like to devote to Windows and how much to OS X. I overestimated how much space I would really need, and ended up wasting about 10 GB of space in the Boot Camp Partition, almost 10% of my laptop’s capacity, so not a small amount for sure.

That was the intended benefit. The unintended benefit of running windows in a pure virtual machine is the speed of loading under fusion. When you run fusion off a partition you need to boot up the system as well as fully shut down, just as if you were running the system normally. With a virtual machine however, Fusion will let you suspend an active session, allowing you to close out faster and get going faster too since you no longer have to wait for Windows to load. I have also noticed that Apple’s Spotlight search now includes Windows files and applications, and choosing one will automatically launch Fusion for you. Very cool.

Overall I am very happy that I made the switch over to VM Ware Fusion. Being able to boot into Windows while still using my OS X software like Omni Focus and Mail is great. The only real advantage I can see for Boot Camp is the price (free for Leopard users) and the potential speed gains if you need to use Windows for gaming or some other processor intensive programs.

The process for converting a boot camp partition is a little tricky, but not terribly difficult if you are ready for it. Of course back everything up if you can (another reason for using Fusion is a simplified backup of ALL of your data).

I highly recommend watching this video if you plan on making the switch: MurphyMac.com

You can also read the article at the same site (vmware converter)

I hope this helps anyone who is on the fence about trying VM Ware’s Fusion. I think it’s great, and it’s well worth checking out with a free trial.

Has anyone else upgraded to iTunes 8 and tried out the new Genius feature? At first I thought it was a little gimmicky, but I have been loving it the past few days for creating on-the-fly playlists, both for general listening and for workout playlists, which are usually a huge pain to create.

What is it? After selecting a song to play, you simply click the genius button and iTunes will create a new playlist with the chosen song and more songs from your library that iTunes believes will complement the current song. After creating the playlist you can select the number of songs in the playlist, refresh the selections, and even store the playlist for listening later. The last feature is awesome for creating workout playlists from one uptempo song.

If you use iTunes and have a even a moderate size library I highly recommend trying out genius. It’s a huge time saver for creating new playlists, and a great way to rediscover songs in your library.

Part of being frugal isn’t just saving money on the things you buy. You must also spend some time taking care of the things you own. As many people know, CDs are not perfect, and as they get old they can fall prey to CD ‘rot.’ You may notice that older discs will start to show holes through the label, rendering them unreadable. I will not discuss the legalities of ripping music, but if you own the disc you should legally be able to back it up.There are numerous free programs available to manage your music, and I will cover just a few of them here.

What you will need:

1. A ripping program, such as EAC or iTunes.

2. A large hard drive. For lossless formats estimate about 350 MB per disc. Lossy formats will be much smaller.

3. A burning program to make backup copies.

The ripping program

For PC users, the best program for ripping your CDs is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). EAC has two useful modes, secure and burst, that can be used for different situations. For newer discs or scratch free discs, burst mode will quickly back up your discs. But where EAC really shines is secure mode. When ripping damaged discs, such as those with scratches, secure mode will read and reread a small section of the disc until it gets two matching reads. This drastically reduces the number of errors that you hear on ripped albums, such as pops, cracks, or skips. If EAC cannot get a matching read, it will record an error and the location, then move on to the next section. After the rip is complete, you can review the error report, listen to the section where the error occurred, and determine if the error is audible or not. 95% of the time, you will not hear anything wrong. If you do hear a problem, you can try to repair the disc or consider replacement. EAC also comes with accuraterip, which compares the results of your copy with other users, increasing accuracy even further.

If you are using EAC you will also need to download a compression program (more on that later). The FLAC program can be downloaded here. LAME can be used to rip mp3 files, and can be downloaded here. Once you have downloaded and installed the FLAC or LAME encoder, you can point EAC to the program, and it will automatically compress the music files for you. If intend to use FLAC, keep in mind that many music players, such as the iPod and iTunes, do not support FLAC.

iTunes is also available to both PC and Mac users for ripping their music collections. iTunes is far more simple to use than EAC, but the iTunes error correction setting can’t touch EAC’s secure mode on damaged discs. I have not seen an EAC equivalent available for Macs.

What is compression?

A little background into what you’re actually doing. When you rip a CD to your computer, the program will convert the small pits in the CD into a digital file. At first this will come in as an uncompressed WAV file, which is then compressed. A compression program will create a music file that allows you to listen to your music on your computer. There are two types of compression types to look into, lossless and lossy.Consider a deck of cards. Laying each one side-by-side, face up, will allow you to easily read the data on each card. This is the equivalent of music burned to a disc. Each pit of the CD can easily be read by the CD player and then converted to the sound you hear. Now take that same deck of cards, stack each card on top of each other, and then put them into a small box. The same information is available if you need it, but instead of taking up a large amount of space to lay the cards side-by-side, they now occupy the space of only a small card box. This is essentially how a lossless compression format works. All of the data is available, it just needs to be extracted by a player to be read. Think back to the deck of cards, now in a small box. If you start taking cards out, the amount of space used shrinks. But you also start to lose information that may or may not be important. At first you might get rid of the card with game instructions, then the jokers. Then you might start losing more valuable data. This is how a lossy compression format works. It shrinks the music file further than a lossless file, but at the expense of some data. For a music file, a lossy format gets rid of some of the highs and lows of the music that it thinks you won’t notice. The further you compress (with a lower bit-rate) the more information that is taken out. You have probably already heard of the most popular lossy compression format, mp3.

The most popular lossless compression formats are FLAC and Apple Lossless. The most popular lossy compression formats are mp3 and the newer AAC, which is used by the iTunes music store. EAC users will likely use FLAC for lossless copies, and mp3 for lossy. iTunes users will have to use Apple Lossless for CD quality rips, and can easily use either mp3 or AAC for lossy compression.

What format should I choose?

As stated earlier, iTunes users will have to choose Apple Lossless for lossless backup, and EAC users will have an easier time finding the open-source FLAC encoder. Both create the exact same quality file, as lossless is lossless, and no data is lost. For lossy compression formats, mp3 is ubiquitous, and so that is what I use for my portable player. There is some debate that other formats have higher quality per file size, such as AAC or Ogg Vorbis.

The big decision is whether to use a lossy or lossless format. Since the purpose of this is to make an actual CD quality backup, I highly recommend ripping into a lossless format first. Once you have a lossless file, you will never have to re-rip your music collection again. Hard drive space is relatively cheap, especially in comparison to the cost of buying a replacement disc should the one you have get damaged, lost, or stolen.

Since hard drive space is so cheap, I also recommend making a second lossy copy for use with portable players. Using a smaller file in a portable player will allow you to pack more songs into the limited space available, and will increase the battery life. Portable players are often used in noisy environments, and with cheaper headphones, so it’s unlikely you will notice a huge difference in sound quality.

iTunes makes creating two copies extremely easy. Once a CD is ripped as an Apple Lossless file, make a duplicate of that disc to convert. Then simply choose the songs you want to convert, control-click (right click for PC users) on the selections, and choose to convert to mp3 (or AAC or Apple Lossless, depending on your import choice). If apple lossless is the choice, simply open the options panel, choose your new compression format, and reselect the files to convert. Don’t forget to change it back to Apple Lossless before you import your next CD.

For PC users, a useful program for converting FLAC files into mp3 is foobar. This is also a great lightweight program if you want a greatly customizable music player. You will have to download the LAME encoder (for mp3) and then point foobar to the program the same way you did with EAC. Then simply choose the songs you want to convert, select the destination directory, and convert.

Burning a copy

Again, I won’t discuss the legalities of this, but I feel that if I own an original copy of the album I should be free to create a copy for my own use. Backup CDs are great for the car, where they will see more abuse. You also don’t have to worry about losing the original should they be stolen, and you can put them in a CD case while keeping the original at home with the jewel case and liner notes.

If you are on a PC and chose to use FLAC, a great free burning program is Burrrn. iTunes users can burn straight from iTunes.

Further reading:

EAC

This awesome guide covers pretty much everything, including how to set up the FLAC or LAME encoder, and should get you setup correctly.

Here is another overview on EAC drive settings.

Foobar 2000

The Hydrogen Audio forums have a huge thread on resources for setting up and customizing foobar.

iTunes

For Windows users, Apple has an iTunes setup guide. Mac users will likely have iTunes installed already.

Summary

• iTunes is a convenient all-in-one solution for both PC and Mac users, and is the easiest (but not necessarily best) solution to use
• EAC is the best solution for creating backups from damaged discs
• Foobar and Burrrn can be used on the PC as a complement to EAC for playing and burning FLAC files
• Lossless codecs like FLAC and Apple Lossless are superior for creating CD quality backup files.
• Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC are better when you have limited storage
• An ideal backup would have lossless copies for archiving and a lossy copy for portable use

If anyone has any questions, or finds other useful resources, please feel free to leave a comment.