Posted on 07/24/2006 11:30:45 AM PDT by 2Jim_Brown
Hymn won't work with iTunes 6.x.
Why? Hard disks are so cheap now, and USB 2.0 adapters readily available... and so much faster than burning to a CD or DVD. I rotate four external 100GB hard disks and do a full copy once a month. Even if one whole drive dies, I still have three more copies.
Technically, MPEG does not imply compression. It is a container format and uncompressed MPEG formats are used in some places. That said, there are several common standard MPEG formats that essentially require compression e.g. the consumer ones.
And while I think video compression is quite noticeable in consumer formats (which tend to universally suck), the same is not true of audio formats. At sufficiently high bitrates of the type commonly available to consumers, compressed audio is essentially indistinguishable from uncompressed versions. Even very high-end consumer listening environments rarely do better than 10-bits of real resolution regardless of the source material, and at some compression level all the artifacts fall below that noise floor. Which makes the source format largerly irrelevant, since very high-end professional analog sources give you around 12-bits and a standard audio CD does 16-bits, assuming that fidelity is maintained in the signal path. There used to be a lot of problems with 16-bit audio fidelity, but high-end gear can do about 20-bits pristinely with ease these days -- which is all anyone needs as a source no matter what you are doing. Higher bit-depths are useful primarily for preventing the accumulation of signal processing rounding errors -- you cannot actually produce an output signal at higher depths with fidelity.
Unless you are talking about some of the more exotic/professional 24/96 formats, there is nothing that produces a signal with more fidelity than the common audio CD if it was created with vaguely recent mastering gear. Even the finest professional analog recordings run around 12-bits, and most "analog" recordings have far less resolution in reality.
With video, the difference between raw D5 High-Def or even DigiBeta and the ISO MPEG-2 streams on a DVD is like night and day, a practical limitation of storage capacity. For audio, it is all the same after a certain low bar, even in precision monitoring environments.
Back up your MP3 and JPG files frequently and store the back-ups remotely from your computer. I put my digital photo back ups as well as my photo negatives in a safety deposit box so even if my home burns to the ground, I don't lose my photos. Be sure to use high quality or archival CDs or DVDs for your back ups as the cheap no name type can start to lose data in a matter of months. Don't forget to keep your back ups abreast of the new technology ..having data backed up on some obsolete media or in a no longer available format may be as bad as losing your data altogether.
Didn't know that. I only used it a few times when I first tried iTunes way back when it came out.
I hated it and removed it from my system. Haven't missed it.
Analog tape, even the good stuff, has very noticeable noise in a good monitoring environment but you are correct that it sounds a lot less objectionable than converter crunch. It should not be an issue anymore, but it never ceases to surprise me how much good gear has crappy converters. I've used nominally decent 24-bit converters that noticeably added artifacts (e.g. the MOTU units) and have also used 20-bit board converters (e.g. Panasonic digital mixers) that were incredibly sweet and transparent. Effectively artifact-free conversion is possible, but it is rare in anything but expensive units. Older expensive units with lower digital specs often produce better audio than cheaper newer units with very high digital specs. 16-bit can beat 24-bit for "clean" depending on gear quality. That said, the average bar continues to slowly improve. Crappy converters anywhere in the chain tend be audible, hence the value of using a single set of excellent converters and doing everything else in the digital domain -- no need to trust that every manufacturer in the signal chain to use the finest quality parts and engineering.
However, when most places master a digital recording (usually from 24-bit source these days) they will usually add an artificial analog noise floor somewhere in the 16-20 bit resolution range to cover any converter artifacts in the source itself since the extreme low bits don't have much use anyway. The "sound" of the analog noise floor is easily reproduced in software, but digital gear does not do it naturally.
And then there's video...........
</:^)
"Why? Hard disks are so cheap now, and USB 2.0 adapters readily available... and so much faster than burning to a CD or DVD. I rotate four external 100GB hard disks and do a full copy once a month. Even if one whole drive dies, I still have three more copies."
Exactly why I use a Network Attached Storage system. I have a small box I created as a server. Then I have a Terabyte NAS. It came with some cheapy software that allows me to automatically copy the directories I want from my PC to the server. Then once a week I have teh server scan itself and copy over to the NAS.
And its pretty quick over my 100 mbps ethernet network.
I had a Drive fail and had to spend 500 to get it back. Since then I dont trust just one drive or cds!
Better solution ... buy two drives, and external USB hard drive carrier and use it as a backup.
The quality of the analog front-end and digital pre-processing can have more impact on quality than the "number of bits", just as the quality of optics on a camera affects quality more than the number of megapixels.
External drives are a great, but I've got a funny story about them:
My shop got flooded last year in the fourth "100 year flood" in 10 years. I had some warning beforehand, so I put my valuables up off the floor beforehand. I didn't lose much because of my precautions, but I did lose one thing: you guessed it--the external backup hard drive! I forgot to pull it out of the bottom shelf of a cabinet.
For a second I thought the headline said "protecting your MP5" which would definitely be a departure from the norm.
~ Blue Jays ~
A lot of equipment gets blamed for the deficiencies of the recording engineer. Two people can use the same equipment and get radically different results.
Unless the coating on the disk delaminated (which I wouldn't expect it to) it should be possible for a data-retrieval company to clean out the drive and get the data. Not a job for amateurs, but probably not a difficult job for a company with the right equipment.
I've heard some good files at very low bit rates (brag alert: I think A Bird in a Barren Cage (22kbps) turned out very nicely) that sounded better than some files at much higher bit rates. Not all compression routines are equal, even when producing output to feed the same decoder, and some compression routines seem to pick up and amplify minor annoyances in the signal they're fed.
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