Sunday, November 25, 2007

Should I abandon lossy audio compression?

The last couple of weekends have been calm, and I've had time to reconsider a couple of things, one being whether I should abandon using AAC for my digitised music (stored on a NAS and played through Sonos).

Until now, I've been using iTunes and Tunessleeve to copy my CD's
in AAC-format and download album covers from the Internet. But, after comparing a lossless (WAV) version and a lossy (AAC) version of the same classical music, I began to seriously considering a lossless solution. And then FLAC (free lossless audio codec) came back to mind. After browsing around, I've downloaded J. River Media Center, which successfully copies a CD to FLAC, looks up info (track names etc.) on the internet and downloads the album cover automatically. Sounds perfect, right? And except from that I have to copy all my CD's once more, it is a nice solution. Except from one thing: the database from which J. River downloads CD-info seems to miss out things like production year and stuff... So now I don't quite know what to do--again.

In the vacuum of a perfect solution, I've had time to explore Adobe Lightroom and uploaded a couple of pictures to Flickr--of which I personally prefer the slightly manipulated one of some frozen roses.

Update:
Bjørg tipped me about CD-DA Extractor, and it appears to be a viable alternative to J. River Media Center. The user interface is awful, but CD-info is better than J. River.