Crystal Clear

I suppose the downside to using FLAC as a codec for storing your music is that the file sizes are much, much larger than MP3. Based on my current statistics, each album will average around 340MB on disk, which seems like a lot but it’s not bad considering the Red Book Standard for CDs declares 700MB total capacity per disc.

Here’s a sample comparison between MP3 and FLAC using Rush’s album “Presto”. The MP3s were generated with the LAME encoder at 192Kbit, 44.1KHz, stereo. The FLACs were generated with the FLAC encoder, medium compression setting.

  • MP3: 73282 bytes (71.5MB)
  • FLAC: 342188 bytes (334.2MB)
  • Overall storage growth: 467%

That extra quality comes at a cost. However, with the dropping prices of large hard drives, storage space becomes inconsequential.

The second drawback of using FLACs instead of MP3s is one of hard drive performance. With the smaller MP3 files, the audio player can read in the entire file and cache it in memory instead of hitting the disk constantly for the next data block to decode. FLAC players, unless they’re written to use a larger block of memory to cache the larger file, will have to hit the disk constantly throughout playback. You may run into situations, as I have, where the player will run out of audio data to send to the speakers if you’re doing something that’s creating extra disk activity. Saving files, copying files, anything to do with adding work to the disk may crowd the music player’s file accesses so it has to stand in line to read the data. This can be overcome with faster disks, larger caches, or smarter music players.

All that being said, I’m glad I’m switching to FLAC. I’m actually hearing the music clear as a bell, just as it’s mastered to the actual CD. All the little nuances, the sonic fluttering in the background, and tiny little noises in the studio, it’s all there. And FLAC, since it’s a perfect copy of the CD material, retains the aural phasing and panning between stereo channels, so if the material’s recorded to “come out of the speakers”, then it comes out of the speakers. MP3 processes all this and crunches it down aurally into only the important pieces of the sound and drops the rest.

It’s good to hear my music again.

Ensalada Mondatta

My friend Maredith demands that I write something new, so I’m going to write about salad. Salad is pretty awesome. You can make it with lettuce, or with eggs, or with tuna. Salad is supposed to be eaten cold. When salad is made with lettuce, it’s great for digestion and elimination, because lettuce, as well as any other vegetable and fruit, is full of fiber. Fiber is the undigestable portion of your food, and is essential for helping carry water through your intestines and out to your colon where the extra water will help keep your stools from being too hard. Ultimately, the more fiber you eat, the healthier you will be. And so that’s why I eat salad.

You can use many different kinds of lettuce for your salad. Most boring Americans use iceberg lettuce, which contains a lot of water, is crispy as long as it’s kept cold and wet, and has large leaves (perfect for sandwiches and burgers, too), but iceberg contains very little flavor or nutrition. Nobody should eat iceberg lettuce if they have a better choice. Another lettuce you could use is romaine lettuce, which contains more flavor, a more wrinkled texture, and has smaller, crunchier leaves. I like romaine, personally. It’s pretty good on sandwiches, but just fine as a salad. A third kind of lettuce is called arugala, which is used a lot in a salad variety called “spring mix”. It has uniquely-shaped leaves, a thin, dark green color, and a ton of flavor and vitamin C. It’s good stuff, and sometimes it goes great on those high-falutin’ sandwiches you find at a deli in a white neighborhood.

I like to add extra vegetables to my salad. I always have green onions (shallots, to you yankees) on hand in the fridge, so I clip off the roots of two stalks, trim the leaf tips, and chop up the green ends of the stalks into little bits of diced onion. Those go on top of the salad. I eat the white part of the stalks between bites of salad or sandwich. I also like to add tomatos; cherry tomatos are my favorite (be sure to wash them first). Sometimes, I’ll have other veggies like baby corn, olives, palm hearts. So tasty.

What dressing you use is based on personal preference. I like lighter dressings, so most times I’ll get either French or Italian dressing, but on occasion I have been known to be a fat American and use ranch dressing. Something about that creamy dreamy manufactured texture sets my taste buds at ease. Ranch dressing also goes good on manufactured “baby carrots” as well as buffalo wings which are manufactured from the arms of tiny immature chickens. Tasty!

Ok, that’s all I know about salad. You should have a salad too. I make a unique salad, and you make a unique salad, too. It’s as individual as each of us. We should totally get together some time and eat each other’s salad for a bit of variety. Ok, bye.

Catching FLAC

Last weekend, I began the slow, arduous process of re-ripping my entire CD collection into files easily playable on my computer. This time, instead of ripping into 192kbit MP3 with the LAME codec (like I did last time), I’m ripping them into FLAC. This has important implications.

First and foremost is that FLAC is lossless, meaning no data is thrown away between the transition from CD to the final sound file. MP3 is a lossy codec, and uses tons of statistical mojo to analyze the sound data of the CD and throw away the bits that your ears can’t hear, crunching the file size tremendously. The problem with this method is that you’re losing the quieter nuances of your music. FLAC’s strength is that it’s able to take the input waveforms and chop them up into similar, easy-to-compress chunks, making the file smaller than the original uncompressed form but on playback the audio is a perfect, exact copy of its original form.

Secondly, since FLAC doesn’t compress the file sizes as well as MP3 (with the obvious quality tradeoffs), the overall space needed to store my music collection has grown tremendously. Instead of storing an entire album in roughly 80 megabytes of space, it now takes an average of 350 megabytes. That’s a large bite to swallow, but with the falling prices of high-capacity hard drives, it’s nothing nowadays. Considering the audio CD format stores around 700 megabytes, that’s not so bad.

I’ve been meaning to do this, because even with my bad ears I can still sometimes hear the strange audio artifacts of the MP3 compression — called “sizzle” in the industry — when I’m listening to my stuff. After I ripped my first disc and gave a listen, I was shocked at the quality difference. There were little pieces of the sound, stuff from the studio, or the audience, or quiet stuff put into the mix, that I never knew was there after listening to the MP3-encoded form for years. The sound came out of my speakers; FLAC saves the exact same stereo phasing that’s mixed into the CD in the final file, and no amount of MP3 bitrate is going to capture that level of nuance. I’m shocked.

So last weekend, I bought a 1 Terabyte hard disk (that’s roughly 1,000,000 Megabytes), installed it, and started ripping the CDs on my shelf. Within two days, I had the shelf of CDs I’ve acquired since 2007; about 60 discs total. And then I cracked open the 120-pound crate of CDs that I’ve collected since my first disc in 1991. These were packed up at my last place, and I’ve just now gotten around to digging them out. I’m about 1/8th of the way through my entire collection, so I expect this to take a while.

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that I will never have to break out a CD again to get quality audio. The end FLAC files can be used as perfect copies to produce any sort of MP3, OGG, or next-generation compressed audio file for ease of portability. Any other use (like for listening at home), I can rely on the FLAC.

Adhesive

To be fair, the friendship I destroyed was mended. You can still see the chips, cracks, and glue smudges, but it’s functional again. It took some difficult talking, some private thinking, and a mutual redefinition to make it work. A little bit of distance is good medicine, too. We’ll revisit the matter in a few days.

I never did learn how to dance without stepping on toes.