[CUBE] AAC vs MP3 vs CD - a comparo (was TiVo)

[Todd Masco]

Alan wrote:
>   I am not about to re-rip
> all my CDs (over 500, and since being married, who knows how many),
> into AAC, nor re-steal files in the minority AAC format from
> acquisition (the application).

Well, for the best results you're stuck reconverting now and then as 
the codecs improve anyway.  For example, the latest release of 
Quicktime was supposed to improve AAC encoding substantially (haven't 
had a chance to test it yet myself) and the MP3 codec improves over 
time as well (many people believe that lame will give you better MP3s 
regardless, but that's a different topic and it improves over time 
too).

This is why I decided to take the long term view.  I now rip all of my 
music into AIFF (which is lossless) and then convert in bulk to formats 
for daily usage.  I have over 1500 (real, not stolen) CDs of music in 
my library, collected over the last 18 years, and reripping is a royal 
pain even when it's justified by the wins (or worse, justified by 
losing a disk).

I realize that this isn't for everybody, but consider this: Disk is 
relatively cheap, you can get a 300 GB FW disk for about $300 or so.  
Since each CD averages around .5 GB, that adds less than $.50 to the 
cost of each CD.  In return, you get an exact copy of the CDs and you 
can do anything you like with them, in bulk, relatively quickly.  For 
an additional $.50 per CD, you can make a copy of the disk and put it 
in long term storage.  In my case, I have the CDs in Case logic storage 
sheets, stacked together in a file box, along with a Maxtor 300 GB FW 
disk for each file box, all packed away in an off-site storage unit.  
That's pretty solid for long term security - even if my house burns 
down I still have the originals off-site.

I don't use Apple Lossless Encoding yet simply because I prefer to have 
authoritative copies in formats that I can use on many Unix platforms 
with command line tools that I have source code to, but if you use it 
you could reduce the cost to $.25/CD, $.50/CD with backup.

Ripping to AIFF once and then converting to up-to-date AACs and MP3s is 
a much easier process than reripping every few years.  I've been doing 
this since 1998, had to rerip hundreds of CDs a couple of times for 
various reasons (codecs improved much faster when I started doing this, 
and a disk loss can really ruin your day when you have this much work 
invested in it), and eventually decided to "do it right."  I'm much 
happier now that I have, and my music library is just about as usable 
as I could ever hope for.

[I won't get into the "which codec at what bitrate" battle except to 
say that I prefer 192 Kbps AACs or 256 Kbps lame-generated MP3s.  My 
library current has 3 copies of each song, the AIFF that I mention, the 
AAC for the iPods, and the MP3s for the TiVos]

Hope that's of interest to somebody here,

	-- Todd