Music is traditionally stored in an analog form, be it on vinyl or on audio tapes. With the introduction of the CD beginning of the 1980′s, music could be reproduced at near-flawless quality, because it was stored digitally. The fact that sound was captured in bits, made it a likely candidate to be stored on other devices, such as a hard disk. The problem however, was that a full CD of music takes up about 700 MB of data, and in the 1990′s memory storage was still expensive.
With encoding techniques, the size of music files could be reduced significantly, without sacrificing too much quality: MP3 became the standard for compressed music. Apple jumped on the bandwagon, and the iPod become on of the biggest hits of all time.
At the same time, storage became less and less expensive. You can now buy a terabyte of storage for a few tens of euros. This allows for keeping music on a storage device without sacrificing any quality. Lossless encoding techniques, such as FLAC or Apple’s ALAC, reduce the original file size by another half without quality loss.
Before you start ‘ripping’ your entire CD collection, think of the following:
- Which audio quality is sufficient for me? Do I need CD quality, or is less (MP3) quality sufficient?
- Do I listen to music mainly from my living room (through your super-duper HiFi set), or am I mainly going to listen through an MP3 player?
- Do I foresee that I may want to have all my music in perfect quality in the future?
The more you aim for high quality (now or in the future), the better it would be to go for lossless encoding straight away. Remember, it is always possible to ‘downconvert’ high quality audio to lower quality, but never the other way around!
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