In case my previous
posts have not made this clear I will say it now: I LOVE MUSIC! I
rarely watch TV but usually have music of some sort playing unless I am listening
to news, a talk show, listening to an audio book, or am somewhere that I cannot
have a player running. If I am playing a video game I will often turn the game
music off and listen to what I choose unless the game has exceptionally good
music with it (there aren't many of those I am aware of) or the game music sets
the mood for game play. Since I bought my first CD in 1989 my collection
has grown to about 900 discs.
Do I need all of this
music? Well... I could get by without it but why should I have to? Portable music players and computers make it
possible to keep large amounts of music readily available in a very small space. A few CD wallets don't take up that much room
(I learned to ditch the jewel cases a long time ago) and I have a USB hard
drive that cost less than $90 that fits in my shirt pocket and would hold seven
complete copies of my library in .flac format (which, if you have ever used it,
you know the files are huge) and still have a little space left over.
Something else you need
to know about me and music. If I am not
home it is rare for me not to have a portable music player close by. The only times I don’t are when I am
somewhere that it is not appropriate to have one.
A couple of years ago my
closest friend convinced me to try out a lossless music player that supported
the afore mentioned .flac format and I fell in love with the sound and jumped
onto the lossless music bandwagon. I finally have about 95% of the CD's
catalogued and ripped into .flac format.
Allow me to digress to
give a plug for my favorite player since I am discussing lossless music.
There are quite a number
of lossless players on the market now that have decent capacity but with the
exception of one brand they are too expensive for most people to even consider. One
exception to this is the Chinese company named FiiO. Their players have a sound quality rivaling
that of the other players that start at about $1,000. I started with their X3 2nd
generation that sold for about $250 but have switched to their most basic current
player: the X1 2nd generation. They have more expensive players with more features but at $100 for a
solid little player that sounds great it can’t be beat. It doesn’t have built in storage and relies
on micro SD cards but it has Bluetooth and has a touch sensitive scroll wheel
that reminds me of the iPod wheel. A
200GB Sandisk card sells for $80 if you have to pay full price.
Now back to our
regularly scheduled blog entry…
The biggest problem with
most current music players is storage space, or lack thereof. Between 2000 and 2010 storage capacity on
portable players was expanding by leaps and bounds. Early iPods and Zune players (just to name a
couple of the really great lines of players that were available) had real,
spinning hard drives in them and had capacities of 10 gigabytes or more. There were versions with flash memory that
had decent capacities but did not come close to the hard drive models. As
far as I know the iPod classic with the largest capacity got to 160 GB and the
Zune topped out at 120 GB.
Step forward to 2017 and
the players with large capacities are mostly gone. The portable music player market has dried up
and most "mp3" players you find have four or eight gigs of storage, have very few features, and support fewer file formats than the older players. Some of the better ones you can find at large
electronic stores like Best Buy might have thirty two gigs. The Zune is
gone. Kaput. iPods other than the small flash players aren't on the
shelves but can be ordered. None of them
have hard drives anymore. I just
checked Apple's site and found that the largest iPod Touch (which is basically
an iPone without cellular capabilities) has 128GB of flash memory storage and costs $400! I
did not check to see if it supports the Apple Lossless music format but imagine
that it does.
Despite the player capacity limitations I have not regretted
diving into lossless music. My FiiO was great and I still couldn’t carry
everything with me but I was used to that.
Even my Zune 80 and iPod Classic 120 that I still use can’t hold all of
my MP3’s. Factor in lossless music and you will get an understanding of my
problem. Like I said earlier.flac files are huge:
nearly five times the size of a “CD quality” MP3. My main digital
music folder has 272 gigabytes of .flac music as of the time I posted this.
I probably have another 20 gigs ripped into a folder that I haven't
catalogued and merged into the main one yet.
My dilemma has just been solved.
The same friend who
convinced me to get my first FiiO and loves music as much as I do (a lot of our
discussions are music related) recently learned that an AAC format music file
encoded at (I think) 200kbps is indistinguishable to the human ear from a
lossless FLAC file and is about 1/5 the size. The research he read spoke
of experts not being able to tell the difference in blind tests.
So where does this leave
me? Scrambling to find a way to convert my lossless files to AAC and
overjoyed at the thought of being able to carry the music I want with me.
I have not found a one step process yet but have developed one
that is not too complex. I decided to help my friend since he doesn't really
have the time to be experimenting with developing a workable process by writing
out the instructions step by step. I guess a bit of OCD kicked in and I
decided write out instructions that are much more detailed for someone who
hasn't had the conversations he and I have.
So for your reading
pleasure (or should that be displeasure?) here is the set of
instructions. No one else has proofread this or used the process at this
point so there are likely to be mistakes I have overlooked. There are
instructions at the bottom on how to contact me and let me know of them.
Converting from
.FLAC to .M4A
The purpose of this is to show the
process I have used to convert my high bit rate music collection down to a
manageable size for a portable player while still maintaining the best possible
sound quality. Anyone converting their music needs to make sure the files they are
working from are at a higher quality than the ones they are converting to. Converting a 128kbps .MP3 to a higher quality
file will not improve the music. The
parts of the sounds eliminated in the compression to .mp3 cannot be recovered
from the file and it will not better any better when converted.
A
few background notes and my reasons for converting:
About two years ago a friend convinced
me to get a lossless music player. He
had purchased a FiiO X3 (second generation) and was absolutely loving the
higher quality sound. After a month or
two of calling him crazy (I still do, but for a different reason: I am nuttier than The Mad Hatter and it takes
someone just as nutty to be able to put up with me) I broke down and ordered
one myself. I have never regretted the
decision. I ripped all of my CD’s into
.flac format and began listening to the clearest, best sounding recorded music
I’ve ever heard. There was only one
problem: .flac files are large. Very large.
For reference, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 128kbps .mp3 (supposed CD
quality) is about 5 ½ megabytes. The
same file in .flac is 34 megabytes (more than six times the size!) Even on a player with capacity of 200 GB it
is not possible to get a large collection like mine on it so I had to choose
which albums to take with me and which to only listen to on my computer.
Recently my friend was doing some
reading and found some interesting research into digital music formats and what
the limits a person with normal hearing can discern. He found that, while it is a lossy format, at
192kbps .AAC file is indistinguishable to the human ear from a .FLAC file. Yes, with very high end equipment I would
imagine that the harmonic vibrations outside of our range of hearing might add
something but I am not concerned about that.
When I have several thousand dollars to spend on a sound system rather
than on a new car or a brain transplant for my ex I might change my mind.
In case you are not familiar with the
particulars of the .M4A format: .M4A is
the Apple .AAC format in a different container.
You convert to it using the .AAC codec but using the .M4A shell is necessary because the .AAC
files are considered to be a RAW format and tagging them properly is next to
impossible and many players (both portable and on a PC) that support .M4A files
will not play .AAC files.
IMPORTANT:, Do not delete your FLAC files when the conversion is complete. The files are archival quality
and if you ever need to convert them to a new format you will need them so you
don’t lose quality. Converting again, is
much, much faster than ripping them from CD again. Move them to an external drive or wherever
they will be out of your way on your system drive but keep them around.
The intro is done. Time to get cracking, or converting, or
whatever!
Programs
used for the process I’ve settled on:
Tag&Rename
fre:ac
Windows
Explorer
Apple
iTunes
That’s it. Nothing more.
I am using a Windows machine to do my converting.
I know Tag&Rename
is only available for Windows so if you are on a Mac or Linux box you will need
to find another tag editing program but as long as the results are what you
desire it doesn’t matter. Tag&Rename
is not freeware but there are powerful freeware editors available. I use it
because I already own a copy, know it well, and am used to it. I have
tried this with Mp3tag (which is free) and it works well.
fre:ac is a powerful, open source
converter. Download the latest snapshot version rather than the core
files. As I understand it the developers
make changes as they see fit and provide a “snapshot” of that but still leave
the core source code available for download.
If you already have a converter you use and are comfortable with keep using it. As long as it lets you set output folders and file name patterns these steps should work with it.
Apple iTunes is not a part of the
conversion process you will use but the AAC encoder in it is necessary. According to the developer fre:ac will use
that encoder. I have not tested which to
install first but I would suggest having the latest version of iTunes installed
and setup BEFORE you install fre:ac just to make sure the fre:ac installer can detect
the encoder.
The process I will line out assumes you
have ample free disk space to keep multiple copies of your music around for as
long as it takes to complete your conversion.
You may need to modify the process a bit if you don’t have enough hard
drive space. I would suggest that as
much of the work as possible be done on internal hard drives. If you will be using a USB drive be prepared
for this process to take much longer since copying large amounts of data is a
frequent part of my method.
I would also suggest that before you start
this process you make a complete backup of your music library. As careful as I have been I have made a
couple of mistakes that would have forced me to re-rip or download a CD again
if I didn’t have a backup from before I started.
FIRST
STEP: Properly tagging your music
Properly tagged music files are
important… No. Properly tagged music files are VITAL for
converting your music and having them placed in the proper folders by the
converter. A good case could be made for
my collection being tagged at an OCD level but at least for this process you
need to have tags for album, track number, and song title correct. Depending on how you listen to your music I
would suggest that you go ahead and get the rest of the fields correct but
whatever you do, do it before converting.
If you don’t, you will wind up with two sets of music with different
tags.
I won’t go into the tagging process more
than this. Use whatever method you
prefer for your tagging. The converter
works from the Id3 tag so the file name before conversion does not matter.
SECOND
STEP: Setting up the folders for the
conversion process
I have set up five separate folders on
the drive I am using for the conversion process. The actual name is not important but it is
vital that you use names that you will not get confused with one another. I would, however, suggest that you keep them
all together in a main folder or at least start them with the same prefix so
they are all together in your directory tree.
Having to hunt for a folder when moving files would make it easy to
accidentally drop files in the wrong location or would at least slow you down.
The folders I used are:
M4A – Backup for the files to be
converted
M4A – Conversion for the files opened by
the converter (I will explain the difference soon)
M4A – Converted for the files after
conversion is completed
M4A – Combined a necessary temporary
folder used for sorting after first conversion step
M4A – Temp the location
where the converter places the files it creates.
Remember the backup folder I suggested
to work from? M4A – Backup is
it. Copy the entire collection to be
converted into this. Don’t worry about
the space it takes having a long term effect on your storage. It will be empty when you are finished.
The M4A – Conversion is used to
place the files the converter will work from.
Since there is some manual sorting with this process I move a portion of
the files from the M4A – Backup folder to this folder and only convert what is
in here.
The M4A – Converted folder is the place
for all of your finished files after they are converted at sorted. The converter is not set to access this
folder and until you put your new collection where you need it you will only be
dropping your files into here.
The M4A – Combined folder is used for
sorting. fre:ac has a limitation on
export locations and will scramble albums with multiple artists if you have it
export by artist name. The exporting
process will be explained shortly and I don’t want to jump too much ahead and
cause confusion. This location and a
step in the process could be unnecessary if you use a different converter that
doesn’t have this limitation.
The M4A – Temp folder is where the
converter needs to place the files it creates.
These files will be moved to the combined directory later.
Continued in next post due to Blogspot limitation on length.
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