Flac!

For the past 4 or 5 years, every time I’ve bought a CD, the first thing I’ve done is put it in my computer and make MP3s from it.

At first it was just for convenience -- double-clicking on a folder to play an album is much easier than going through a few hundred CD cases, finding the one you want, taking it out, putting it in a CD player, etc.  Not to mention that you can tell a computer to do cool things like "play a random album" that you can’t really tell a stack of physical CDs to do.

Once I created my musicbox to play MP3s in my car, that was another reason to have all my music in MP3 format.  No more fumbling with CD wallets looking for something to listen to while driving, and no more only having 40 or 80 albums with you at any given time, never having the one you want to listen to.

For about 2 years now, I’ve also been keeping the WAV files (uncompressed CD tracks) on my computer, instead of deleting them after creating the MP3s from them.  Since WAV is uncompressed, each song is about 40MB compared to about 4MB per MP3, so it takes up tons of space on my hard drive.  But I realized that my huge CD collection would be lost forever in the event of a fire or theft, so I wanted to have them backed up this way.

Now I have about 200 albums (about half my collection) taking up about 71GB on my hard drive.  And my hard drive is filling up.  Last night, Andy pointed out that tools like Flac, which do lossless compression of WAV files, can compress the files to about 70% of their original size.  I had heard of such lossless WAV compressors in the past, but never considered 30% to be impressive enough savings to make it worthwhile.  But now, with my hard drive filling up, and the realization that I have 71GB of WAV files, having 30%*71GB=21GB of free space sounds amazing.

So I’m happily flac-ing all my WAVs as we speak.  And thankfully on Linux this is accomplished with just one simple command:

find /music/cds/ -type f -iname ’*.wav’ -exec flac --best --replay-gain --delete-input-file "{}" \;

When you consider that a nice 250GB hard drive can be had for only $136 nowadays, and that 1GB holds 3 albums in flac format, and that most computer audio players can play flac files directly... having your entire CD collection on the computer is more economical and sensible than ever.