SHN or Shorten is a lossless file format that pre-dates FLAC, but is not as flexible as FLAC and has been replaced by FLAC in recent years.) (On rare occasion one might see reference to SHN files as well. I have conducted checksum tests with Apple's lossless codec and they routinely fail whereas I have had no problems with FLAC. Apple has their own proprietary lossless audio compression format, but I prefer FLAC. Although FLAC is the standard in lossless audio compression, Apple's iTunes does not support it. So a 30 minute CD would be around 300MB in WAV format and circa 150MB in FLAC. Depending on the original WAV files, the FLACs of the same files will use 40-60% of the original drive space. When encoding a WAV file to FLAC the same minute of music will take up anywhere from 4.5MB-6MB.
However, Mac has no problem handling WAV and since it is the standard and works across platforms I use WAV as my default raw audio format.įLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. The complement of WAV on the Mac system is called AIFF. One minute of music in WAV format takes up about 10MB.
WAV is the format that you end up with when you rip a CD to your hard drive. To keep things simple I'll deal with 3 different file formats: WAV, FLAC, and MP3. It is probably worthwhile to say something about file formats at this juncture to ensure that there is no confusion for those who are new to the world of digital media. Fortunately, for myself, I find this entire process cathartic, and, as you will probably see, I am OCD enough that I enjoy the attention to detail it sometimes requires. This process can be very time consuming as well. This means you will need a sizable hard drive (or perhaps several). Grateful Dead, Phish, etc.) your music library might be very large. If you have a lot of CDs or if you do a lot of legal music trading (i.e. Of course for every benefit there are some drawbacks. One of the primary reasons that I do it, is with the pace of change in terms of digital music formats and technology dealing with the consumption of audio media, archiving your music in FLAC enables me to easily keep pace with these changes with little effort. Transcoding, which I will cover below, is much easier and convenient once you already have your files properly archives. Having a CD quality file on a hard drive allows users to do many things quickly with their music without having to continuously re-rip it. There is a lot of information here and it could probably be broken down into several posts, but that can be harder to keep track of and I think it's better to have everything in one place.įirst off, why would one create a lossless audio archive? One reason is convenience. This post will try to address those questions as thoroughly as possible.
Some people may be looking for information on how to archive their CDs or wondering why one would even be interested in doing so.