Does anybody here encode their music collection using lossless audio encoders like FLAC?

Ever since becoming a member of Oink's Pink Palace many years ago, I've become an avid fan of FLAC. Oink's Pink Palace shut down a long time ago now, but without that site, I don't think I'd be encoding all of my music to FLAC format now. I'd probably still be listening to crappy low-bitrate MP3's....

It's really nice to have 1:1 copies of all of the CDs in your audio collection on your computer.

These days with the massive size of hard-drives, it is justifiable to have all your music be in FLAC and other lossless formats. The size of FLAC files is much larger the size of MP3s and other lossy encoded audio files, but the audio quality is untouched.

Every time I rip a CD now, I use Exact Audio Copy with FLAC and use settings which entail me to make 1:1 copies of my CDs with the CD gaps intact, proper read-offset, I make sure that the songs' CRCs match and produce a cuesheet which allows me to burn a 1:1 copy of the CD if I ever wish to write a copy in the future.

I listen to all of my music using Foobar2000, which is, in my opinion, the greatest software music player ever. It is light-weight, has the ability to decode most major audio formats 'right out of the box' and the plug-ins for it are infinite.

I tend to listen to most of my music with cheap, low-end headphones or (gasp!) old Logitech speakers, which hiss and spit even when not connected to an audio source. If I had a nicer audio set-up, I would probably be more inclined to download higher bitrate and lossless audio. However, for now, it doesn't matter too much to me which format the audio is in.

Indeed, I've fallen in love with FLAC also. Not that I claim to be able to discern a well ripped mp3-file from a FLAC-file, but FLAC is way better for archiving purposes. With FLAC you'll always have a CD quality copy of the album even if the disc gets mangled. With the rapid increase in hard drive capacity storage space is becoming less of an issue, so I try to get all my music in FLAC or other lossless formats.

On Windows foobar2000 is a great player, but I still miss Amarok from linux :)

I really miss oink. I had finally gotten an invite there, and within a month oink was taken down. Not cool. But I was also introduced to FLAC thanks to oink. I do have a few FLAC albums, mostly my favorites, but I just can't justify taking up that much space for that increase in quality. Most of my favorite music has terrible production anyway, haha.

But still, you can't go wrong with a surround sound FLAC DVD-rip of Dark Side of the Moon. 1.6 gigs of pure amazingness.

I try to avoid lower quality rips and generally aim for 320kps CBR albums, but I'm not too picky. I'll sometimes search for FLAC rips of bands I reeeeeaaally like though.

I don't bother with FLAC because all the files are bloody enormous - and that may not be a problem for my hard drive, but - my internet connection is woeful. And that is a problem.

If I had a shit connection, I'd stick to V0 MP3 rips like what I used to listen to.

I don't really, care for flac. I'm all for simplifying my life, flac just creates too much work for me. Plus MP3's are a must for Ipod's/Zune ect. Other then that I'm not too worried about the quality in general, heck the same goes for video, and photos. As long as it's not horrible...

I listen to music in any format, including atrac 3 plus, it's good to save space in my cds.

I've recently become a fan of Flac.
It's hard for me to tell the difference between Flac and 320 kbps MP3s for most music. But for music I really like, I would much rather have the Flac files than the 192 kbps MP3 files I often come across.
I tried out that EAC program to rip my CDs, but it doesn't seem to work on my computer for some reason. I don't know what other program I should use instead... I like the idea of a cue sheet feature.

I usually encode everything to 320 mp3's. Sounds quality isn't too big of a deal for me. As long as the audio is loud enough, then I'm content.

I can maybe help you out with EAC; I know the app well, and can show you a guide to rip/burn FLAC files.

The only worthy alternative to EAC that I know of is XLD for Mac.

I used to have about 200 lossless albums then I did a clean install and deleted everything. It would take too long to build that collection again so I download 320 kbps MP3's now.

320 CBR MP3s are a waste of space since quiet, non-complex parts of songs are encoded the same as complex parts, which results in wasted bits. With V0 MP3, or VBR in general, you use lots of bits where needed (at complex/loud parts of songs), and few where it's not needed (at non-complex/quiet parts of songs).

If you want near CD-quality lossy audio, V0 MP3 is the way to go - it'll save you space and give you as good of sound as 320 KBPS MP3s.

If you download 320 KBPS MP3s, you should consider switching to lossless audio. With lossless you don't lose any bits at all, and can burn 1:1 backups of the albums you download (if they have proper cue-sheets included with them).

I used to download/encode V0 MP3s, but switched to FLAC and other lossless encoders when I got a bigger HDD. There's no point in compromising the sound-quality of audio now that HDDs are so large, but if I was a little less anal, I'd stick to V0 MP3.

Hmmm, I suppose you are right. It would lighten the load on my small HDD. Most of my songs tend to eat up at least 6MB of space. Take that number times like 3000 (exaggeration). Thanks for the suggestion.

The difference between FLAC and (atleast) 320kbps mp3 isn't really that noticeable at all to the human ear. That is unless you're in a completely silent room surrounded by a hi-def sound system. And it's still a pretty little noticeable difference.

It isn't much different to the human ear, but if you "do" lossy audio, ripping/downloading 320 kbps MP3s is a waste of space. It's generally regarded as being "noobish" to encode at this level. V0 or V2 encodes will give you the same sound quality (if not superior), and you'll end up with a much smaller output size - it's a win/win situation. The "scene" (torrent groups who release high-quality stuff on torrent sites) always encode at V2 or V0 - it's standard. Most people who upload files to torrent sites that specialize in audio encode their stuff with this setting. Users who upload 320 kbps MP3s often get bitched at, but they're generally "noobs" to the private torrent scene, so someone usually will leave them a comment kindly asking them to make their future rips in V0/V2 MP3 format.

FLAC, opposed to MP3, makes a great audio archiver. It allows you to do whatever you wish to do with the output files. You can convert your FLACs to lossy formats of any bitrate (MP3, etc.) without worrying about your files suffering more than a single instant of generation loss. Generation loss is the reason why so many MP3s you download on P2P apps have awful sound quality - they've been transcoded from one lossy source to another so many times that their audio quality has gone down the drain. High-bitrate MP3s may sound alright, but they don't work good for achival purposes - you can't possibly encode to another format without suffering further loss of sound quality, so they must stay the same bitrate forever.

FLAC is flexible; it's one reason why it's great.

If I wasn't anal, I'd be content with listening to nothing but V0/V2 MP3s like I used to, but I've long known that 320 kbps MP3s are the enemy, so I've stayed away from them for a very long time now (eight years?).

i download all my songs in 320 kbs but sometimes if the song isn't satisfactory quality even in 320 i get the flac file. i have only about 4 or 5 songs in flac.

Okay I got EAC working. It was apparently conflicting with some of my Adobe software.
Since my last post, I have gotten a ton of albums in Flac and am starting to see what all the "fuss" is about.
I have to disagree about it being impossible to tell the difference between high quality MP3 files and Flac. I have come to realize that certain songs or albums have a very noticeable loss of quality on MP3 of any sort. It's mainly noticeable in the sound of cymbals and certain types of sparse instrumentation, such as acoustic guitar. I've also noticed a difference in music with a lot of very low bass or intricate treble sounds. I have some pretty nice speakers and good ears though.
I don't have any accounts to private Bittorrent trackers or anything, so it's been tough tracking some stuff down. But I have managed to find a lot of what I want. One slightly annoying thing I've frequently come across is vinyl rips.
I mean, I can see some advantage to that, as the format allows for the Flac files to be ripped at a higher sampling rate than CD allows. (making a huge set of files that will only fit on a DVD-R) But I am wary nonetheless. I don't want to download what is supposed to be a flawless rip of an album and hear crackling, or listen to something where the ripper of the vinyl had the speed/pitch of their player not set correctly.
I guess the only time it would be obviously useful would be when the music was never released on CD, or the later mastering of the CD was somehow much worse than the original vinyl.
I guess I will quit rambling.

I know I shouldn't double post but this thread is interesting to me.

Since I last posted, I've converted my whole music library to Flac, other than the few things I could only find in MP3 format.

Also, to make sure it wasn't all a sort of placebo effect, I did some blind ABX tests (there is a plug-in for Foobar2000 that does this, as well as other programs). I was able to tell the difference between Flac and a V0 rip of the same song, but it was quite a bit harder than I imagined. The whole "golden ears" snobbery that some audiophiles exude probably turns a lot of people off of the whole lossless audio thing. And in reality, a lot of these snobbish people couldn't pass a Flac/MP3 ABX test, which is one of the only objective ways of measuring this stuff. But I am getting off subject.

Being someone who rarely goes out, having all my music in Flac isn't really impractical. Even if you wanted to use an MP3 player, there are players that support Flac or other lossless formats, or are at least able to after you install different firmware for the device.

I don't have much memory on my computer, so I could definitely not use something like that that takes up so much space.