I have been working to create a music server for my local network.  The final goal will be to have a small head-end at my hi-fi where I can play from my music collection at CD quality without keeping my substantial CD collection in my living room.  A bonus to this system is being able to access my entire collection from anywhere I am able to attach to my network.

There are several considerations in building this system and I’d like to talk a bit about my encoding decisions and some solutions I have come across.

First let’s talk about wave files (.wav) because they are basically CD (.cda) equivalents, they are lossless, and they are universally supported.

Drive space is really cheap now.  I can fit my CD collection (more than 600 albums/sets, so maybe 800 actual discs) on a half terabyte drive (500GB), probably.  I’ve encoded a couple hundred discs so far and I’m looking at 131.2GB.

I ran into a bit of a snag in getting my encoding set up on my Ubuntu system.  By default Sound Juicer will try to encode waves at a voice oriented bit rate (22050/mono) while for encoding CD’s you’ll need to set up a profile for a music oriented bit rate (44100/stereo).

How?

I created another profile in Sound Juicer:

• Open Sound Juicer: Applications —> Sound & Video —> Audio CD Extractor
• Open the preferences: Edit —> Preferences
• Click the “Edit Profiles…” button
• Click the “New” button [name it whatever you’d like—I used “MusicWaves”]
• Then the “Create” button to close that dialog
• Select your newly created profile in the “Profiles:” list and click the “Edit” button.
• For “GStreamer pipeline:” you will enter “audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! wavenc name=enc“
• Under “File extension:” use “wav“.
• Check the “Active?” box or you won’t be able to select it from the drop-down in Sound Juicer.
• Close that and get to work.

Using this newly created profile (by selecting it in the “Output Format:” drop-down) I was able to create satisfactory waves from from a CD.

If this doesn’t work for you, ask yourself “why did I copy and paste the quotation marks?”

(For the whole story on my encoding waves adventure, see this helpful conversation at the Ubuntu forums.)

So you can now create musical waves in Ubuntu.  How great is that?  Everything will play a wave file and they have the best sound quality.  There is a bit of a problem with running waves.  I don’t mean the size.  They are not compressed and so they take up the same storage space as the CD (700MB or less, depending on the album).  Sure.  That’s true, but you can put together a mirrored TB of storage for a couple hundred dollars.  That’s a lot less than you’d pay for shelves to hold all those CD’s.  The size of the wave files is not a problem today.

But you can’t tag waves using the traditional methods.  Wave files don’t support ID3v2 tags which is what your other formats use (mp3, aac, flac, ogg, wmv, &c).  That’s a bit of a drag.  There is a solution to adding album and artist information to your waves.  You can edit the RIFF headers to add that information.  I’ve heard of Windows software which will do it and there is probably Mac and Linux software too.  It’s a bit of a hack and not really what I want to spend my time doing; the 3000 songs I’ve encoded thus far as waves would each need to be edited—not fun.

What’s a poor boy to do?

I read here about a test to confirm that flac files are truly lossless.  I have now done a listening comparison on my studio equipment (read about my pre-amp/receiver here).  I have concluded that flac files are sonically indistinguishable from wave files.  I’ll be starting my collection ripping over—again.  Fourth time’s a charm, right?

Flac supports ID3v2 tagging.  It is supported by almost everything out there—Apple and Microsoft have their own proprietary formats and shun the flac.  There remains the problem of my iPod.  I can either convert playlists (for the pod) to waves and sync this smaller segment of my collection.  That’s one possibility.  Another is to flash my iPod and run Rockbox instead.

What are the limitations of flac?

Well, there really aren’t any.  They provide the same sonic output as waves so there is no loss in audio quality (I have electrostats—I would know).  There are three important detractions: Windows Media Player, iTunes, and iPods.  I will address these in order.  Windows Media Player isn’t interesting to me.  Never has been.  I use iTunes on my Windows machines typically.  For simple playing I often use Classic Media Player or VLC, but they don’t support library control.  However, all of my music listening machines are Ubuntu machines.  My studio machine (Vista) isn’t here for listening to music—it’s for creating it.

I did find this article which purports to give flac support to iTunes (on the Mac).  I can’t tell if this transcodes the flacs into something else (heaven forbid mp3’s) or if it really gives iTunes the codecs to support flac.  If it transcodes then it’s useless.  If it adds the necessary codecs then I would consider it.  I may try this and post again.

As to my music iPod, on which I currently run waves, as I said I have two options.  First, I have the wave files for my iPod on my Mac laptop.  I can continue using this system of organization, transcoding from flac to wave (or CD to wave if appropriate) whenever I want to add something new to my iPod via my laptop.  Second, I can replace my iPod’s firmware with Rockbox and thereby give it flac support (and ogg support as it happens).

(You can find Rockbox here.)

Of course, as far as my Ubuntu system is concerned it loves flac files.  Both Amarok and Rhythmbox can handle playback and they both use SoundJuicer (mentioned above) for their ripping (though I just open SoundJuicer directly as per above).

That being said, I have a shit-load of flacs to encode, so if you’ll please excuse me…