I’ve recently tidied up my music collection and got the tags right and started re-ripping my real-world CDs to FLAC. I like FLAC because it’s an open format and it’s lossless (meaning it retains the same full audio quality of the CD in a slightly compressed format) but it’s a touch on the chunky side.

For portability I have my Sansa Fuze that serves me extremely well but I’ll run out of space sharpish with FLAC files so Ogg, another open audio format, comes into play. Ogg is lossy (meaning audio data is cropped to significantly shrink the files but in way human ears don’t notice too much) so I can fit oodles of it on my Fuze. Problem is the faff of converting the FLAC albums to Ogg then copy them over. It’s a little laborious.

I started to hunt around for some tools that might do the trick. First stop: Songbird. Sadly no file conversion options on the go here. Next up DB Poweramp, a Windows audio ripping and conversion package. No luck here either as I have to convert to Ogg then create the destination folder on the Fuze (repeat for each album… ZZzzz….). Media Monkey has the facility but in the free version.. argh!

With great surprise my salvation comes in the form of an audio player / library that I shunned years ago: Winamp.

Winamp on a BIG monitor works well but gets very cramped very quickly on medium to small screens. That aside it does support copying to portable devices while trans-coding to the format of your choice all within the free version. The level of configuration you can dive into for your portable device is impressive. Permitted formats, by file extension, can be specified with anything that doesn’t match being converted automatically to the format of your choice.

Converting to Ogg isn’t supported out of the box however a happy Winamp plugin adds this and you’re good to go! I’d go into more details but hardly anyone actually reads SpaceCookies at the moment so leave a comment if you’re interested to know more.

Yes yes I know things like iTunes are much simpler and easier to use but if, like me, you’re one of the minority that demand full control over the quality of their music and aren’t scared off by a little tinkering it’s a great solution.

The dawn of CD was greeted with a volley ‘oh look how small it is and harder to break’ along side ‘aaaaah it sounds rubbish’. Granted it didn’t help that mastering audio to CD was an art that took a long while to mature so CDs had poorer sound quality due to the content rather than the media. In my humble opinion a well mastered CD on average sound kit sounds better than a Vinyl – but it’s still a digital representation rather than vinyl’s physical capturing of sound which in the high-end of things should always sound better.

Times move on.. vinyl wanes in popularity as CD players become cheaper and more portable, CDs themselves become cheaper it gets it’s feet solidly under the carpet. Now digital downloads are nuzzling their mitts in too, now, I’m seeing some similarities to the CD vs vinyl argument.

Digital downloads are, by nature, again smaller physically (i.e. intangible) and harder to break (you can’t snap an MP3, only break the drive it’s on – but that’s ok, you can download it again) but also by the same token there is a quality trade-off. MP3 / WMA / AAC / whatever all are ‘lossy’ audio formats which means to get the file size down elements of the audio data is removed. The level of audio data removed impacts the quality of the sound. MP3, being one of the oldest lossy formats, suffers the most with quality degradation. I’ve played with legitimate MP3 downloading but always feel it’s lacking something so I’m returning to CDs for the most part.

With a CD I get the full audio quality which I can then convert into the lossy audio format of my choosing, rather than the music’s retailer’s, at the quality I desire while still retaining the full quality audio for home enjoyment. Perhaps most importantly though I’ve grown up with CD and feel at home with it, much like the generation or two before me hold vinyl in such high esteem.

Perhaps the time will come when downloading full-quality, or loss-less, versions of music will become commonplace but until then I strike a balance: listening via Spotify premium when something is new then bide my time to snare the CD once the price drops.

As ever thoughts and comments are open

First up: Rotersand: Random Is Resistance.  Hailing from Germany this chunk of EBM (Electronic Body Music) has a great beat, heavy bass, fantastic synth melodies and good lead male vocals.  If you liked the more melodic Trance music of old it’s well worth a listen.  Not as heavy and indiscriminately noisy-for-the-sake-of-noise as some EBM so… I like it ^_^

Hadouken: For The Masses makes the second highlight for today.  Rule of thumb: If you like The Prodigy you’ll like this.  A kind of rave – guitars – rock  mash up.  Powerful, pacey, GREAT driving music (pay attention to your speedo if you do listen while driving).  Full of adrenalin.

Last up for today is Does It Offend You Yeah?: You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into.  Spotify recommended this to me after listening to Hadouken but it’s far more varied than their brand of electro-rave.  While still fundamentally electronic there is a greater use of real-world instruments and vocals.  For example, We Are Rockstars is messy dirty electronica in contrast to Dawn Of The Dead being more of a radio-friendly song. Varied and nice anyway, bit calmer than the above two albums in places so can be a good change of pace.

Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions of your own? Let me know