Anyone who’s interested in music by definition has a huge collection of CD’s, and when I started university I had to think of a better solution than lugging my entire collection around with me. Unbeknownst to me, when I first did it my solution was to archive my music onto my computer in .flac (free lossless audio codec) format, luck points to me! There’re many ways of doing this, some of which are better than others… here’s how:

Everyone in the world (well at least in the parts of it which I’m interested in) have heard of MP3’s, but not everyone in the world knows that these files are ‘lossy‘. This basically means when you rip your CD to the computer it removes some data that it deems inaudible (as well as some other fancy jiggerypokery to optimise the file size). The thing is, that the loss of information does have quite a noticeable impact on the quality, which is no problem at all when you’re listening to some music on the bus – but say you scratch your CD, it’s not going to sound as good through your Hi-Fi as the CD did. Enter [Stage Right]: (Wow I’ve written less than 5 articles and I’m already repeating myself, this doesn’t bode well!) the flac file which has the advantage of not losing all the nice detail from your music files.

(more…)