by VRN » Tue Sep 16, 2008 3:19 am
Hi,
As I see it there are several ways of addressing the problem at hand. One may favour one solution over another depending on whether money, time, storage, network or processor speed is(are) the limited resource(s).
For my part, I have enough disc space to host both the "originals" in FLAC and irreversibly compressed copies thereof (MP3s). What I don't have a lot of is time and processing power. Accordingly, I favour having a "master library" in FLAC and an identical "slave library" in MP3. The "master library", I would use to make changes (additions, deletions, tag amendments, cover art etc.) to my FLAC files. These changes should be automatically reflected in the MP3s and the "slave library" I would use for sync'ing to mobile devices. Now the advantage of having the "slave library" addressing a collection of physical MP3-files from a "cache" or "shadow" rather than the FLACs would be that sync'ing to a new device wouldn't require that all FLACs would have to be converted on-the-fly (again). Accordingly, "first-time" sync'ing would be much faster. There might also be occasions where you quickly need an MP3 copy of some of your songs and don't want to wait for conversion.
Moreover, where the lossless version in FLAC feeds my SONOS players in my living room, kitchen etc; the MP3 version could be streamed to cheaper streaming clients (typically not supporting FLAC) in the bath, garage, basement, toilet etc., i.e. everything available everywhere at any time.
Best regards,
>V<
Hi,
As I see it there are several ways of addressing the problem at hand. One may favour one solution over another depending on whether money, time, storage, network or processor speed is(are) the limited resource(s).
For my part, I have enough disc space to host both the "originals" in FLAC and irreversibly compressed copies thereof (MP3s). What I don't have a lot of is time and processing power. Accordingly, I favour having a "master library" in FLAC and an identical "slave library" in MP3. The "master library", I would use to make changes (additions, deletions, tag amendments, cover art etc.) to my FLAC files. These changes should be automatically reflected in the MP3s and the "slave library" I would use for sync'ing to mobile devices. Now the advantage of having the "slave library" addressing a collection of physical MP3-files from a "cache" or "shadow" rather than the FLACs would be that sync'ing to a new device wouldn't require that all FLACs would have to be converted on-the-fly (again). Accordingly, "first-time" sync'ing would be much faster. There might also be occasions where you quickly need an MP3 copy of some of your songs and don't want to wait for conversion.
Moreover, where the lossless version in FLAC feeds my SONOS players in my living room, kitchen etc; the MP3 version could be streamed to cheaper streaming clients (typically not supporting FLAC) in the bath, garage, basement, toilet etc., i.e. everything available everywhere at any time.
Best regards,
>V<