The Awesome Uselessness Of CDs On Demand

So I was sitting around the house, buying CDs, or at least trying to buy a CD. Thing is, the band in question ("Denial Machine", it's not really important), a small American band, didn't seem to have actually released their album on CD in the UK. Sure, there was a download available, but no sign of the CD in the usual long-tail internet retailers. So before grudgingly accepting a lower-quality download, I tried Amazon in the states, just to see what the import price might be. And in addition to the usual CD and MP3 sources, they offered a "CD on demand" version. You buy, they burn the lossless files to a disc, print artwork, and ship across the Atlantic. Awesome. Except, it's kind of unnecessary. Got me thinking, "why no lossless download?". After all, there are sites out there offering music in nice high-bitrate CD-quality lossless.

The reasons for stores sticking to offering MP3 (or AAC) downloads are probably something like:

1. Offering downloads in a single format reduces customer confusion
2. MP3 is a popular universal format
3. Niche lossless formats typically require more knowledge or specialised software, which means more customer support
4. Most people, with their combination of ears and equipment, struggle to tell the difference between higher bitrate lossy (MP3) and lossless, so MP3 is fine
5. Lossless versions of files take three times as much space to store, a valid consideration for a store with many thousand albums selling in small numbers

The last point is obviously no longer valid when you have to store the lossless masters for your on-demand printing anyway. Got me thinking "what else stops them cutting out printing a CD?".

What about piracy/DRM? Not an issue, the CD is basically DRM-free WAVs, I'm only going to rip to FLAC and stuff the CD on a shelf, and not share the files around because I'm a nice guy. And anyway, the MP3s are DRM-free.

Offering lossless downloads means you have to start explaining the difference between lossy and lossless. You probably have to price accordingly, which means explaining why your "lower quality and no distribution costs" MP3 version currently costs the same as the CD, or pricing the lossless above the CD for delivery convenience. And your nice simple two-format "CD or download" options become confusing. This is a likely motive. Incidentally, Play.com seem to get by just fine offering downloads in both 256kbps and 320kbps.

Lossless files are big. Means long download times. Again, a possible reason. If you're on dial-up.

Thing is, I know the issues with buying lossless music, I'm OK with the higher prices. I'd really rather buy lossless directly than wait a month for Amazon to burn the lossless files to a disc and ship them (at great cost) so I can re-construct them on my hard drive. Of course, I'd probably be denied the ability to buy a download from a US site that has a store in my country anyway.

In the end, I bought the original CD, on import. It'll take a few weeks, but it's better quality and (postage costs aside) as cheap as buying the lossy download over here.

Look, the DIY approach of just getting your music out there and not relying on a record company to distribute it is great, and more or less necessary. And I understand that most people have accepted that lossy downloads are "good enough". Maybe one day I'll forget how things were in the 1990s and do the same.

CDs on demand are still better than lossy downloads, especially if all the nasty rumours about record companies trying to ditch CDs in favour of downloads are true. But please, everyone, consider just selling us music in 1990s/CD quality bitrate.

Converting Lossless Music To Other Formats

Some quick notes on ways to convert your lossless (eg. FLAC) files into other audio formats.

Using Foobar - FLAC To MP3

Note that Foobar doesn't ship with encoders, so you'll have to go download extras to handle the formats you want to use.

1. Get Foobar
2. Launch Foobar
3. Open/drag FLAC files in
4. Select all, right-click and do a "convert", for output format pick MP3 - might want to set up an entry with chosen bitrate, constant/variable preference
5. Pick a folder to dump the converted files into
6. The first time you do this, you might have to tell Foobar where your lame.exe encoder is (see below)
7. Watch the progress bar, go collect your files when done

Options

Foobar lets you set up a number of converter options, so if the defaults aren't enough, do an edit/add new.

My settings for MP3 are
Encoder type: "custom"
Encoder: lame.exe
Extension: mp3
Parameters: -S --noreplaygain -b 192 - %d
Format: lossy
Highest BPS: 24
Encoder name: "MP3 (LAME), 192kbps CBR"
Bitrate: 192
Settings: CBR

Apple Lossless

Foobar doesn't ship with the apple lossless decoding, I had to grab an extra plugin (try the Foobar website for download).

Getting LAME

LAME is the encoder engine that actually converts to MP3. If you don't have the LAME encoder (lame.exe), get latest from Rarewares. Download the zip (it should contain an exe, a DLL, and a bunch of HTML and CSS) and unpack all the files into somewhere like "C:\Program Files\Lame" (just create a new folder).

Ripping CDs For Home Servers And Portable Players

CDs are awesome. They sound great. They have artwork and booklets and occasionally fancy packaging. They can hold up to 100 tracks or 78 minutes. They take up shelf space. They need to be loaded into a machine if you want to play a song off them... er, OK, CDs were awesome, a digital music library of thousands of tracks that can be played as whole albums, single tracks, playlists etc. is more awesome.

Many people have made the switch from CD to a flexible digital library and traded quality for the convenience of inferior formats like MP3. You don't have to. You can have that nice fat bitrate lossless CD quality with all the convenience of a 10000-track CD jukebox. But first you have to rip those CDs...

So you want get that music off CD into digital format. The plan is to only do this once. Ever. So the key question is:

"Do you want it fast or do you want it good?"

If you just want any old quality of rip, use iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. If you have an expensive CD/DVD ROM drive, a shiny new CD and a bit of luck, it'll rip fine. The problem is, something like iTunes will just sprint through a CD regardless, and if it picks up any errors, well you might just hear them when you play it back. CDs aren't perfect and don't have the best built-in error checking, and it takes care or fancy hardware to reproduce them exactly.

If you want this to be the only time you ever rip this CD, ever, consider a slower error-checking rip. CDex is good, DBPowerAmp or acknowleged leader EAC are better. You're looking at 20 minutes a CD, but a good chance of perfect rips. EAC will do a couple of things to get good rips - read and re-read (extremely slowly if necessary) every bit of data on your CD, and then compare that to a crowd-sourced database to determine whether there are any errors on your copy of the CD.

So you have a CD/DVD-ROM drive and a stack of CDs just waiting to be ripped. If you have a laptop (or when you realise some CDs just won't work well on your current drive) you might also want to look at getting an external CD drive or getting that old tower out of storage instead of just relying on that one drive. For major bulk ripping sessions, start with a pile of CDs, set several drives going and burn through your collection.

So basically, you fire up your ripping software, feed it a CD, get it to pick up the tagging information, then start ripping and come back when its done. The best format for filenaming is a "Music\Artist\Album" folder structure, tracks named and numbered "01 - Track Name" for sorting.

If your library software needs a playlist for each album (most don't), make sure you spit out a ".m3u" file at this point.

Some rippers, such as EAC (think DBPowerAmp too) can grab the artwork as part of the tagging process, saving you some work later.