Re: A PC for music management and storage.
- From: Listener <resident@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 May 2007 11:12:31 -0700
On May 15, 4:47 pm, Derrick Fawsitt <blackh...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Can I ask you to help me in building or even buying such a PC with a
spectacular spec that would fulfil the above criteria.
You don't need a PC with "spectacular specs" to play audio. However,
if you are doing other things on your PC while you are playing music,
those activities can interfere. That can cause glitches such as pops,
clicks and short pauses. An aggressive anti-virus program such as
Norton Anti-Virus is the worst offender. A dual-core processor chip
helps make playing audio more predictable.
You should avoid the fastest processors and the fastest graphics cards
if your PC will be in your listening room. You will want to listen to
music niot the fans in your PC. An PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo 4300,
6300 or 6400 chip or an AMD X2 3800 or 4200 will be fine for the
processor speed. Something with integrated motherboard graphics
rather than a separate graphics card is fine. Get 2 GB of Ram and one
or more large hard disks. Avoid 1 TB external hard drives - they have
loud fans. Single drive Seagate external; drives work well for me.
Using Windows gives you wide choice in software. If you get a Mac and
want Mac OSX based s/w, your choices will be3 very limited in
comparison.
---
Getting good hardware matters but getting the right software is far
mor eimportant.
If you music library is sizeable, you will get a lot of value from
software that allows you to classify your CDs by Composer as well as
Album and Artist and retrieve music by a series of choices of those
"Tags". I most often select a Compioser, then a Work Name and then an
Artist. Most music player software is not designed with classical
music in mind. iTunes is a bit better but not right. I found that
J.River Media Center 12 was far and away the best for a large
collection of classical music.
Some notes on the process:
1. Picking tools and getting skills - experiment on a fraction of your
library to see what tools work for you and how to use them. You may
be able to change tools later but it is much better to do your
homework before you start.
2. Pick a format for the music files on your computer. The big choice
is whether to use a lossless or lossy format. A lossless format
stores the content of your CDs so that it can be de-compressed to the
original stream of bits. A lossy format simplifies the content to
reduce the size of your music files. A lossless format requires about
1/2 the space of the original bit-stream on your CD. A lossy format
may be smaller by a factor of 2 to 5 than the lossless format for the
same CD. There are several lossy format you might consider: MP3 -
widely supported by almost every music player program or portable
player. AAC (or mp4) - Apple's choice for a lossy fomat with some
support by other software. WMA - Microsoft's choice for a lossy
format. Not as widely supported by other software.
For a lossless format, Flac is widely supported but not by iTunes.
ALAC is Apple's lossless format with some support from other play
software. Microsoft's WMA Lossless format is not widely supported.
I ripped over 2000 CDs to the lossless Flac format using about 530
Gigabytes of disk space.
3. "Rip" your CDs - Audio CDs are not in the same format as data CD-
Roms and the process of reading audio CDs is not as foolproof. Secure
rippers make extra effort to get the correct bit stream and verify its
correctness. Some secure rippers: EAC which has vocal fans on the
web, Foobar2000 which as a hobbyist music player with ripping support,
J. River Media Center 12, a player with secure ripping and dBpoweramp
which uses some novel techniques. iTunes has an error correction mode
but a number of users have reported that they still get pops and
clicks that iTunes appeared to rip successfully.
4. Tagging your music files - Very few audio CDs have any information
in the data on the disk identifying theie contents. There are several
on-line services for looking up an audio CD and producing Tag info on
Album, Artist and Track Name. They don't produce usable information
for classical music. The Composer name may be crammed into the Album
Tag, the Artist Tag or the Track Name Tag. Sometimes the Composer
name is omitted and sometimes it occupies the Artist Tag and the name
of the actual performer is not present at all. You should expect to
do do a lot of data entry yourself.
Tagging can be done as part of the ripping process or later. Of the
secure rippers I mentioned above, J. River is by far the best in
allowing me to Tag classical music the way I wanted to.
So why tag at all? Why not just store music files in a hierarchy of
folders such as Genre\Composer\Work Name\Artist with file names
indicating movements? If you try it and find it is all you need, Ok.
The heirarchy works for one order of searching but isn't good for
others. It gets clumsy when CDs contain more than one work or works
by several composers. It doesn't work well when your collection
overflows a single hard disk.
I found that being able to search my collection as I wanted to at that
moment provided a new benefit relative to using physical CDs. Ripping
and tagging was a lot of work but the result is well worth it for me.
5. Picking and setting up your music player - You will want a player
that supports "Gapless" playback and allows you to turn off cross-
fading and similar effects. You will want gaps between movements to
be as they were on the CD and when two CD tracks don't have a pause,
you want to hear the music without a spurious pause. On CDs, many
classical works are recorded on multiple tracks. You want your player
to make it easy and foolproof to select a performance of a work and
get all tracks played in the right order. (Experiment at Step 1 if
you can.)
I apologize if this is off the subject or repeats what you already
knew.
Bill
.
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