Should I upgrade to Squeezecenter 7.1 or not?

[CatBus]

I've never really understood just what tags can do for someone or how they make a difference...I have mine orgainzed under a main Music folder and in subfolders by artist/album/tracks. They show up on the Squeezebox display just the same and I don't have any problem finding any music I want to listen to.

The main advantage under this scenario (i.e. you're already very comfortable with file browsing) is that tags allow characters that are illegal under many filesystems, such as question marks, etc. Also, being able to navigate to the same album via two paths (via genre OR artist) can sometimes be helpful, and this is pretty much the only way to handle multiple genres gracefully. I actually like it because it allows me to sort by last name WITHOUT having to make the display name show lastname, first.

[maggior]

I chose wav for my archive format because I don't care about storage space as I have a lot and can add as much more when I need it. Storage is not expensive. And with wav files, I can convert them to any format I want or need at the time.

Ok, the tags thing. I've never really understood the tags issue. What is a tag and what does it do for me? With my Squeezebox setup I have now, I don't see any difference with the wav files or the flac files. They both look and play the same.

A significant reason to use FLAC over wav has nothing to do with tags, but with data integrity. FLAC has a built in checksum to validate the integrity of the data within. wav has no such thing.

Why would you care? Well suppose one day you find that your memory has gotten flakey and that it is affecting the integrity of the data on your disc. How will you validate all of your wav files? Unless you've archived md5s from when you ripped them, you won't be able to. With FLAC, you can run a utility to scan your entire music collection and identify any files that have become corrupted.

This may sound like an unlikely scenario, but it isn't to me - I've experienced this. It was not fun, but thankfully I was able to easily and quickly ID what files had problems and rerip only them. Otherwise, my entire music library would have been suspect.

Given the tagging, compression, and data integrity checks, FLAC is just a more robust format than WAV in general.

[MrSinatra]

thats very cool.

what compression ratio do you get with flac? i love that a 256 mp3 will give me a 7 to 1 ratio, i can't tell the difference.

still, i've been thinking about re-encoding some of my fave albums, just a select few, as flac. do i need a flac exe for eac like i need lame.exe? will i also need a flac dll the way i use a lame dll?

[maggior]

thats very cool.

what compression ratio do you get with flac? i love that a 256 mp3 will give me a 7 to 1 ratio, i can't tell the difference.

still, i've been thinking about re-encoding some of my fave albums, just a select few, as flac. do i need a flac exe for eac like i need lame.exe? will i also need a flac dll the way i use a lame dll?

The current releases of EAC have the FLAC encoder in the package. It also has the configuration for the FLAC encoder already set up. I was never able to get it to work in older releases.

You just hit <shift>F5 and you will have tagged FLAC as output. You can even configure the number of concurrent encoding processes. I stick with one on my machine even though it is hyperthreading. Perhaps a dual core machine would handle it better.

I only use FLAC for my archive - my library that I listen to is mp3 so I can use it with my iPod. I encode at 192K and I really can't tell the difference. I've never sat down to do a scientific A/B test because I'm afraid I will hear a difference :-). But if I did, I'm sure it would be subtle.

The compression ratio I get is on average probably around 40% - not even 2:1. But is still beats archiving uncompressed WAV data.