FLAC and 1TB

[Blazer]

My FLAC (level 5) collection consists of:

9817 tracks
777 albums
1064 artists
30 genres
total playing time of 18,075 hours

This music currently uses only 214 GB on my hard drive.

[gharris999]

If I were you I would not play around with the compression level because the gain is not much and your server/SBT will have more work to do. So I would just stick to level 5. And yes, don't worry 1TB will be enough!.
juzi

I'm surprised by this. I thought there was just a slight CPU utilization difference between decoding flac level 8 and level 5. Am I wrong about this?

[Phil Leigh]

I'm surprised by this. I thought there was just a slight CPU utilization difference between decoding flac level 8 and level 5. Am I wrong about this?

Level 8 uses less CPU than 5 - on a PC this doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but on SB hardware (TP, Touch etc) this difference CAN be enough to cause intermittant problems with hi-rez file playback.

Best bet is to stick with level 5 (actually I use level 0 these days; disk space is Sooooo cheap :-)

[Phil Leigh]

I'm surprised by this. I thought there was just a slight CPU utilization difference between decoding flac level 8 and level 5. Am I wrong about this?

Level 8 uses more CPU than 5 - on a PC this doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but on SB hardware (TP, Touch etc) this difference CAN be enough to cause intermittant problems with hi-rez file playback (assuming you are streaming FLAC native, not as PCM).

Best bet is to stick with level 5 (actually I use level 0 these days; disk space is Sooooo cheap :-)

[bluestang]

Level 8 uses more CPU than 5 - on a PC this doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but on SB hardware (TP, Touch etc) this difference CAN be enough to cause intermittant problems with hi-rez file playback (assuming you are streaming FLAC native, not as PCM).

Best bet is to stick with level 5 (actually I use level 0 these days; disk space is Sooooo cheap :-)

Just to make sure I have this right (since I'm in the beginning stages of ripping my CD collection)...if I'm letting the Server do the FLAC decoding and streaming PCM, it doesn't matter right? But if I'm streaming FLAC and letting the Touch decode or running off the USB Drive, then stay @ level 5 or better yet 0?

[Phil Leigh]

Just to make sure I have this right (since I'm in the beginning stages of ripping my CD collection)...if I'm letting the Server do the FLAC decoding and streaming PCM, it doesn't matter right? But if I'm streaming FLAC and letting the Touch decode or running off the USB Drive, then stay @ level 5 or better yet 0?

Yes - although personally I find no audio benefit in streaming PCM instead of FLAC. Believe me, I have tried...

[gharris999]

Level 8 uses more CPU than 5 - on a PC this doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but on SB hardware (TP, Touch etc) this difference CAN be enough to cause intermittant problems with hi-rez file playback (assuming you are streaming FLAC native, not as PCM).

Best bet is to stick with level 5 (actually I use level 0 these days; disk space is Sooooo cheap :-)

With regular 'ol 16b 44.1khz redbook, I've never known flac -8 to be a problem with my Transporter, SB3, SBBoom, SBRadio or SBTouch. Because I use flacs with embedded cuesheets, SBS 7.5x and earlier always streamed flac -0 to the players anyway because of transcoding. My SBReceiver seemed to have trouble with even that...but the SBR always struck me as the slow-learner in the class.

Having been using SBS 7.6 beta since shortly after the branch was created (i.e. for more than a year), the flac -8 has been streaming nativly to the players and (with the exception of the SBR) I've never noticed any problems.

But I'm not really disagreeing with Phil here. Flac -0 or flac -5 will provide you with a bit of insurance. You'll spend much less time (and money too, if time == money) moving your audio library to a larger hard disc than you would re-flacing the collection to down-compress from 8 to 5.

[Phil Leigh]

With regular 'ol 16b 44.1khz redbook, I've never known flac -8 to be a problem with my Transporter, SB3, SBBoom, SBRadio or SBTouch. Because I use flacs with embedded cuesheets, SBS 7.5x and earlier always streamed flac -0 to the players anyway because of transcoding. My SBReceiver seemed to have trouble with even that...but the SBR always struck me as the slow-learner in the class.

Having been using SBS 7.6 beta since shortly after the branch was created (i.e. for more than a year), the flac -8 has been streaming nativly to the players and (with the exception of the SBR) I've never noticed any problems.

But I'm not really disagreeing with Phil here. Flac -0 or flac -5 will provide you with a bit of insurance. You'll spend much less time (and money too, if time == money) moving your audio library to a larger hard disc than you would re-flacing the collection to down-compress from 8 to 5.

As I said, the problem only affects some hi-res (e.g 24/96)... sometimes...