One Big Project Finished

Today is a monumental day for me in many ways. Well, actually only one way. I finally finished recording and archiving all of my vinyl records. The final count is 1687 tracks which is about 100MB of .wav files. I guess it’s about 560 albums/EPs. Most of it is house from late nineties to 2001, along with a good collection (IMO) of techno. I have a smattering of atmospheric dnb and downtemp for good measure.

I think I started this project in 2002. I distinctly recall doing it at my last apartment before we moved to the house in Feb 2003. I used to wish that I was rich so that I could hire a summer student to do all of the recording for me. It was pretty good listening to all the tracks again though because a lot of it had slipped my memory for several years. As well, I came across some kick-ass b-sides that I previously had not noticed their brilliance.

There’s still some work to do on the files. I want to convert them all to FLAC format. The main reason for this is that .wav files don’t really support tagging, whereas FLAC does. This means each track can get tagged by label, genre, artist, etc. FLAC is a lossless compression format, similar to how winzip works. For example, with winzip you compress and decompress the file without any loss in data. On the other hand, mp3 is a lossy compression format. When you compress audio with mp3 some of the information is lost in order to shrink the file size down. The audio loses some of its dynamic range and can sound a bit digitized. FLAC can’t compress as much as mp3 but the sound quality does not change. In fact, you can re-convert FLAC back to .wav and it will be exactly like the original (the same as how winzip works). Many audio programs play FLAC. However I’m not sure iPod will playback FLAC files. I have to check on this. For a good comparison of different lossless compression methods, check out this page from Hydrogenaudio.