Music is Complicated

If you're a music snob, you know you're going to want to check out The Lossless Audio Blog.

While lossless formats like FLAC, APE, and ATRAC compete to see who gets the smallest filesize or fastest encoding algorithm, I'll be patiently playing around with various tools to try to find my holy grail, The Last Audio Format I'll Ever, Ever Need.

I thought it was APE. Now I'm not so sure.

Here is my dilemma in a nutshell. I own a CD. Technically, I own several. This is neither here nor there. I have a CD, and I want to preserve it like the Magna bloody Carta. So I put the CD into my computer and extract the bits to my hard drive. The information on the disk is safe. I can upload it to a new system. I can put it on a RAID array. As long as I can guarantee the safety of those bits, I will always have a perfect copy of that CD.

If I want to listen to one or more of the songs on my computer, I can do it. If I want to push a song onto my portable player, I can listen to it on the go. I don't mind compressing the original bits into something smaller, but I don't want to have to do so just for archival purposes.

Basically, I need to own a perfect copy of that CD for ever and all time. If I never touch a Windows box again (and let's all cross our fingers for that), I still need to have that music. If I lose my iBook and only have a Linux box to my name, I still need to have that music.

If the Internet explodes and everybody has to switch to new computers that have 14-bit chips and every assembly instruction does something in Pig Latin, I still need to have that music. I cannot trust Microsoft to keep my bits alive because Microsoft has other interests. I cannot trust Apple for the same reason. I cannot trust Red Hat, or Intel, or Winamp.

So how do I extract my bits? Previous attempts involved ripping the CD tracks to WAVs, then compressing them to APEs and when needed compressing them into Oggs. But what should happen if my next machine isn't a Windows box? I can't use the Monkey's Audio application then. There's an unofficial port for Linux and OS X. Would you put your musical faith in an "unofficial port"?

I'm thinking FLACs are the way to go, but FLACs shrink to a larger size than APEs and I haven't found a decent FLAC converter yet. One benefit of lossless formats is that you should, in theory, be able to perfectly convert between them. I have yet to find support of this theory, but I still hold hope.