I’m one of these stubborn people that still buys all my music on compact discs. I want a nice, archival original to use if I want. The only downside to this tenacity is that I have to go to a store to buy them, or have to buy them by mail. Since I have plenty of music to listen to already, the instant gratification of a digital download isn’t all that necessary.
Years ago I converted all of my CDs to MP3 files so that I could play them on my iPod (and later iPad). As you likely know, MP3s are lossily compressed. They are of lower quality than the original. Sometimes the difference in quality is not particularly noticeable, but at times it is. (As my brother-in-law likes to say, if you have a high noise floor – i.e. you’re in a noisy environment – the lossiness of MP3s is not likely to bother you.)
As hard disks have gotten bigger, and I’ve been able to have more space on my server, the idea of ripping my CDs again into a lossless format grew on me. FLAC is a common, open source alternative – FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Compression. It does exactly what it says it does; it stores audio files in a format that is significantly smaller than the original (about 1/3 the size of a WAV file for most music), but sounds identical. In fact, if you rip a table of contents for your CDs, you can use that plus the FLAC files to burn a precise copy of the CD.
I figured these rips would be great for archival purposes (in case CDs got damaged or lost), but I discovered something fun recently. As part of our A/V system upgrade, I purchased a Yamaha RX-A1000 audio/video receiver. As one of its nice features, it has a network port so you can hook it up to your wired network.
Install some UPnP file serving software (ushare for Linux is free and works well; I’ve installed it right on my server) and this server can play the MP3s off my server. Not only that… it plays FLAC too! (I also tried it with OGG Vorbis – an open source alternative to MP3s – and they work too.) Apparently not many network streaming devices support OGG Vorbis and FLAC, but this Yamaha receiver does.
So… every CD I own is on the server and I can play it on the receiver with just a few button presses. Very cool and very convenient.