Topic: Archiving work flow

[rasta]

I'm trying to get all my recordings organized and I want to keep everything as FLAC files I think.  A few questions.

What format do you archive the masters in?

When converting to FLAC do you compress to the smallest file size?

Does the compression affect the audio quality of the file if you plan to play the file back through a squeezebox or something similar?

What is the work flow when going from edited WAV file to FLAC file that will be listened to?  I don't understand the fixing SBE's or the md5.  When do I do what.

Many thanks +T

[lefty]

i'm wondering the same too.. and what all software are people using these days?  is sound forge still good? 

[cleantone]

What format do you archive the masters in?

Most often FLAC. Sometimes I archive multitrack sessions in SDII or WAV. Any two track will be FLAC'ed WITH metadata tags.

When converting to FLAC do you compress to the smallest file size?

Not always. The difference between lever 6-8 is very small but can add a noticeable time to the FLAC conversion process.

Does the compression affect the audio quality of the file if you plan to play the file back through a squeezebox or something similar?

To the best of my understanding it doesn't at all. They both decode to the original format, on the fly, or full conversion.

What is the work flow when going from edited WAV file to FLAC file that will be listened to?  I don't understand the fixing SBE's or the md5.  When do I do what.

If your working with Redbook audio (16bit 44.1khz) for CD's you'll want to fix the SBE's. This aligns the track split properly to avoid ticks on playback. Chop our tracks as you see fit and use whatever tool you have to check and/or fix the SBE errors. Some software does it for you, like CD Wave for instance. An md5 is essentially a integrity check file. It allows you to verify that the file is 100% as it was the day the md5 was first made. This can be helpful after PC >CD >PC or after internet downloads. It's a good idea to generate one. FLAC fingerprints are essentially the same. md5's can be made for (I think) any file type)

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Important consideration: If you ever have to recover audio from failed media, WAV will be far easier to recover than flac.

I can salvage raw wav data from file systems. But random pieces of flac data? Yuck!  It should be doable but reconstructing from pieces would be a lot harder and more time consuming.  So that's a good reason to not use flac on masters.  Recent builds of flac have improved but there have been some cases in the past where it wouldn't store all of the wav audio in the flac.  So that's another thing to watch out for and doggedly verify.


Fwiw, in the data world, "backup" implies that the original will be kept.  Archiving implies that the original will be deleted to save space and the archive is THE copy (which there should be other backups of).

So whenever you discuss archiving, it is important to be clear about that... I would never want to trust a single optical disc to hold the only archive of a show.  I don't think multiple copies from the same spindle of disks or batch would be much more reliable.  I think having a magnetic copy and an optical copy is important.

One concern is if you lose your hard drive copy (lightning, theft, etc) and suddenly that optical disc is your only copy...