Jazz Odyssey

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The MP3 format celebrates its 10th birthday this year (it was actually invented a couple of years before that but 1995 was its first real public appearance with available software players…those interested in the history of the MP3 should read the wikipedia entry) and it continues to be the most widely used digital music format. Many people would agree that it offers the best compromise between file size and audio fidelity with the widest range of hardware and software support. Sure, other formats such as WMA and Ogg Vorbis have gained footholds and offer arguably better sound and compression (especially at low bitrates) but they aren’t as widely supported.

As this article in Wired points out, as storage space has increased in capacity and decreased in cost, and improvements have been made in hardware and software used for digital music playback, some folks are listening to their 128 kilobits per second music libraries and finding themselves dissatisfied with the quality of sound. This Wired points out the LAME MP3 encoder which is an opensource project that strives for the best possible sound quality of MP3s.

I’ve been using the LAME encoder for a couple of years as my primary encoding tool with dbPowerAmp and it sounds much better than the iTunes MP3 encoder (especially north of 192kpbs which is the sonic compromise I’m willing to live with for portable digital music). LAME is easy to use and comes highly recommended to those who don’t mind the extra step of using an encoder and then importing the files into iTunes.

From my perspective, at the rate that hard drive prices continue to drop and digital music hardware/software continues to improve, any lossy compression scheme will eventually fall short. I’m starting to encode everything using the lossless FLAC format and then using software like Anapod to transcode into a lossy format when I want to fill my iPod. For some music, I’ll leave it in FLAC format and use my iAudio X5 (which other than the Rio Karma is the only portable digital music player that supports FLAC) when I really want to hear something with full dynamic range.

Whether LAME MP3 or FLAC, I am slowly but surely moving to encode my collection to digital and store it on a series of external hard drives…this is much more to my liking than CDs (and takes up far less space). I’m still experimenting with directory structures and naming schemes, and have yet to find a music library manager that does a thorough job accounting for the music from both commercially produced CDs and live CDs (my Grateful Dead and Phish collections alone are well over a terabyte). Some music library managers tap Gracenote or freedb to help populate tracklists and album credits, and others have taken to grabbing that information from Amazon.com. Ideally, the perfect solution would be a music library manager that grabbed info from all of those sources, as well as the All Music Guide and also tapped the incredible live music database at etree.org for unreleased live material. The icing on the cake would be that this software would also integrate with iTunes for playback and syncronize with iPods and other portable devices, transcoding on-the-fly as necessary. And a good universal tagging/renaming engine is a must.

Does anyone out there know of any software that comes close to this functionality?