FLAC
I’ve decided that Troutmouth fully endorses the incredible audio compression technology FLAC. Being an MP3 connoisseur, I had heard of FLAC before, but didn’t really have a need for it. All I knew was that real audio geeks, the kind that make their own DAT recordings of live shows, loved FLAC, and that it was the format of choice for trading live bootlegs online. Designed with archival in mind, and at around 5mbs/minute, it’s not practical for everyday audio sharing.
Of course, with our new recording setup, I realized that storing enormous WAV files of every single practice session was going to fill up the little 40gb hard drive we have in the audio computer pretty quick. I thought about encoding sessions in 320kbps MP3, or even high quality OGG, but I would also like the option of going back and picking pieces out to edit (something you don’t do with compressed audio). I decided to check FLAC out to see if it would do what we needed it to do.
FLAC is different from OGG or MP3 in that it is completely lossless (Free Lossless Audio Codec). In MP3 encoding, for example, “useless” data is thrown out of the audio file in order to drop its size. FLAC on the other hand can be thought of like ZIP compression. All the data is there, it just comes up with a more efficient way of storing it. However, FLAC differs from ZIP in several ways. If you ZIP a WAV file, you can normally cut its size by about 20-30%. FLAC is designed specifically for audio compression, and in my experience has reduced our WAVs by about 50-60%. The other awesome thing is that, with a simple plugin for your audio player of choice (well, Winamp and Foobar as far as I know…), FLAC files can be played in realtime without decompressing, and you can even tag them. Additionally, what really sold me on FLAC is the fact that at any time, your FLAC files can be run back through the encoder and decoded back to their original WAV format (just like unzipping), and absolutely no data is lost.
In 3 days of practice, we had already accumulated 2.4gbs of audio data. After I compressed the entire folder with FLAC, we were dealing with 1.10gbs. Still probably going to have to invest in a larger hard drive at some point, but at least we’ve doubled the drive’s usefulness.
Speaking of the “studio”, we were able to utilize our new MP3 playback capability for the first time to begin working on a new cover. After listening to the MP3 a couple times we were able to tear apart the song ourselves and figure the whole thing out without having to hit tab sites or anything.
Since I’m becoming a fan of 30 second teaser clips of our songs, here is a teaser of the new cover, recorded just minutes after we started figuring the damn thing out. (Read: We didn’t know the song yet!)
I also tore the audio computer apart after Sunday’s practice and rebuilt it. Basically the system is 100% dedicated to audio capture and editing now, and I’ve added some toolbars and such to simplify our process. I also found an old Soundblaster Audigy laying around (from about 2001) and threw that in there as well, so we should have a little more control over our input now. I also went ahead and upgraded Audition from 1.5 to 2.0. I don’t like the new interface as much, and honestly we didn’t really NEED the upgrade, but what can you do? We’re also still learning the ins and outs of the sound board, and levels seem to change daily. Soon we’ll get it all figured out and get some good solid demos online.
February 28th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Why couldn’t you use a better clip. I know there was at least one that was better.
February 28th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
That was RIGHT when we started figuring it out. I thought it’d be cool to hear it in its early stages.
March 1st, 2006 at 3:40 pm
yeah cool if youre into crap!! hahaha yeah bitch i had you so snowed!!! suck it