Grateful Dead

What Takes Up Less Hard Drive Space?

Hal,Go here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV It explains this better than I could. Peace, Richard

I'm starting to get there. Here is another question. Is wav the same as Windows Media Audio Lossless or is wav something I need to download? I do know about not trading music that is not lossless. Remember that too from the days of tapes. I have been one of those guys lower on the totem pole that has generally benefited from the generosity of folks like you rather than an active trader. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Wiliam Blake

Hal,For storage and trading, shn or flac is the best. Here is why - shn and flac are digital file formats. This means that they do not degenerate when copied multiple times (like tapes, you lose sound quality every time you copy an audio file). Also, digital files can withstand disc abuse better than audio files. If you scratch a disc with audio files on it, you are screwed. Not necessarily so with digital files. For listening, I would suggest burning as wav audio files. These are much more player friendly - can be played on most newer home and car CD players. No so with WMA files. When I send discs out on the vine, I burn them as wav files to CD. You can covert these to shn or flac files using Traderslittle helper. You can then store these digital files on CD or data DVD for backup in case the audio CDs get damaged. Also, lossless digital files take up about half the space of wav audio files. (The beauty of data DVD is you can store about 4 shows on a single disc). You can also burn multiple audio CDs from the digital files without losing sound quality. The one thing you don't want to do is take an audio CD, convert to digital then trade that file with someone who is expecting pristine digital files 'cause once you have converted to wav, then back to digital, you have "broken the seal" so to speak. Hope that helps. Richard

i store my shows in flac/shn format on Dvd's and then burn them onto cd's when i want to listen, or listen direct from the discs via foobar 2000 on my computer Bob - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Spanish Jam

So I have just started to get involved in this whole ripping and burning of CDs and storing information on my computer this year and am starting to have lots of questions which I hope some of you can answer. I have Windows Media Player on my computer which is a Gateway laptop bought at the end of last year. When I started using the media player to rip music it offered several options of how to store information. I chose Windows Media Audio as the way to rip. I wonder if I should have chosen the Windows Media Lossless. Am I losing a lot of sound quality? Is the Windows Media Audio much higher quality than the mp3 option? I usually store all the music I get from the vine on my computer and then burn it to disc and play that. If I store it all in lossless it will fill up my hard drive. Then I would need to find other ways besides my computer hard drive to store the data. What is the easiest way to do that? I don’t know if I want the storage of music in yet another format to become a major hobby. (You wouldn’t know that the way I’ve been signing up for the vine.) I am not interested in being a vast reservoir of highest quality sound to trade I just want lots of good quality to listen to. What I do have from the vine I have shared with several of my deadhead friends around here and we are all pretty happy with what we are getting from it being stored as Windows Media Audio. It is much higher quality than the most of the tapes we listened to during the 70’s, 80’s, early 90’s. Are folks saving the vine discs in what format? What do you do with this stuff and what are your thoughts on the sound quality of the formats? Most of my listening is done with a Harman Kardon amp and BIC 6 speakers that are now 32 years old or on a high quality Panasonic portable disc player, so I am Old School and I still have those tapes. I ramble, how about some feedback on this ramble. Thanks. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Wiliam Blake

I've got a few shows from sugarmegs that are an entire show in one 3+ hour track. What is a good way to split this big track into seperate, song length tracks so I can burn them down to CD, or to an ipod? Any advice would be welcome. I've been looking around and there seems to be software that claims it will do the job, but I don't want to buy anything until I can gain more knowledge on the issue. Thnx.

I have used a free program called Audacity which allows you to record a tape and then go back and seperate it into tracks. Its a bit intimidating at first but after you play around and go through the instructions it does what you want it to. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Eric

What is the best way to get my old bootlegs onto my computer?

Heres the reasons Sugarmegs gives - sounds similiar to what your experiencing: "If you are absolutly STUCK with windows media player version 11 here is a workaround. FOR THOSE USING WINDOWS 2000 or WINDOWS XP, Right click the .asx file you want to listen to and download it to your desktop. Open it for text editing in notepad by right clicking on the downloaded .asx file. Do a search for ://mms (control f to search the text. Hint: its near the botton of the text.) and change it to ://http. Save and close it. Double click it to open it in Windows media player. You will not be able to fast forward the stream as you can with media player 9 or 10. FOR THOSE USING VISTA, you can simply click any .asx file and it will play as described above, no FF, without you having to do anything else. The reason for this is Microsoft is no longer supporting the ://mms protocol in player 11 which does not seem quite right to me but is the case neverless. Sugarmegs uses ://mms protocol because we use a 2000 server. " I hope that helps Eric