- Fri Jul 13, 2012 8:00 pm
#469716
I don't know if I was too clear earlier on, but here's what I'm proposing:
1) Aled transfers his WAV (uncompressed 44KHz, 16-bit stereo audio) shows to a USB hard drive and passes that to The Gatekeeper Of The Files.
Let's say for argument, the files are 4TB and we have given Aled a 4TB drive.
2) The Gatekeeper Of The Files (let's now call him The Archivist) compresses these files losslessly using something like FLAC. This retains 100% of the quality of the original file, but it uses about 50% less space. The FLAC files are still playable with many media players, but not usable on say an iPod. This doesn't matter, as it's an archival format used to preserve the original quality with no losses. See later for how the files are ultimately distributed.
Before compressing the files, The Archivist creates an MD5 or SFV for each file or group of files so integrity checks can be performed later. This is fairly quick.
The files are now 2TB. A few people would like to keep copies of these. We can call these "The Quality Nuts".
3) The Quality Nuts each send a 2TB USB drive to The Archivist and he transfers the FLACs and MD5s to the drives and sends them back to The Quality Nuts. Maybe there are 3 or 4 Quality Nuts. I am one of them.
This serves two purposes. It satisfies the Quality Nuts desire for the best possible quality and also acts as multiple off-site backups of the files. If a file is corrupted somewhere (verifiable with the MD5), it can be restored from another backup site.
4) Edits can be performed on the FLAC files (decode losslessly back to WAV, edit, save as FLAC and/or MP3) to remove News and music etc.
5) The edited MP3 versions can now be distributed to The Masses. The Masses will be happy with 128kbps MP3 files and the files will take up approximately 130GB.
The distribution could be via archive.org or by other means. Bearing in mind that because the edits will take a while, long upload and download times may be not a big issue as files will be edited one at a time and be posted on archive.org individually over time.
How does that sound?
1) Aled transfers his WAV (uncompressed 44KHz, 16-bit stereo audio) shows to a USB hard drive and passes that to The Gatekeeper Of The Files.
Let's say for argument, the files are 4TB and we have given Aled a 4TB drive.
2) The Gatekeeper Of The Files (let's now call him The Archivist) compresses these files losslessly using something like FLAC. This retains 100% of the quality of the original file, but it uses about 50% less space. The FLAC files are still playable with many media players, but not usable on say an iPod. This doesn't matter, as it's an archival format used to preserve the original quality with no losses. See later for how the files are ultimately distributed.
Before compressing the files, The Archivist creates an MD5 or SFV for each file or group of files so integrity checks can be performed later. This is fairly quick.
The files are now 2TB. A few people would like to keep copies of these. We can call these "The Quality Nuts".
3) The Quality Nuts each send a 2TB USB drive to The Archivist and he transfers the FLACs and MD5s to the drives and sends them back to The Quality Nuts. Maybe there are 3 or 4 Quality Nuts. I am one of them.
This serves two purposes. It satisfies the Quality Nuts desire for the best possible quality and also acts as multiple off-site backups of the files. If a file is corrupted somewhere (verifiable with the MD5), it can be restored from another backup site.
4) Edits can be performed on the FLAC files (decode losslessly back to WAV, edit, save as FLAC and/or MP3) to remove News and music etc.
5) The edited MP3 versions can now be distributed to The Masses. The Masses will be happy with 128kbps MP3 files and the files will take up approximately 130GB.
The distribution could be via archive.org or by other means. Bearing in mind that because the edits will take a while, long upload and download times may be not a big issue as files will be edited one at a time and be posted on archive.org individually over time.
How does that sound?