GoldfishX Jan 11, 2010
My take on it is, in exchange for a little (okay, a lot! lol) of extra space and general inconvenience (I had to add an external harddrive and switch to a digital audio player that could support FLAC...not really an inconvenience for me, since I had been looking to upgrade from my iPod anyway and my D2+ supports SD cards), it is well worth it for the enhancement to the overall listening experience. Everything sounds livelier than they have in YEARS...sounds like back when I listening to CD's. It's seriously like starting over the whole listening experience from scratch and relegating mp3's to sample-only (unless it's for something like a rip, where a lossless encode is not available)
There's also the point that, if I pay good money for a CD, there's no sense in killing 85-90 percent of the audio data for an inferior listening experience that may negatively affect my overall take on an album (ex: tracks I want to like sounding flat and boring). I find this has been the case with a number of albums I've owned for awhile (Raystorm OST immediately comes to mind) This is what made me seriously consider doing a full-on lossless experiment with about 20-25 of my most listened to albums: I wanted to see if I could tell a difference. While I'm not 100% perfect at audibly telling a difference between FLAC and mp3's, I do know the ones I ripped to FLAC sound fresher than they have in YEARS. More than one evening, I just find myself queueing up maybe 5-10 tracks in winamp and repeating them time and time again, only to find hours have gone by with the same tracks in rotation. Since going to mostly mp3's sometime back in 2004-ish, this has almost never been the case.
So for me, it's worth the added space to bring back the addictiveness of the music, but I'm curious what other people think of going lossless. Worth the effort?
For what I do, I rip a CD to .wav, then I wavgain to 90db, then encode to FLAC. This is practically the same as basic replay gain or mp3gain, but is necessary because I can't get winamp, Burnnnn! or my D2+ to read the Replay Gain on regular FLAC files. This makes all my music the same volume (no matter what format it's in!) and eliminates the loud mastering of most of my albums.