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Inspired somewhat by this post I’m going to rant a little about CD as an information storage.

1. CD can and should be replaced by files.
CD is not in any way superior to music stored in files. CD is a digital format which stores musical data as a sequence of bits (that is “0100100100010…”) so you can treat all its contents as just one big file (usually about 650Mb). Music in CD is encoded using PCM, this encoding is used in WAV files on PC. So CD contains just one big WAV file, and some rippers, e.g. EAC, treat it just in a right way. When you rip a CD with EAC you get one big file, which contains exactly the same information (bits) as the CD you’ve ripped.

Now you can compress this file so it would take not so much space on your HDD (or portable player). There are two main options: lossy & lossless compression.

Lossy compression is a kind of compression which throws away some information which is concidered neglegible to achieve very good compressions rates. Examples are: MP3, OGG, AAC. When you compress with lossy codec you get another information and you cannot restore it back to the original. So CD would be always superior to these formats, of course. Especially if you can actually hear the difference between CD and 320Kbps MP3.

Lossless compression, on the other hand, doesn’t throw away any information when you perform compression. So you get much lower compression rates. But all the information is the same when uncompressed. You can restore it to the original. And that’s what happens when you play it. Just think of it, when you zip or 7zip or rar your files, they will be exactly the same when you would uncompress them. zip is a lossless compressor. But zip is not good at compressing PCM, it’s good at textual data, that’s why there are FLAC, APE & Apple Lossless. (Note that you may get binary different file after decompression of FLAC, this is due to some uncertainty in PCM coding.)

So, lossless compressed files hold exaclty the same information as a CD (except CD text, but who the fuck needs CD text, when you have tags?) plus metadata (tags, yes). And files give you some great bonuses, e.g. easy to copy, easy to change tracks and albums (you don’t have to have a CD changer to listen to 40 track from different albums), easy to create playlists, they don’t expire (ever scratched your CD hard?), and on.

Btw, if we talk about CD/DVD as a holder of non-musical data, files are better too when you need the data often (for backups DVD is just good). Have you ever bought a StarForce protected game and then made a little scratch on a CD so your game wouldn’t load? Well, try to refund it, good luck.

2. CD is lossy.
There are some lossless formats which are superior to CD in terms of information storing, they are analog. There are also other lossy formats which are superior to CD but still digital (e.g. digital master recording, 24/96Khz FLAC, and so on).

The only losless formats for storing musical data are analog: vinyl (sure there is noise there, but that’s off-the point), tape (e.g. master tapes, which are used in studios) and the best is the live performance (the only truly lossy one, I suppose). So if you are kind of audiophile, you’d better listen to these. Vinyl is a great choise. And actually you may rip vinyl or tape into a lossy-better-than-CD (e.g. 24/96Khz) format if you have a decent audiocard and some other high-end equipment.

3. SACD and DVDAudio are not the options.
SACD is just the same as CD but with higher definition. The same goes for DVDAudio. And more to this: these formats are so fucking DRM’ed I will never ever use them. I would rather buy vinyl and rip it to FLAC with the same definition as SACD. Btw, analog cannot be DRM’ed ;)

So, that’s all for today.