Mastodawn

I’m going through my music CD archive and re-ripping everything to store it losslessly as ALAC.

Back in the day, I used MP3, encoded with LAME using the -V0 preset, which is considered transparent. So I’m 100% sure I won’t hear the difference, but storing the audio exactly as it was meant to be gives me peace of mind. Also, having the lossless file is useful if I ever want to convert to a more modern lossy format, such as Opus.

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aaron 6d ago

There is so much weirdness in audio CDs. Remember hidden tracks? They could be hidden before the first track, so if your CD player supported it, you’d have to rewind while on track 1. Some CDs also had like 10 tracks of 2 seconds each at the end, followed by the hidden track at the very end. Or they had a 15-minute track at the end that contained two songs with several minutes of silence in between.

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aaron

I also found this German techno masterpiece from 2014 in my archive, which I had never ripped back in the day. Many artists on these two CDs didn’t have an artist entry in MusicBrainz, including the main artist. Also, there’s an interesting inconsistency: one artist is credited as “Derfus” in the printed booklet, but as “Diffus” in CD-Text.

This was a pain to add to #MusicBrainz, but at some point I was too invested to quit and finished it. 🎉

https://musicbrainz.org/release/3a083d38-3310-4841-8892-57b31deb870f