Backup Tracks with FLAC?

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:27 am

Hi there,

currently I am a little concerned about the persistence of my tracks in the future, so I am willing to back up every track split into the individual tracks (separate bass-track, separate drum-track etc.). As I started doing this, I realized I had to install some older software on my windows pc and for example search the net for the (of course free) refills I used in the time I worked with reason. Software disappears more quickly that one would expect, so the only logical way to back up tracks and ensure accessibility over a long amount of time is bouncing all components in single tracks to disc, is it?

If you have a track with let's say 10 instruments, you'll end up in roughly about a gigabyte of data PER TRACK. Though I have about 400 gigs of free storage, that's very much, because I want to mirror the data for safety reasons (everything else would be naive I think).

I found out Ableton can handle FLAC, which I think maybe a great alternative instead of backing up the raw wave data. The problem is, that I always get warnings when encoding 24bit 44,1khz wave files (which is okay for a backup, I think).

Additionally some of the FLAC files I imported then into Ableton have the right length, but do only contain a tiny fraction of the data in the wave file. Very strange.

Now before I start backing up everything in FLAC and try to solve the strange problems, I wanted to know, what you think about this way of backing things up in FLAC, or if there is a better alternative.

The main constraints are:

1) The files must be at the most half as big as the wave files (I tried FLAC compression and I ended up in about one tenth of the size, surely depending in the amount of silence and richness of frequencies of the tracks)

2) The files must be decoded easily or even be supported by applications like Ableton, so no complex decoding process is needed.

Please let me know what you think.

Best regards,
Martin

jonny72 · Post by **jonny72** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:21 pm

Any of the compressed lossless codecs will give about the same compression, which is about 60-70% of the original size. One other option is to leave the tracks in WAV format and compress them with Zip or 7Zip.

I wouldn't worry too much about which way you go, the chances of any of the main codecs disappearing and not being supported by anything are pretty remote.

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:23 pm

zips are not a very good option for me, because the risk that a zip file may become damaged is very high, so all data would be lost.

pepezabala · Post by **pepezabala** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

If you trust in the live application being available and functional in a couple of years, then you could create "live-packs" for archiving. All audio gets compressed in FLAC. You could freeze your VST-channels beforehand, so there shouldn't be a problem.

Only issue is that you rely on a working computer that allows to open those livepacks. Pure speculation, but maybe Live 7 won't install/work any longer on OS12 or a future windows OS.

dc43 · Post by **dc43** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 2:00 am

Has anyone else noticed this issue of not being able to play back FLAC files encoded from 24bit (44kHz) WAV files?

I used FLAC 1.2.1b with common settings, even without any settings (using defaults).

Winamp plays it fine. In Live there is a problem?

dc43 · Post by **dc43** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 2:47 pm

Well, I found another encoder called flake (http://flake-enc.sourceforge.net/).

It does not support making 24bit flac, so it automatically converted the audio and produced a 16bit flac file. The file played back fine in Live. Although I'm not satisfied with this solution, because I lose in quality

, it will be fine for this case. I'm converting long boring recordings (about 60-120min) of my live performances with Ableton Live.

mdk · Post by **mdk** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 7:11 pm

scifish wrote:zips are not a very good option for me, because the risk that a zip file may become damaged is very high, so all data would be lost.

how is a zip file more likely to get damaged than any other file?

dc43 · Post by **dc43** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 4:50 am

mdk wrote:
scifish wrote:zips are not a very good option for me, because the risk that a zip file may become damaged is very high, so all data would be lost.
how is a zip file more likely to get damaged than any other file?

I found that part funny also

dabble · Post by **dabble** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 4:43 pm

If im not mistaken, i think winrar works better with audio, but theres another compression that works well for audio, cant remember what its called