I want to save some space on my hard disk, by encoding some of my lossless files (FLAC/TAK (cc) net releases, around 100GB) to lossy
I don't plan to backup burn DVDs, and I was thinking which codec profile should I choose while seeking for fine space and quality ratio
Basically I'm interested in this: which codec and profile would you choose if you need to convert you lossless files while losing them irreversibly
Thanks
I would still choose a lossless codec but process the files first with lossywav to make the compressed files smller. This is likely to give the best results if you later transcode to a more conventional lossy codec like mp3.
i think you should consider hybrid mode first. wavpack can do that, for example.
I would strongly consider not "losing them irreversibly"..Instead copy/transfer the original lossless files onto another drive for archiving, and use the primary HDD files for transcoding/converting to a lossy format..Then delete the flacs for HDD space gain.
For me Lame -v2 is a good size while being transparent to my ears..
100 GB?
Work a single day at McDonalds / mow four yards and buy yourself another HDD.
Seriously, if you're low on space and have doubts such as you've expressed, buy a HDD.
Actually not a bad way to sell LossyWAV to people.
Using LossyWAV could save you having to work 1 day at McDonalds.
C.
EDIT: To the OP, I'd recommend LossyWAV too.
Thanks for all posts trying to answer the question. Maybe I should have been more direct without making my post useless by saying what I want to do
I was interested in LossyWAV, as I did some search before posting and noticed that topics covering listening tests are made to "near" transparency level or comparisons on low quality level, naturally. But should I go to LossyWAV -q 5 or choose aoTuV -q 9.5. Or maybe just go with aoTuV q -8 or use other codec?
I'm interested in comparison of high quality settings for lossy codecs, but couldn't find any, so I thought to ask about user's experiances
Hi romor
You might find this (http://www.giantpygmy.net/gpa/index.php?id=a-high-quality-encoding-solution-pc-dap) useful:
As you can see from below, benefits vary with the type of music:
(http://www.giantpygmy.net/gpa/data/uploads/images/play/lossy_lossless_by_music.png)
From my own listening tests LossyWAV at --standard and above is a safe transcode source. It may well be safe below those levels but I've not tested it.
Just as an aside, I think a major transcode test of LossyWAV would be far more beneficial than the currently planned HA 2010 public test (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=77272).
But that's just my 2 pennies worth.
To answer your question I'd go with LossyWAV --standard i.e. -q 5
Also, there's this thread re. transcoding & lossyWAV (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=75098&start=0&p=663343&#entry663343) that I initiated when researching the above stuff.
C.
100 GB?
Work a single day at McDonalds / mow four yards and buy yourself another HDD.
Seriously, if you're low on space and have doubts such as you've expressed, buy a HDD.
^^ This.
When a performance 1TB hard drive (Samsung Spintpoint F3) can be had for $70 or non performance ones for $60, the answer is almost always to get more hard drive space. I'm up to 6.25TB. If all the space you need is satisfiable by 70GB (assuming you compressed to 30% of original) then a 1TB hard drive would easily be enough. If that's still too much money, I'd recommend a Spintpoint F3 in 500GB for $55.
Edit: if you're doing this on a laptop, then an external may be the way to go. Possibly take a hybrid lossless/lossy format keep the lossy on your internal and the correction files on the external. IDK if you can have your player set to look for the correction files somewhere else like that though.
As you can see from below, benefits vary with the type of music:
That's one track representative sample, correct?
It's interesting graph, as majority of the tracks to be converted are in noise, experimental electronic genre, but I guess far from pure white noise as their bitrate is at FLAC average ~700 Kb/s
I did some test encoding at -q 5, and result is fine - files are halved.
I'm still in doubt, but I'll decide later should I go with 350-400 @ (LossyWAV -q 5) or 250 @ (Vorbis -q 8). Difference between this two settings should be very sensitive, maybe theoretical
Thanks carpman
Just remember that with the vorbis method you're locking yourself into that format.
Once processed with LossyWAV you can transcode to other lossless codecs losslessly.
WAV > LossyFLAC = Lossy
LossyFLAC > LossyTAK = Lossless
WAV > OGG = Lossy
OGG > MP3 = Lossy
C.
EDIT:
re. "That's one track representative sample, correct?"
Yes, one sample per kind of music (though not really split so much by genre, as loudness and frequency spectrum).
Where the frequency spectrum is full and the music is loud lossyWAV performs best. On quiet piano where the musical sound is < 10kHz lossyWAV has very little effect. Personally on solo piano music, I skip lossyWAV (TAK on its performs very well approx 350 - 550 kbps).
But not all lossless codecs work equally well with LossyWav converted files?
Just remember that with the vorbis method you're locking yourself into that format.
Once processed with LossyWAV you can transcode to other lossless codecs losslessly.
I haven't thought about that
I could benefit from it if I choose LossyTAK, but I try to avoid this excellent codec because of compatibility
I'll test LossyFLAC -q 3 and 4 later and collect some results before doing whole conversion (which could take double-time with LossyWAV)
But not all lossless codecs work equally well with LossyWav converted files?
Correct - on some, it brings no benefit at all...
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...c_compatibility (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossywav#Codec_compatibility)
...though of course there's no additional quality hit whatever lossless codec you use - it's just that some don't give smaller file sizes with lossyWAV files.
Cheers,
David.
Seriously, these days your 100 GB amounts to $5 worth of disk space, though you have to buy in larger quantity.
I did some simple tests out of curiosity, like diff-ing spectrogram images and audio files at q3, q4, q5, then q3.5, q3.75 and q3.75alt
It's far from scientific method, but my DSP skills are none, and it showed me that my tests were pretty useless as differences were very subtle, but wandering what could be difference between q3.75alt and q4: almost same file sizes, same amount of information loss, but differently arranged in spectrogram?
I couldn't put aoTuV there as different methods are used making LW always "look" better is such comparisons
Accidentally, someone restored older topic about aoTuV -q8 ABXing: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=57783 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57783), where OP is asking similar question (thanks for that ) and influenced by posts made by halb27, shadowking and Nick.C, I decided to go with LossyFLAC q3.75, later tonight
In my experience you can go right down to Q2 and still have robust quality . If you are after 'practical high quality' (you can accept a slight deviation from original source on rare occasion) this is a good setting that will have meaningful savings even on piano tracks. Even at Q2 you still get all the benefits of 100% gapless, lossless encoding to other lossless codecs, high quality transcoding for your portable player.
For me part of the 'quality' thing is also about getting a good saving on ALL genre . I used to be very seduced with the 'headroom' thing. Going above Q3 you start to lose efficiency IMO.
Accidentally, someone restored older topic about aoTuV -q8 ABXing: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=57783 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57783), where OP is asking similar question (thanks for that )
It's interesting how little lossyWAV changes that new problem sample. It chooses almost not to touch the first half of the file - e.g. the music sits at -approx 6dB, but lossyWAV only adds noise at about -80dB. In the second half of the file, there are 3 or 4 brief peaks of noise up to -48dB, but otherwise it's still way down.
(mp3 noise typically sits at -25dB relative to the music - though of course mp3 shapes that noise to be inaudible - hopefully).
There's no magic in this case with lossyWAV - it simply sees the runs of 400+ flat samples that appear regularly throughout this track, and decides to leave them as they are. In a way, it's very overcautious (I think you could convert the whole lot to 8-bits without causing any audible difference) - but I suppose it's better to be over cautious than to create audible problems.
Most lossy codecs hate tracks like this where the music content is effectively made up from strings of impulses. Most lossy codecs hate impulses. Whereas lossyWAV knows to leave them well alone. Often (not always) FLAC can encode them very efficiently anyway.
Cheers,
David.
Seriously, these days your 100 GB amounts to $5 worth of disk space, though you have to buy in larger quantity.
This is just retail cost for the drive. The majority of the cost for storage is actually in the management of it - time, risk and other resources spent copying, backing up, record keeping, dealing with media failures; electricity to power the device and supporting equipment; support hardware for housing, controlling, powering and cooling.
For instance, to upgrade storage inside a laptop requires that you replace the drive, reinstall the OS, and copy everything to the new drive. Even if you work at McDonald's wages, that's potentially a very time-consuming, expensive and risky undertaking.
Seriously, these days your 100 GB amounts to $5 worth of disk space, though you have to buy in larger quantity.
This is just retail cost for the drive. The majority of the cost for storage is actually in the management of it - time, risk and other resources spent copying, backing up, record keeping, dealing with media failures; electricity to power the device and supporting equipment; support hardware for housing, controlling, powering and cooling.
For instance, to upgrade storage inside a laptop requires that you replace the drive, reinstall the OS, and copy everything to the new drive. Even if you work at McDonald's wages, that's potentially a very time-consuming, expensive and risky undertaking.
Time / Resources spent copying: a One time fee of up to a couple hours. Run overnight if you're so concerned.
Backing up / dealing with Media failures: A newer hard drive is less likely to fail than an old one.
Record keeping...?
Electricity: Virtually all HDDs use < 10W when under load and only a few when idle, plus you can have them spin down if you're still concerned. Worse case ($0.08/kWh) $7/year for full use 24/7/365
Support hardware - usually just a very simple enclosure that doesn't need special powering/ cooling requirements assuming you're going w/ an external. An internal just requires a SATA cable.
Upgrading storage inside a laptop is as simple as buying an external hard drive instead and plugging it in. Done. Use a hybrid lossy format put the lossys on your internal like you'd be planning now, but then keep the correction files on the external so when you're desked you have lossless and have the ability to recode to a different format in the future.
A new hard drive is the 2nd easiest upgrade a computer can take (after optical disk drive), easiest in the case of an external hard drive. It's a really painless ordeal, and offers you more storage, better performance and reliability, and lets you take the best of all worlds involved.
...but plenty of people just don't need lossless. It doesn't matter how cheap it is.
"Pay me $1 for this thing you don't need" - !
lossy vs lossless bitrate does make a difference with time+expense of backing up large collections (one copy on "a newer hard drive" is not a backup!).
It doesn't matter a huge amount though.
It matters less with time.
It depends what else you store: lossless audio bitrate vs lossy HD video bitrate = lossless audio doesn't use that much!
Cheers,
David.
So I repeated my same tests on q0, q1 and q2, and it's interesting how added noise mask, grows by 2-3 dB with every q switch increment
KHz Left Right
(R) 22 -92.04 -90.22
q5: 22 -92.04 -90.22
q4: 22 -89.56 -87.96
q3: 22 -87.64 -85.77
q2: 22 -85.29 -83.57
q1: 22 -82.22 -80.41
q0: 22 -78.69 -76.96
In my experience you can go right down to Q2 and still have robust quality
I could go with practical q2, relying on your experince, but considering that I was planing to go with aoTuV at 250 Kb/s, I'm not sure why not q1 or q0?
You can't necessarily say that LossyWAV would be robust at similar bitrates to where Vorbis would be robust. That's why we wouldn't be keen to recommend q1 or q0 as your main computer audio files.
• We're very confident that encoding from lossyWAV -q5 to MP3 or similar is remarkably robust compared to lossless-to-MP3 conversion, so it's a good alternative to lossless for transcoding (e.g. for your iPod or phone). For some of us, FLAC is viable on external devices like the Sansa Clip or Fuze.
• We're pretty confident that lossyWAV -q2 or -q2.5 is transparent in itself, and that it has at worst fairly subtle issues used as a transcoding source.
• We're confident that at -q1 or -q0 a little extra audible noise or sometimes noise-modulation can start to be noticed in careful listening for at least some samples, though the quality is fine for listening in noisy environments or at quiet levels.
LossyWAV doesn't (yet) try highly advanced methods to hide the noise added when reducing the audio bitrate that can be used by transform codecs such as MP3, Vorbis or AAC. Transform codecs use special mathematical transforms to represent the data in another form (effectively a frequency representation) where knowledge about how the sounds mask the audibility of noise to the human ear can be used to permit more noise by storing with less accuracy or omitting (filtering out) certain frequency ranges altogether.
LossyWAV currently does relatively simple analysis. It never filters out frequencies from the audio signal. It never alters the timing of impulses or smears impulses. It currently doesn't aim to exploit temporal masking either (which it could implement, potentially opening the door to pre-echo artifacts if the psymodel is incorrect). It generally attempts to add a fairly broad-spectrum noise below the level of audibility by reducing bit depth in a way that lossless encoders can exploit.
Some problems that arise in lossy-to-lossy transcoding come from an accumulation of similar effects such as time-smearing that are benign when applied by one lossy encode because they fall within the temporal maskng curve, for example, but when applied again in cumulative fashion by the second lossy encode can become audibly different from the original and are no longer masked from audibility.
Out of simplicity, imagine that you could hear a 14 dB change to feature X (which is perhaps 25 milliseconds before a sudden drum-hit) but not a 8 dB change. Assume that your first lossy encoder can save bits by rounding up its representation of feature X by +7.5 dB. This would not be noticeably different to your ear.
Encoder 2, when supplied with the original lossless audio, might decide to represent feature X +7.0 dB louder. Against this would no be noticeably different to your ear.
If instead of supplying Encoder 2 with the original lossless audio, you instead transcode by supplying it with the decoded output of encoder 1, and the second lossy encoder decides it can save bits by rounding up feature X by +6.8 dB from what it was fed with. After transcoding, Feature X wouldn't necessarily be audibly different from the output of Encoder 1, but it would be 14.3 dB different to the original lossless audio, making it become audibly different to the lossless original audio.
This is a crude representation of how an effect like temporal smearing or pre-echo can become a problem when transcoding. (I'm not claiming that any of the figures used are especially representative of real transcoding artifact generation).
Encoding to MP3, Vorbis, AAC, WMA or Musepack, most masking effects such as these tend to be exploited fairly fully when encoding, so transcoding with two such encoding steps may well cause occasions when two changes in the same direction become audibly different from the original, and because the second encoder doesn't know what the original was, it can't base its decisions on the qualities of the original audio.
LossyWAV doesn't currently cause temporal smearing or exploit temporal masking, so tends to be more benign in these areas when used as a source for transcoding.
You caught me on a way to press the button for -q2 on a first half of tracks, which I hope will be encoded till tomorrow morning
You can't necessarily say that LossyWAV would be robust at similar bitrates to where Vorbis would be robust. That's why we wouldn't be keen to recommend q1 or q0 as your main computer audio files.
I suspected that, and was asking out of curiosity, without really considering it
Thanks for theory summary, it helped me see new aspects of LossyWAV, which I don't pretend to understand, and I think that others can benefit from it too, and also hope that this topic can introduce LossyWAV as good alternative to users asking about "best" lossy encoding
Upgrading storage inside a laptop is as simple as buying an external hard drive instead and plugging it in. Done. Use a hybrid lossy format put the lossys on your internal like you'd be planning now, but then keep the correction files on the external so when you're desked you have lossless and have the ability to recode to a different format in the future.
Some people might not want to haul around that second drive. A system with two drives is twice as likely to have a failure. Infant mortality means new drives have higher failure rates than used ones. The rest of your response demonstrates that these other costs are real and it is not a ridiculous estimate to say they are greater than the retail cost of the raw disk space.
Record keeping is for the backups. Backups are not useful unless you know what's backed up where. A lot of work goes into designing and maintaining a robust storage system. If you're overlooking this, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise some day.
I want to save some space on my hard disk, by encoding some of my lossless files (FLAC/TAK (cc) net releases, around 100GB) to lossy
I don't plan to backup burn DVDs, and I was thinking which codec profile should I choose while seeking for fine space and quality ratio
Basically I'm interested in this: which codec and profile would you choose if you need to convert you lossless files while losing them irreversibly
Thanks
If you're in the US you can get a 1.5 T Seagate drive at Fry's for $87 which will hold a LOT of FLAC files.
G²
Upgrading storage inside a laptop is as simple as buying an external hard drive instead and plugging it in. Done. Use a hybrid lossy format put the lossys on your internal like you'd be planning now, but then keep the correction files on the external so when you're desked you have lossless and have the ability to recode to a different format in the future.
Some people might not want to haul around that second drive. A system with two drives is twice as likely to have a failure. Infant mortality means new drives have higher failure rates than used ones. The rest of your response demonstrates that these other costs are real and it is not a ridiculous estimate to say they are greater than the retail cost of the raw disk space.
Record keeping is for the backups. Backups are not useful unless you know what's backed up where. A lot of work goes into designing and maintaining a robust storage system. If you're overlooking this, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise some day.
That's the thing. You don't have to lug around an extra drive. That's why the hybrid mode is awesome. A system with two drives is more likely to experience a failure. However, an older drive is more likely to fail than a newer one, so data on the newer one is less likely to be lost than just compressing your data to fit on the older one. The time it takes to copy the files to a new drive no worse than the time to convert the files to a lossy format on the same drive, so although it can take a few hours to fill an entire hard drive, it isn't actually losing you any time. Power consumption of a hard drive is extremely negligible, and like I said, if somehow you managed to get a hard drive to be continuously under load for 24 hours a day every day for the 5 years it's expected to live for, you can get an additional cost that ~1/2 the retail price. Let's be realistic. The cost at most is going to be 10% of that. I will concede that over the lifetime of the harddrive you may average a couple dollars of extra electricity usage.
What you gain by adding an additional Hard drive: the ability to keep files in lossless, meaning that you still have the original to make backups from, convert to newer required formats, etc. You retain the ability to keep a laptop internal's mobility with a smaller filesize in a lossy amount, while not losing the lossless. You gain the ability to greatly expand your collection or anything else on your computer. (If you go with an external/ internal+enclosure) You gain the ability to share your library with more than just one computer or even put it on a NAS server.
What you gain by not adding an additional hard drive and converting to lossy: save $50-70 until you need more HDD space anyways.
as for backups, eh, it's about the same. I don't see a significant difference. Doesn't even matter for me, I can't afford to backup anyways.
What you gain by adding an additional Hard drive: the ability to keep files in lossless, meaning that you still have the original to make backups from, convert to newer required formats, etc.
as for backups, eh, it's about the same. I don't see a significant difference. Doesn't even matter for me, I can't afford to backup anyways.
I don't want to say something horrible, because it's not fair, but I think one day you'll realise this verges on OCD: suggesting that lossless is important, yet not backing it up. It's completely irrational.
I think another way of looking at lossy is this: if you had the chance to buy a 1.5TB drive for $100, or an otherwise identical $3TB drive for $100, which would you buy? For most people, that's exactly what lossy coding does for them - it lets them store twice as much stuff. It makes no other difference to them. The "but it's not really lossless" argument is about as relevant to them as saying "but the magnetic particles inside the drive that you'll never see are a slightly different colour" - they care about whether it works, and whether they can hear the music properly.
By the time you get to the level of lossyWAV, it's more like "why
wouldn't you do it?" - sensible answers being "I can't be bothered", "My music is already such a small percentage of the data I store that I wouldn't even notice the difference", and maybe "I want to be able to burn a bit-accurate copy of the original CD which I can then re-verify with AccurateRip." The more common answer is "I'm worried it might cause an audible change in some context at some point with some music" - which is fair enough, but it's also irrational: if you're that sensitive to potential faults in sound, you shouldn't be buying modern CDs or listening to the radio or watching TV because 99.9% of it will already be 10000x worse than anything lossyWAV will ever do.
Then again, we're all free to be irrational at times!
Cheers,
David.
Seriously, these days your 100 GB amounts to $5 worth of disk space, though you have to buy in larger quantity.
This is just retail cost for the drive. The majority of the cost for storage is actually in the management of it - time, risk and other resources spent copying, backing up, record keeping, dealing with media failures; electricity to power the device and supporting equipment; support hardware for housing, controlling, powering and cooling.
For instance, to upgrade storage inside a laptop requires that you replace the drive, reinstall the OS, and copy everything to the new drive. Even if you work at McDonald's wages, that's potentially a very time-consuming, expensive and risky undertaking.
Get an external drive. No extra cost for support hardware, no need to reinstall your OS. No electricity when you're not using it. Using lossy for your on-line music may make sense, esp with a laptop, but the extra hard drive removes the " irreversibly losing source" part of the original question.
but the extra hard drive removes the " irreversibly losing source" part of the original question.
Yes, but what all the advocates of "just get a new HDD" seem to be missing is their own assumption of the importance of "keeping the original".
Why is the original/lossless so important?
Because a) you can encode safely to lossy - i.e. it's a safe transcode source, and b) because it's future safe - i.e. you can switch from FLAC to WavPack losslessly and c) you can't ABX the difference (because there is none)
Now, that's exactly what you get with LossyWAV --standard:
Transcode safe, future safe, and can't ABX, BUT in addition you get filesizes 30% - 50% smaller.
The only thing you don't get is that warm fuzzy feeling that your files are bit for bit identical to the CD.
So unless you are going to be "remastering" / editing / processing the CDs you've ripped I can see no benefit, whatsoever of FLAC vs. LossyFLAC --standard. END OF STORY.
Unless any of the "new HDD advocates" in this thread can give a rational benefit of Lossless vs LossyWAV --standard please let me know. Conversely, filesizes 30% - 50% smaller is a clear undisputable benefit.
C.
Actually, the burden of proof is on you. Given the starting condition of having lossless music, there needs to be sufficient reason to change this. Given just this premise alone, combined with the fact that the user also needs more space, we can deduce the user has a need for this additional space and would like to fill it up, implying that they have more data they'd like to store. Any modern hard drive will easily be able to fit an entire lossless music collection, and add additional storage to the user's system while keeping the system the user has been using. This method allows them to expand as they have been. It is up to the proponents of lossy encoding to prove that a user who has room for lossless music now and is receiving more requirement for storage would be better off choosing a non-reversible action that allows a little bit more use out of a small hard drive (50-70 GB in this case) vs keeping their music as is just increasing their storage gains by 20X that. Since the user just wants more space, the most straight forward answer is just to get more space. It is up to the lossy proponents to prove that scraping up a few extra GB by hitting their music collection is the more sound action than just getting more space.
Btw, the comparison of a 1.5TB for the same price of a 3TB drive is invalid. This would imply that the person in question has 3TB of music in lossless. That is several times the size of my collection, and even larger than my video collection. A 1TB hard drive would be easily capable of storing almost everyone's lossless OR lossy music collection with plenty of room to spare. Furthermore hard drive price tapers off below 1TB. As such, the difference between your 1.5TB and 3TB hard drives in that example is non-existent.
That's a very long-winded way of saying "I'm sorry, based on what you said, I can't give you a rational benefit of choosing Lossless vs LossyWAV --standard".
C.
Just for the record, neither myself, nor Nick C (as far as I know!) are paying carpman for his endorsement of lossyWAV!
Cheers,
David.
Just to make clear, it's not my profound love of LossyWAV (sorry 2Bdecided) that's been motivating my posts in this thread (though I do think it's an excellent idea/tool); rather it's my disdain for this wasteful attitude of "just get another HDD". I can afford to leave all the lights on in my house all the time, but I don't, simply because it's wasteful. Perhaps people can afford another HDD, perhaps they'd rather save some space on their existing HDD. Perhaps they'd rather spend that money on something else. Hey! perhaps they'd rather save it! But the attitude of "just get another HDD" doesn't allow for anything other than "you don't need much of a reason to buy more crap".
No one asked the OP why he/she wanted to save space, instead a number of "just buy a new HDD" posters had some weird assumption that somehow the OP hadn't thought of buying a HDD, and that the OP lives in a land where HDDs are cheap. Notice that the OP simply ignored every poster that suggested buying a new HDD and engaged with those who dealt with the OP's question directly. So why not assume that the OP is not stupid and has a valid reason for wanting to do what they want to do.
Now, most of the quoted prices I've seen in this thread are in dollars, so let's see:
- Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,788 [Just get another HDD]
- Total U.S. revolving debt (98 percent of which is made up of credit card debt): $852.6 billion, as of March 2010 (Source: Federal Reserve's G.19 report on consumer credit, March 2010) [Just get more HDDs]
- Total U.S. consumer debt: $2.45 trillion, as of March 2010 (Source: Federal Reserve's G.19 report on consumer credit, May 2010) [borrow more and get another HDD]
- U.S. credit card default rate: 13.01 percent. (Source: Fitch Ratings, April 2010) [don't worry, get another HDD]
So, when China sells its US bonds and the dollar goes through the floor, I shall be interested to see how such attitudes change.
C.
I'm thankful to all users who helped me decide codec profile for what I asked, and very satisfied with the results: lossyFLAC with plain -q 2 switch, gained half space, at avg 370 Kb/s bitrate
Also I should mention that using foobar2000 made whole process very simple and testing pleasant
Additional ReplayGain processing was fast
As carpman noted, I didn't wanted to be involved in the separate discussions, but also don't want to leave mystery behind me: It is a laptop and not my main music library which is organized across different devices as it is. It is "wearable" unlike my desktop, so it has different treatment and music content among other things. I could have burned DVDs or simply copied to my desktop, which would slightly ruined my scheme, but I don't feel like I need to. Space is cheap, and I try to avoid redundancy as general principle - I'm not a "collector". You may not agree with it, but it's really not your decision in my case, so that's way I ignored some "buy" related posts
If now, I have a chance to choose release type between general lossy, lossyFLAC (even -q 2) or FLAC, I'd choose lossyFLAC, however ambitious it may seem