Swinsian "Now Playing" user interface.

SO. A couple months ago I decided to switch away from Apple’s Music app to a third-party music player/manager. I ended up going with Swinsian, which seemed to replicate all the features I liked/needed from Music.app, without all the baggage (I’m not at all interested in streaming services, I like to own my music, and Apple never really lets you shut off that aspect of the application).

Swinsian music player for Mac

There were other reasons to leave the Music app:

• iTunes Match is glitchy, gets slow and fails to load music sometimes
• Music/Match loves to discard your artwork and substitute its own. In fact, it doesn’t seem to save artwork to the file itself, but buries it in somewhere in its database.
• Overloading of the poorly-chosen app name (Music) so you never know if they are talking about the app, the streaming service, or four other things named “music.”

So anyway, the marketing for all these alternative apps talked a lot about lossless formats. It wasn’t a big selling point for me, but it stuck in my head.

Come two weeks ago, I suddenly felt the need to switch to FLAC as my preferred format. I can’t remember exactly what the catalyst was, but that “lossless” idea had been tumbling around in my head.

So I re-ripped a few favorite CDs in FLAC. It took me a while to settle in to the best tools/process, but eventually I got into a groove and got to re-ripping a LOT of my CDs. I also re-downloaded a bunch of music I bought from BandCamp in FLAC format (nice that you can do that without re-purchasing!).

Now, on the other side of this process (I’ve re-ripped about 80% of the CDs I own and care about), was it worth it?

Yes…and no.

One the one hand, I think it’s better to listen to music as it’s published (on CD or lossless), and to avoid intentionally introducing file compression and artifacts. Encoding to mp3 is a near-25-year old habit that is unnecessary at this point. Disk space is a lot cheaper than it’s ever been.

On the other hand, I did a quick A/B listening test with a snippet of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” (from Meddle), and I couldn’t detect a whiff of difference between the mp3 and the FLAC. The mp3 format is advertised as getting rid of only the frequencies you won’t miss, and in a focused listening session, I could not determine that I was missing anything. I care a lot about timbre and sound quality (though not to the point of considering myself an audiophile), but even with focused listening, actively looking for differences, I could detect none.

Am I glad I did it? Yes. Because I now have lossless digital copies of all that music, I don’t ever need to go back to the discs and can consider them redundant backups (as I mentioned in the post about my ripping process, after importing, I copy them to an external hard drive which gets further backed up online). I can listen to this music knowing that it’s the best possible sound quality, if not quite hearing it.