The Bhaktivedanta Archives of the Future
BY: PRATYATOSA DASA (ACBSP)
Apr 9, MICHIGAN, USA (SUN) — Without a doubt, the Bhaktivedanta Archives have, in the past, performed a wonderful service for Srila Prabhupada. Even though they have made some very big mistakes, such as editing his lectures, I'll assume that it was done out of ignorance of Srila Prabhupada's very clear instructions on the matter, and that Srila Prabhupada is, for the most part, very much pleased with their sincere service.
However, IMHO, the time has come for a change. I am hereby suggesting that the Bhaktivedanta Archives devotees give up their 20th century ideas, and make the leap into the 21st century. This means that they should realize that all digital media, especially Srila Prabhupada's precious legacy (including the VedaBase), should be made available (with no copy protection) for free on the Internet, or on CDs / DVDs for slightly above the cost of the media!
The original audio tapes should be made available, one-by-one, on a daily basis, on the Internet in a high quality, lossless format such as FLAC. This is especially important for the tapes that are good quality, but have not been transcribed or released as MP3s because the time and place information has been lost. Making these particular audio recordings available to the entire worldwide community of devotees should be the highest priority, but eventually exact lossless digital copies of all of the original audio tapes should be made available as free downloads.
Having all of Srila Prabhupada's audio recordings made available as free downloads in a high quality lossless format would ...
1. ...increase web traffic to Prabhupada.com, therefore increasing book and poster sales. The sales of MP3 / FLAC / movie DVDs would also increase, because not everyone is going to be willing to spend several days downloading them. In some parts of the world, where Internet connections are slow and/or unreliable, it may not even be possible to download them.
2. ...allow devotees all over the world to become "mini-archives" of Srila Prabhupada's precious legacy. (What if someday in the future, heaven forbid, there is a fire at the Archives which destroys the originals!)
3. ...allow devotees all over the world to be engaged in very important devotional service by "cleaning up" the original recordings (employing advanced digital noise reduction techniques, etc.). All that is required to do this is an inexpensive computer, and software
such as Adobe Audition.
4. ...allow devotees all over the world to be engaged in very important devotional service by helping to identify the audio recordings for which the time and/or place information has been lost.
5. ...allow devotees all over the world to be engaged in very important devotional service by transcribing Srila Prabhupada's newly released lectures / conversations. These transcriptions could then be also published on the Internet. These transcriptions would then serve as addition tools to help in jogging devotees' memories so as to help to narrow down the time and place information.
6. ...allow devotees all over the world to be engaged in very important devotional service by converting the lossless format files into MP3 files with tags designed to be compatible with popular cutting-edge MP3 players such as the iPhone and iPod touch.
Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa
"Idiots guide to FLAC vs WAV vs MP3:"
rick's cafe wrote:
Could someone give me a brief idiots guide to FLAC Ripping vs WAV vs
> MP3.
I'm not sure if you are asking about the file formats or ripping software.
Since, this is the audiophiles list, part of the answer can be short
and easy. MP3 and other lossy formats throw away parts of the music
that they think are not important. Audiophiles think that every part
of the music is important, and no dumb algorithm can decide so they
never use MP3 for anything worth listening to.
From the audiophile focus on sound, there is no difference between WAV
(pcm) and any of the lossless compression systems. These include FLAC,
MLP, WMA-lossless, AAC-lossless, etc. By definition, lossless means
nothing is lost.
WAV files have two downsides. They are bigger (see below) and you
can't tag them. Tags help library management, and managing a large
library is a big deal. If you have a tiny library, it doesn't matter
at all.
> Also on avg what is the file size for a CD ripped as FLAC vs the rest
> and what rippers do you recommend I use.
FLAC for me achieves a 40% to 50% compression. So a movement that is
100MB becomes 60MB compressed. YMMV a lot.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19976
