CD Ripping ?

[ncage]

Hey guys i am about to rip all my CDs so that i can listen to them on my mp3 player. My question is should i rip to mp3 or wma? I have a creative zen xtra and if i would buy another mp3 player i would probably go creative but who knows what the future will hold. I know wma will save me a little space though and creative is compatible with wma (i believe). Should i then convert everything to wma to save some space? If i decide to ever go with an ipod or something that isn't compatible with wma (which i probably won't) i would probably have to recode them to mp3 and i would think it would sound crappy. Also what do you guys recommend as in a ripping program? Right now i just have Windows Media Player 9 beta. Oh yes what bitrate should i encode them in also. I was thinking 192k.

thanks,
ncage

 

[d2arcturus]

EAC + LAME = VBR

http://www.chrismyden.com/bestmp3guide.php

 

[ncage]

Originally posted by: d2arcturus
EAC + LAME = VBR

http://www.chrismyden.com/bestmp3guide.php

Could you explain why this solution is the best?

 

[MichaelD]

This is MHO.

Go with MP3 b/c it's a universal format. Everything will play an MP3, but some players/CD players won't play .wma files.

Additionally, I used to go the EAC+LAME=MP3 route, and was very happy with the results. The downside is that it took extra time to rip the files to raw .wav format with EAC, then crunch them with LAME.

For about...1.5 years now, I use WMP10 to rip to MP3. 99% of the time, it even finds the song/artist list for the CD. I rip all my CDs to 320KB/s MP3s. These days, storage is very cheap. Not like 5 years ago when I started digitizing my 300+CD collection. Currently, about 60% of my MP3s are 256KB/s (very good) and the rest are 320KB/s (CD quality, IMHO).

CLIFF NOTE
Go with .mp3

 

[PurdueRy]

My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: ncage

Originally posted by: d2arcturus
EAC + LAME = VBR

http://www.chrismyden.com/bestmp3guide.php

Could you explain why this solution is the best?

IMO, it USED TO BE the best b/c it offered a plethora of options for naming the files, as well as the ability to either to Variable Bit Rate (VBR...which not all MP3 players support!) or go as high as 320KB/s fixed rate.

I'm not a Microsoft fanatic, but WMP10 is pretty darn good. It can do all of the above and then some. Plus, it's already on your computer, most probably, or only a free download away.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

Heh, now I'm curious! I know that FLAC offers the best audio quality for digitizing CDs. But, aren't the files almost the same size as the original CD/.wav files? A CD ripped to 320KB/s .mp3 is about 150MB in size...substantially smaller than say, 600MB.

 

[ncage]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

How exactly does FLAC work? You encode it to using flac to some format and how is the compression compared with say 128k mp3? About what size are you look for an entire cd? When your ready to put your cd in say a wma 96k format what process do you have to go through to convert it over?

 

[Megatomic]

I've never seen the use of going with a format other than MP3 myself. As MichaelD said, it's a universal format, it's going to be damned difficult to find an incompatability.

As to the actual ripping, I use CDex. It's back in development and you can find the latest build at it's home at Sourceforge.

CDex

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

Heh, now I'm curious! I know that FLAC offers the best audio quality for digitizing CDs. But, aren't the files almost the same size as the original CD/.wav files? A CD ripped to 320KB/s .mp3 is about 150MB in size...substantially smaller than say, 600MB.

It depends on the music itself. I get compression ratios from maybe 32% for simplistic instrumental tracks, to 75% for more complex rock/pop songs.

FLAC is nice for archiving, or regular use if you've got the space. The benefit of course of lossless compression is that you can encode to other audio formats from the "original" FLAC files, with no loss of quality other than that of simply encoding to a lossy format.

Concerning the original post, I also suggest MP3. It's just a more widely accepted format. If you encode with LAME, use the q=0 (or the highest quality) setting. What that setting does is control the balance between encoding time and quality. q=0 tells the encoder to do the best possible job it can, so it squishes more quality into the given bitspace that it has been given, but it takes longer to do it. So queue up plenty of work, set it to high quality, and go do something else. Or set the encoding process to Low Priority, and it won't slow things down.

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

Heh, now I'm curious! I know that FLAC offers the best audio quality for digitizing CDs. But, aren't the files almost the same size as the original CD/.wav files? A CD ripped to 320KB/s .mp3 is about 150MB in size...substantially smaller than say, 600MB.

Files ripped into FLAC format are not as big as .wav files, yet retain the same sound quality. Just for an example, I have the Smashing Pumpkins' "Siamese Dream" in FLAC format on my PC. The entire disc is 372MB, and most of the songs are 25-35MB in size.

The benefit is that if you use Foobar to listen to the FLAC files, you're getting CD quality sound because off the lossless compression (yes, better than even MP3s ripped at 320k CBR). Or, as PurdueRy pointed out, you can convert the FLAC files into any other format and get the same result as ripping them from the CD, except it's much faster and more convenient. For obvious reasons, this isn't the way to go unless you have a ton of free storage, but it doesn't cost very much to get a lot of space these days.

 

[DaveSimmons]

1,000 CDs in lossless FLAC format took up 300 GB of disk space on my music server. This was for about 80% rock/pop/etc. and 20% blues/jazz/classical. So on average about 300 MB per CD.

I had a Zen Xtra (until it died :| ) and like PurdueRy said I used dbPowerAmp to automatcially mass-convert from FLAC to 192 kbps mp3 for the Zen.

The nice thing is, if I change my mind I can re-convert to any other bitrate, or another format like Ogg or WMA, without lossy-to-lossy quality loss. The quality is just as good as if I re-ripped the CDs.

Now that I have an iPod, I might mass-convert to AAC at 160 kbps since it sounds as good as 192 kbps mp3 to me and would fit about 50 more CDs on the iPod.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't support importing from FLAC so to do this I'd have to try using the SDK to bash out my own conversion tool.

 

[Operandi]

Originally posted by: ncage

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

How exactly does FLAC work? You encode it to using flac to some format and how is the compression compared with say 128k mp3? About what size are you look for an entire cd? When your ready to put your cd in say a wma 96k format what process do you have to go through to convert it over?

For your use FLAC most likely won't work, since it's not supported by many MP3 players. It's a lossless codec so typically it's used for archrival purposes.

Right now MP3 is really the only practical solution that?s not closed (WMA is owned by Microsoft). There are other good open solutions (Ogg for example) but none of them have the wide spread acceptance that MP3 has.

I currently use and suggest EAC + LAME, I've ripped/encoded well over 1,000 CDs with this combination. Personally I'm using the extreme preset, which is the highest quality VBR setting but that's probably more then what most people need or want. Give this thread a read for the various LAME quality settings.

 

[MichaelD]

Excellent explanations; thanks guys. :thumbsup:

 

[ncage]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

Heh, now I'm curious! I know that FLAC offers the best audio quality for digitizing CDs. But, aren't the files almost the same size as the original CD/.wav files? A CD ripped to 320KB/s .mp3 is about 150MB in size...substantially smaller than say, 600MB.

It depends on the music itself. I get compression ratios from maybe 32% for simplistic instrumental tracks, to 75% for more complex rock/pop songs.

FLAC is nice for archiving, or regular use if you've got the space. The benefit of course of lossless compression is that you can encode to other audio formats from the "original" FLAC files, with no loss of quality other than that of simply encoding to a lossy format.

Concerning the original post, I also suggest MP3. It's just a more widely accepted format. If you encode with LAME, use the q=0 (or the highest quality) setting. What that setting does is control the balance between encoding time and quality. q=0 tells the encoder to do the best possible job it can, so it squishes more quality into the given bitspace that it has been given, but it takes longer to do it. So queue up plenty of work, set it to high quality, and go do something else. Or set the encoding process to Low Priority, and it won't slow things down.

In EAC where do you change this q=0 setting?

 

[ncage]

One More Question? Why do you guys think this option is better than using wmp10 to encode your mp3 (i decided to go with 192 Mp3)?What advantage does EAC + Lame give?

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: Operandi

Originally posted by: ncage

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.

This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.

Best of both worlds IMO

How exactly does FLAC work? You encode it to using flac to some format and how is the compression compared with say 128k mp3? About what size are you look for an entire cd? When your ready to put your cd in say a wma 96k format what process do you have to go through to convert it over?

For your use FLAC most likely won't work, since it's not supported by many MP3 players. It's a lossless codec so typically it's used for archrival purposes.

Right now MP3 is really the only practical solution that?s not closed (WMA is owned by Microsoft). There are other good open solutions (Ogg for example) but none of them have the wide spread acceptance that MP3 has.

I currently use and suggest EAC + LAME, I've ripped/encoded well over 1,000 CDs with this combination. Personally I'm using the extreme preset, which is the highest quality VBR setting but that's probably more then what most people need or want. Give this thread a read for the various LAME quality settings.

I wasn't suggesting he load his mp3 player with FLAC files. I merely suggest ripping to FLAC first as its easier then to change the file type and you will never need to get the CD out again.

 

[Operandi]

Originally posted by: ncage
One More Question? Why do you guys think this option is better than using wmp10 to encode your mp3 (i decided to go with 192 Mp3)?What advantage does EAC + Lame give?

LAME is considered to be the best MP3 encoder from a quality perspective, especially past 192k. EAC is also considered the best program for extracting the raw audio off the disc (many other produce errors). EAC is also the only program (to my knowledge) that dose secure rips, ie perfect bit for bit extractions.

As for LAME settings EAC uses the external LAME.exe for the encoding, so EAC has to send "commands" to the LAME executable. If you really want you can break it down to every command setting but the easiest way is to simply use the pre defined settings through the presets.

For example the command line I'm using looks like this " --alt-preset extreme %s %d -c -o" for the extreme preset, the rest of the commands have to with file name formatting mostly. Odds are you would be fine with the "alt standard" preset; check the link in my above post for more info.

 

[Baked]

You should just install iTunes and convert to 128/kbps MP3. You won't notice the difference between 128 and 192. You don't sound like a hardcore encoding fanatic, so why even bother going FLAC or LAME.

 

[ChiSoxFan]

Originally posted by: Baked
You should just install iTunes and convert to 128/kbps MP3. You won't notice the difference between 128 and 192. You don't sound like a hardcore encoding fanatic, so why even bother going FLAC or LAME.

I'm no audiophile, but there is definately a noticeable difference between 128 and 192 MP3, and with the size of portable players nowadays that is a really bad way to skimp on quality IMO for such a big quality difference. Also doesn't iTunes have a pretty poor quality MP3 encoder built in?

 

[sniperruff]

192-320kbps VBR mp3 FTW. you can play it in your car's mp3 deck, any mp3 discman, any mp3 player, laptop, phone... you name it.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: ncage
In EAC where do you change this q=0 setting?

Actually, I'm not quite sure. In the Compression Options, in the LAME DLL tab, there's a Quality setting. I'm not sure which is better though, High Quality (which might be q=2) or Voice Quality. Your other option is to use the External Compression tab, but that means that you'd have to know the commandline options, accessible by typing lame --longhelp at the commandline. My options: -m s -q 0 -b 160 Sets it to stereo mode, q=0, and a 160kbps bitrate. I use that for my portable CD-MP3 player and my car's CD-MP3 player.

 

[ForumMaster]

you could go with AAC. and despite what most people think, AAC is NOT apple audio codec. it is advanced audio codec which is the followup to mp3. it is mpeg-4 encoded music. it gives you lot's of options and frankly, i think it sounds better. if you are an audiophile, then go with flac or some other loss-less format. otherwise, aac is good.

 

[Operandi]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: ncage
In EAC where do you change this q=0 setting?

Actually, I'm not quite sure. In the Compression Options, in the LAME DLL tab, there's a Quality setting. I'm not sure which is better though, High Quality (which might be q=2) or Voice Quality. Your other option is to use the External Compression tab, but that means that you'd have to know the commandline options, accessible by typing lame --longhelp at the commandline. My options: -m s -q 0 -b 160 Sets it to stereo mode, q=0, and a 160kbps bitrate. I use that for my portable CD-MP3 player and my car's CD-MP3 player.

No you don't actually; you simply use the presets, that?s what they are there for.

 

[tjpark1111]

if you have the device to support it, OGG FTW!!!! Sounds MUCH better at lower bitrates and overall even better than AAC, and takes up even less space as well. It does take up a bit more battery power in portable devices because apparently it takes more decoding power to listen to OGG files, but I see it as a good trade-off for the extra space and better sound quality i get from my Cowon iAudio A2 PMP(sent in for repair.... grr....)