CD ripping
 

Just curious
What bit rate do most rip at for wma?
96, 128, other....

For mp3s, I usually choose the highest Variable Bit Rate setting.

Why VBR?

320k for MP3
256k for WMA

All new stuff is ripped WMA.

I've picked higher rates so that some point X years from now, when all home stereo equipment is wireless, I don't have to worry about re-ripping my old stuff. The high quality file will sound great on my 19.1 hifi.

Having said that, I'm sure that X years from now, all content will be readily available on-line and on-demand, and I'll have needlessly filled up my disks with bloated bitrate files.

I'm also sure that X years form now, my hearing will have deteriorated so much, that a 64k bit rate would be fine.

I'm also sure that X years from now, Microsoft will have abandoned the WMA format for something more proprietary.

But for now I'm content with my far sightedness. :)

I store the original wav files using lossless compression (.ape or .flac) was well as encode using vbr. that way if i decide to use a different format or higher quality settings, i can easily re-encode my collection without manually inserting and removing the cd's again. unfortunately, this does use quite a bit of disk space.

I rip at the max in WMA.

No kidding! Are you looking at 400-500mb per CD?

No. Usually a CD can be compressed about 50%, so it's more in the 200-300mb range. Disk drives are cheap nowadays.

It's usually the best compromise between quality and compression.

Do you rip it twice, or do you use a flac > something playable converter?

I rip it to a .wav file using a program called "exact audio copy".

then i compress it using "monkey's audio" to a .ape file.

i run "lame" to convert the .wav file into an mp3.

then i delete the .wav files.

producing the .ape and .mp3 files is very processor intensive, so i usually run those steps overnight.

I too rip everything to lossless flac files, and encode to mp3 at whatever bit rate I want, as needed. (or whatever format I need).

Disk space is very cheap these days.

-David

There are various programs that support flac decoding. I use cdex with flac as an external encoder/decoder. cdex is very powerful, so you effectively get to skip a step as in RLG's method (but really, under the hood, the same is happening .. it reads the file in as a wav file and passes it to your external encoder using the command line options you specify, it's just easier this way since it's all done in a single "job".)

You can get flac plugins for winamp and other players, so you can play them natively using your favorite player.

Then I use dbpowereamp for converting from flac to anything else. dbpoweramp is a very handy program.

-David

You may want to look at Easy CD-DA extractor.. It will rip directly to .flac or .ape. It will also convert form one format to another...

EAC can do that as well.

I don't use that feature because it slows down the ripping process while it does the computation intensive compression. I prefer to have it do the part which requires manual intervention (inserting & removing CD's) quickly, then run the other part overnite when I'm sleeping.

I also use dbpoweramp for converting between formats. It's a great program.

Personally, I can't fathom why anybody would choose wma as their native format, but to each their own, I guess. That's why we have choices. :)

-David

I vaguely recall that if you're going to extremely compress the files (i.e. very low bitrates), wma gives better quality for the same size than mp3. since i'm using a high bitrate, mp3 is better.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ is the FT of these types of audio issues.

Its higher quality at a lower bitrate than than mp3 and compatible with my player.

I do exactly the same thing. Take a stack of CDs, copy them to WAV with EAC (which also does lots of error correction and the like in case a CD happens to have a scratch, as some of my 16 year old CDs now unfortunatley do), and then run a batch file to bulk encode them overnight.

Am I the only one that uses Apple's Lossless codec? It does a pretty good job of sound preservation, though 40MB for a 3 min track is abit heavy on the memory.

I especially use Lossless for instrumental CD's.

My DAP directly supports FLAC so I RIP CD's directly to FLAC using jetAudio and then drag an drop them to the DAP.

I just discovered a service that I wish I had known about sooner.

www.awaken.com will rip your CDs for you in your choice of several formats and bit rates and send them back to you with all your CDS in the chosen format organized on DVD. During the process, they'll repair scratches and organize by Artist, Title and genre

For a slightly higher fee, they'll also organize your CDs and cover art in a binder.

What a great idea! I still have about 150 CDs I haven't gotten around to ripping, so they are going off to them next week.

128kb.

Seems best compromise although with CDs being so cheap I should do it much higher :o