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.