Best ripping method

[Big Wheel]

What's odd is that this disc is, at least as far as I can tell, cleaner than most of the others I've ripped so far. There is one one scratch running along the radius of the disc but it's very faint and doesn't appear deep at all. There's also some dust on the surface, but no more than on other CDs I own...guess I'll experiment and make sure that not everything is taking this long.

[Epithet]

There is one one scratch running along the radius of the disc

Those are the worst kind.

[Big Wheel]

Maybe for copying, but I've never had any playback problems with them.

[Daniel A]

Those are the worst for playback too. A CD player reads at constant speed, much like the CDR drive does in "Burst mode". If the data stream is broken - a few samples are perhaps not readable due to a scratch - the CD player may mask the errors so well that you can't hear anything wrong. However, if you want to create a copy of the CD (or make an MP3 file) you must have a continuous data stream. In secure mode the software tries to get the missing samples again and again, causing - in the worst case - infinite extraction time. Burst mode will make the CDR drive work more like a CD player, except that there is no hardware error correction.

Scratches along the radius are much more likely to cause problems than other scratches, even for a audio CD player, because they may make several samples in a row unreadable, whereas a diagonal scratch only damages a few each turn of the disc.

[Big Wheel]

Thankfully, it was just that one disc. Everything else I've ripped today has been very speedy--averaging about 5x. Crazy what that one little scratch can do!

[clandy44]

Big W-I have ripped a number of cds in recent weeks. Two things: (1) I used AAC 128kbp and the sound is excellent, especially with Etymotic ER-4P headphones-big advantage is that I can squeeze a ton of music on my 40 gig-more sensitive ears may need slower, better regarded methods, and(2) when several of my cds would not rip properly and yet played through nicely on my cd players, I simply made a copy of the offending cd and then ripped the copy-worked flawlessly every time. All of this is well worth the effort-shoveling the white stuff just got a lot better.

[Daniel A]

(2) when several of my cds would not rip properly and yet played through nicely on my cd players, I simply made a copy of the offending cd and then ripped the copy-worked flawlessly every time. All of this is well worth the effort-shoveling the white stuff just got a lot better.

How did you make a copy without having to rip the CD first? On compact cassette?

[Big Wheel]

When restoring the Secure mode, also be sure change "Speed selection" back to top speed again.

The program gives me a choice between "Actual" speed, and then a bunch of speeds from 4x to 24x. Should I choose "actual" or 24x?

Also, how should I set the extraction/compression priority and error recovery settings? They're both set to "medium" now, but I wasn't sure if that was the default.

[Daniel A]

When restoring the Secure mode, also be sure change "Speed selection" back to top speed again.

The program gives me a choice between "Actual" speed, and then a bunch of speeds from 4x to 24x. Should I choose "actual" or 24x?

Also, how should I set the extraction/compression priority and error recovery settings? They're both set to "medium" now, but I wasn't sure if that was the default.

"Actual" for some reason seems to mean "The speed you picked last time, whatever that is", so if you've selected a lower speed for a problematic disc earlier, just switch back to highest possible speed, which in this case is 24x.

Regarding the extraction/compression and error recovery settings, just put the cursor over the respective drop-down menu, and a fairly explanatory info box will appear. I'd say that "medium" should be a good setting in most cases.

[couw]

"Actual" for some reason seems to mean "The speed you picked last time, whatever that is"

common mistake by German speaking folks. Aktuell = current/active, not actual = eigentlich.

[Big Wheel]

It's amazing how much better EAC does when I make sure to give the disc a thorough wipe with a soft cloth before ripping. Last night I tried to rip a CCR album and there were tons of errors; today I gave the same CD another good wiping and it blazed through at about 10x. I think EAC may slow the whole CD down if there are errors on the very first track (in other words, it doesn't speed back up again very much even if the rest of the CD is nice and clean).

[Epithet]

You got 10x in secure mode? Wow.

[cannonball-addict]

Use iTunes!!!!

It is supported by Mac OS, Windows, Linux, etc. - almost any operating system

Click on the iTunes menus.

Select Preferences.

Click on the 'Importing' tab.

Under 'Import Using,' select AAC Encoder for best quality.

Under 'Setting' select Custom and set 'Stereo Bit Rate' for 192 kbps.

For 'Sample Rate' and 'Channels' set both to 'Auto.'

Rock on!

[Daniel A]

Under 'Import Using,' select AAC Encoder for best quality.

For some people that might be an aternative. If you plan to listen to the music on a MP3 player (portable, car stereo, DVD player etc.) MP3 is still the choice.

BTW, be warned that Microsoft's wma format is inferior, though hardware support is icreasing.

[Daniel A]

For newcomers, here's a good and informative five page guide to making MP3s with LAME:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/encoding.ars/1

The only thing it fails to mention are settings for mono encoding, but that is mentioned above in this thread.

Edited March 25, 2005 by Daniel A

[Jazz Kat]

I was afraid this thread would be about something else......

[AfricaBrass]

For newcomers, here's a good and informative five page guide to making MP3s with LAME:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/encoding.ars/1

The only thing it fails to mention are settings for mono encoding, but that is mentioned above in this thread.

Thanks for all your help, Daniel!

Your advice has made a huge difference in my mp3s. Since I'm ripping my entire collection, this means a lot to me.

:rsmile:

---------------

Jeff / Formerly AfricaBrass

[Daniel A]

[riverrat]

Check this site out for a completely painless tutorial on downloading LAME and EAC, as well as a couple of other files that apparently are necessary to make them talk to each other. I am highly challenged with this stuff and I had EAC and LAME installed and working seamlessly in about 15 minutes.

http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php...E&file=painless

I've been lurking on this thread for awhile now, trying to do my homework before making multi-dimensional move into the digital music era in my truck and perhaps a personal music player. I want to buy a CD player for my 4runner, an iPod, start an MP3 library and make custom HIGH QUALITY burns to listen to in my truck.

I downloaded iTunes awhile back, nice software for archiving, but I wanted to integrate the high quality rips and burns I read about here. I was, frankly, intimidated by the steps mentioned in this thread. Then I found out about some freeware that integrates LAME with iTunes for Macs. While searching to see if there was a Windows version of this (there isn't) I came upon the site listed above and decided to walk through it.

Really nice to have a bunch of download and configuration steps work without a single problem, certainly a first for me.

I have LAME set at 192 kps variable and "alt preset standard" (the default). I've only burned one song to test my setup so far, but even my tin ears can easily detect the improvement over my standard iTunes MP3s. I am STOKED.

[Jim Dye]

Lately, I've been encoding with LAME 3.96.1 and using the --preset fast medium setting. The average bit rate is around 160 and everything I've thrown at it sounds great. It's more than good enough for the car and office, and allows me to cram a few more albums on my 20 gig iPod.

B-)

[Daniel A]

For those who want to keep up with the latest improvements of the LAME encoder, but who haven't visited Hydrogen Audio or some similar forums of late: For a while there has been a new LAME version out with slightly faster encoding speed and supposedly giving somewhat better audio quality.

Check this thread at Hydrogen Audio :

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=28124

Recommended version of LAME is 3.97 beta 2, available here

http://www.free-codecs.com/LAME_Encoder_download.htm

In short, the alt-presets for VBR (variable bit rate) encoding have been replaced with ten different presets, ranging from -V 9 (lower quality) to -V 0 (highest quality).

The recommended commandline equivalents of the old alt-preset standard are now:

-V 2 --vbr-new (stereo)

-V 2 --vbr-new -mm (mono)

-V 2 --vbr-new --lowpass 15 (FM stereo recording)

(The -b previously used for setting the minimum bitrate is no longer needed)

[johnagrandy]

BTW, be warned that Microsoft's wma format is inferior, though hardware support is icreasing.

That's exactly what I read and heard from many sources ... including professional audio/video engineers.

But I recently bought a high-end new Toshiba laptop with Windows XP Pro SP2 and wmplayer.exe v10.0.0.3646 pre-installed and it rips/encodes .wma files lightning fast (less than 1 minute per CD) and the sound is absolutely flawless as far as I can hear. No technical reading or configuration necessary. Pure simplicity.

Maybe I'm not getting the best sound possible, and maybe I need to do some comparisons with other technologies to know for sure, but with the WMAs sounding just as good as on my high quality CD player I really wonder if it's worth my time ... ?

What's radically changing the world of laptop rip/encode is the dual-core CPU machines (MacBook the first) -- because with these you can run other processor-intensive app(s) while the rip/encode is occurring. One core does the rip/encode, the other core runs the other app(s). For example, you can watch high-quality video or run some monster db sql script while ripping/encoding.

And at my work today, a guy who's an expert in all this was talking about how you can even hook up an external CD burner and simultaneously rip/encode one CD while burning another one you've previously ripped/encoded onto your hard drive. Not sure if wmplayer.exe can do this yet, but apparently some sofware can.

He also said that Microsoft's next big version of wmplayer.exe that will make it possible to rip/encode a CD and burn a copy of it simultaneously (if you have the extra external drive, or course; plus there are rumours of laptops in the works with built-in dual CD/DVD drives). I'll talk to him more tomorrow and post.

I can't wait until Toshiba puts out a dual-core model that gets top reviews. ( I only trust Toshiba for laptops ... bad experiences with every other manufacturer. )

Of course, dual-core will be always be faster on boxes than on laptops (because of the heat dissipation issues). The reason I emphasize laptops is that you can slice up the monster chore of ripping/encoding all your CDs across your daily schedule. Some in the morning before work, a whole bunch at work, more at home at night, at a cafe on the weekends, when you're visiting family or friends, etc. Takes a lot of the tedium out of it.

Edited March 23, 2006 by johnagrandy

[Mr. Gone]

BTW, be warned that Microsoft's wma format is inferior, though hardware support is icreasing.

Maybe I'm not getting the best sound possible, and maybe I need to do some comparisons with other technologies to know for sure, but with the WMAs sounding just as good as on my high quality CD player I really wonder if it's worth my time ... ?

"Worth my time"? Uhm...

downloading (the new lame version) + unzip + encoding a sample wav < 3 min

Takes almost less time than talking about how it's probably not worth one's time.

Edited March 23, 2006 by Mr. Gone

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I've recently switched to using EAC with the latest LAME encoder set to VBR q3 mp3 which is approx. 192 kbps. While slightly larger than my old CBR 128 kbps, they sound exactly like the source to my ears.

Be warned that Windows Media Player futzes with the analog if you use it to burn CD-R back-ups. In particular, find the tab where they default to having normalization "on". Shut that off pronto.

Also, be forewarned that by default Windows Media Player reports back to Microsoft when you stick a CD in there. It's set by default in several places. It looks for "licenses", which is a buzzword for "copy protected". Windows is big on copy protection.

Kevin

[Guest]

I've recently switched to using EAC with the latest LAME encoder set to VBR q3 mp3 which is approx. 192 kbps. While slightly larger than my old CBR 128 kbps, they sound exactly like the source to my ears.

Be warned that Windows Media Player futzes with the analog if you use it to burn CD-R back-ups. In particular, find the tab where they default to having normalization "on". Shut that off pronto.

Also, be forewarned that by default Windows Media Player reports back to Microsoft when you stick a CD in there. It's set by default in several places. It looks for "licenses", which is a buzzword for "copy protected". Windows is big on copy protection.

Kevin

Kevin - does this mean I am 'reported' to Bill Gates every time I rip a CD (my own) to transfer to MP3 (WMP) format to play on my MP3 player? Can't think Apple are going to be happy about this - surely not everyone downloads MP3 tracks from the web?

Edited March 23, 2006 by RogerFarbey