MP3 Audio

I've been pondering over putting all my music into MP3 format for several reasons:

1) MP3 portables (those with around 128MB) are now pretty cheap and not expensive to replace if they die. They are also very compact and a convenient way to transfer music - i.e. not having to record all of your CDs to MiniDisc, not having to carry around a ton of discs etc.

2) Having access to tracks quickly - sometimes if you just want to listen to a selection for background music, hunting through 550 CDs is a real PITA.

3) If I every plan to work overseas (which I ultimately do), I can easily carry all my music on a HDD with me and just carry my laptop and a good pair of headphones, especially if the jobs are in remote locations/on short term contracts.

I've decided to use 128kps - although to some, it's a fairly low bit-rate, if encoded properly, I've found the music to sound more than acceptable. Also, storage space is a problem with large music collections. The format will be MP3, as that's what most portables use, so it would save the need to re-encocde if I was using another format that a replacement player wouldn't support.

Now, my main question is what ripping/encoding/management software to use? I like iTunes in the sense that it's very slick and simple to use. However, I did notice that encoding took an awfully long length of time - sometimes over 6 or 7 mins or more per CD, which is very time consuming if you're dealing with the number of CDs that I have.

My PC is of pretty decent spec - AMD Athlon 2000+ XP, 1GB RAM etc., so I don't think the speed issue could be that. CD drive is a 52X.

I'm looking for a package that will enable CDDB support, putting in proper tags - even track numbering, so that it would be easy to put album tracks in order when playing/transferring to a portable.

 

I hope that Tim F and WM will respond after yesterday. We did do the comparison, and even a 320kbps MP3 was off the pace of CD. 128 and 192 kbit drew comparisons to a transistor radio, and all of these were going through the same DAC as the CD transport does.

Talk to pbirkett, as he knows rather more than I on the encoding formats and programs to do it, but lately the view seems to be (garyi?) that compressed formats aren't a worthwhile compromise.

As for me, I'm not too bothered by CDs. I keep mine alphabetically so I can find anything quickly.

 

lost of info in this thread and especially this one...

for the record, i've been using 256K AAC, since the day iTunes for Windows came out, and it sounds every bit (pardon the pun) as good as CD through the same dac/pre/power/speakers...

and i can say for certain that i wouldn't listen to half of what i do if it weren't all sitting on a hard drive... but that's cos i'm a lazy git

 

In regards to the software, I would recommend Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.org/ as my ripper of choice. It's free, can hook up to the free CDDB to identify and label tracks, and can be configured to work with almost all the external auido codecs you would need i.e MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, APE etc. Admitidely it may not be as slick as iTunes and does take a little bit of work to configure the external codecs but there are plenty of FAQs and websites out there with info on how to do it.

As for your settings, I found the best MP3 settings to be those using VBR (Variable Bit Rate), which basically modulates the bit rate of the file so that in regions where there is more complexity more bits are used to store the info while in regions of low complexity less bits are used thus making more effieceint files.

For encoding into MP3 I would recommend LAME http://lame.sourceforge.net/

Here's a link on how to use LAME with EAC
http://users.pandora.be/satcp/cd2mp3-en.htm

As for info on codec and file formats, try www.hydrogenaudio.org

 

Whether MP3 will prove to be acceptable to you depends on quite a few things:-

1. Your standard of hearing - if you by your own admission have "cloth ears" then you may not hear much difference, or maybe even none at all.

2. The type of equipment you use - Naturally if you play it back on a portable player with cheap freebie headphones, then you definitely wont notice the difference. With a good enough rip, even on midfi equipment the difference may be small enough to prove insignificant. On very high end equipment, I can appreciate that it may make more of a difference (indeed, MP3s are more easily recognisable on my headfi rig than on my speakers). Also, for high end equipment, then you may as well go whole hog and have the very best source you can, and that starts with the software.

3. The type of music you compress - Perhaps my own satisfaction with the MP3 format comes down to the fact I listen to dance music. Most of which is not particularly detailed, and is not based in many cases on real instruments, but synethesised ones. I have downloaded many MP3s off the internet. Some are poor, some are very good, which leads me to point 4....

4. How they are ripped. If you use a package like CDex you can expect more or less the highest possible quality from your MP3s, as it has the LAME codec built in (so no arsing on configuring like EAC), and its ripping engine is maybe not quite as good as EAC, but its very very good and I believe that 99.9% of people will not be able to tell the difference between EAC and CDex if a secure mode rip is used for each.

So, those for me should be the main considerations just in regards to sound quality as to whether you will want to compress your audio. "Lossy" compressed audio is a bit of a minefield, because while there exists very good codecs that far surpass the performance of MP3, whilst even managing to do the encoding faster and the resulting filesizes being smaller, these formats have their drawback in being very poorly supported. For example, I have a slightly mixed blessing with using Musepack. While it clearly allows me to make more use of my disk space, its lack of support (only 3 or 4 PC software players I know of support it) can be annoying. Then you have the likes of OGG Vorbis, which is more supported than Musepack, but the quality is not as good at the same bitrate, and the files can end up very large if you want perfect quality - meaning that you may as well just go to lossless. WMA and AAC are not two formats that I have had any experience with, but I'd be surprised if they can match Musepack for their outright performance, but theres no debating that both are much more widely supported.

As much as it pains me to say it now, but I sometimes think it may be best to go straight for lossless these days, especially now that very large capacity devices are the norm - a 250 Gb hard disk drive should be able to fit approximately 600 - 700 80 minute CD's. A DVD-R backup should be able to fit approximately 12 - 15 full length CDs. These make more sense because even though it is compressed, its done losslessly and therefore can be used as a PROPER backup of your original CDs. You can even go ahead and make MP3, MPC, OGG, AAC, WMA or whatever format takes your fancy from these lossless files, and the quality will be exactly the same as if you had done it from the original CD.

Another thing to take into consideration is whether you can be bothered to rip possibly thousands of CDs. It is a VERY time consuming process, and I feel you should be forewarned about this before you start. I only have about 200 CD's personally, and it took me quite a few weeks to get all mine on board. In the longer term, PC audio can be quite convenient, but it can also be VERY hard work.

And that is only the beginning - you have soundcards, DAC's and software tweaking to do as well to get the best results!!

Even I lately have been questioning the real convenience of PC audio, I dont think its as convenient as some would have you believe, but I personally will continue to stick with it, because I admit that I still get most of my music from Peer 2 Peer, mainly because of money, and the fact that a usually small drop in quality is barely noticable in many cases, and for me at least, its not worth losing any sleep over. You may feel different though.

 

I use DBpoweramp for my encoding (www.dbpoweramp.com) because it is free and uses the lame encoder with plugins for others.

For playing I use winamp, I found iTunes was a little resource heavy when running other programs.

I personally encode at a minimum of 192, preferably 320 but still prefer my CD's

Andrew

 

Well as part of yesterdays proceedings Iaasc's ran through a few MP3/wav 192/512 kps demo's using his complete hifi set up and same dac, as the marantz transport was using.
Now if there was ever a demonstration to underline the fact how grim/awful/way behind this form of music reproduction is, graphicaly I might add, then we had it yesterday.
The initial setting was 192kps, compared to the cd running through the same cables and set up, it was like listening to an 80's matsui special, thin no bass, lifless, limp and totally digital in every respect.
Kicking up to 512kps was much better, it has a passable stab at approximating a drum rimshot too
swopping bad to the orginal cd format, presence tangibility and instruments that sound more like the real thing.
Iaasc will have all the tecnical details and spec's ask the man, prehaps the format is great for storage & convience.
This is the 3rd system for hard drive material I've heard, not the most most top notch, however I have heard an all sing and dancing one, for the moment at least the CD playing uis staying put.

 

Just to add that it is pointless to encode at 512Kbit... you may as well encode losslessly at that bitrate, as MP3 is always lossy no matter how high the bitrate.

 

Paul and others, many thanks for the detail/replies so far.

I've not got particularly sensitive hearing, so probably won't be able to notice minor differences. There is a particular 'way' in which I like my music to sound, so as long as I can acheive that, then I'd guess I've reached my objective really.

It's primarily for portable use that I'm doing this, although I will also play MP3s back into my hifi for general background listening through a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 card. Although not favoured by many, the sound I get from it playing back MP3s through my headphones (via a Yamaha AV amp) sounds pretty good to me.

I think I'll use CDex (I like simplicity) and see how rips @ 128kbps sound. I've heard very good and truely shocking MP3s at this bit-rate and I suspect much of it is down to the software. It's also a sensible bit-rate to use for portables in terms of number of tracks stored, where sound quality doesn't have to be a major factor.

I've been using MiniDisc for yonks and the ATRAC bit-rate is only slightly higher @ 132kbps, although I appreciate ATRAC is a different compression algorithim compared to MP3.

I'll give it a whirl in a bit using Youssou N'Dour's 'The Guide (Wommat) CD. I've been playing it a few times this afternoon on my Pioneer DVD, as the NAD is acting up (stopping during play). Sound quality is perfectly acceptable and it's a better comparison to use with MP3, in the sense that my expectations should be lower when using a £100 DVD player as a source, compared to a £200 CDP.

 

Right, I've downloaded CDex and had a play with it. First impressions are that it's nice and simple to use. I ripped 'Undecided (Deep Radio Mix)' from Youssou N'Dour's 'The Guide (Wommat) CD.

I encoded the file 4 times using slightly different settings. All, but one were at 128kpbs:

- Bog-standard 128kbps using the program defaults
- Joint-stereo, normal quality
- Stereo, high quality
- Variable bit-rate

'Bog standard' sounded a little too compressed and ropey for my liking. Slightly lacking in bass punch, detail and dynamics. Couldn't tell ANY difference with 'joint-stereo'. 'Stereo, high quality' offers a perfectly acceptable level of bass, detail and dynamics and I could easily live with this. VBR didn't offer me any difference over SHQ that warrants the larger filesize - approx 60% more over non-VBR.

On players, Windows Media Player offered pants quality and too much CPU utilisation. CDex was average, but very basic in function. I've just downloaded and installed WinAmp v5.03 and sound quality is better than CDex and the feature set is pretty

Note, these are my personal oppinions - bog standard, joint stereo and VBR etc. may have noticable improvements to others, but my cloth ears certainly cannot tell any difference.

 

2 things

• 
  1. Use FLAC for ripping
  2. Use FooBar2k for playback

 

There is a ripper called FLAC? I have heard of a lossless encoder called FLAC, but not a ripper. CDex or EAC can be configured to use FLAC, BTW.

Nsherin, tell me what your soundcard is and if you wish to use Winamp or Foobar I can offer suggestions to improve it more...

 

Cheers for that, Paul

I'm using a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 and WinAmp v5.03. If Foobar is better than WinAmp, then I'll happily change to it.

 

i'd second the use of flac (and EAC as the wav ripper / cddb / encoder shell) i've recently started ripping my cd collection in this format and must say that is compares favourably to cd (even though the playback hardware for pc audio is several orders of magnitude cruder than that for cd playback but plans are afoot).
i do have a couple of albums worth of 128bit mp3 lurking on my hard drive and must say that although it's definitely worse than flac or cd it's not as horribly offensive as has been made out. certainly for car or portable use it's more than sufficient however given the hard drive space i'd go with lossles (flac in this case) every time.
cheers


julian

 

Not sure about this, but don't some mp3 player not support flac as a format yet? It may be worth waiting until nsherin decides on his mp3 player of choice and seeing if it supports it, rather than convert everything now only to discover that he has to reencode everything later! Of course I may be talking complete crap here so feel free to say

At the moment I am using cdex quite happily, and using either mp3 192 or ogg. Ogg sounds a little better, though there isnt much in it. This is on an Iriver 120 with beyerdynamic 251 headphones.

 

i like this mp3 player
STP
runs in the system tray, takes very little cpu, easy to use

 

david,
yes you're right however if you look at http://flac.sourceforge.net/ then you'll be able to see some of the hardware that supports it.
cheers


julian

 

Paul

Yes you are correct, I should have said rip it (using EAC) and then convert to FLAC.

I pretty much use Foobar as is. Being lazy, tell us what tweaks can be done?

 

The tweaks you can use ultimately depend on the hardware.

What soundcard do you use Lilolee?

I will report back with these tweaks later, I am at work now so its not too easy to spend too much time on this...

 

Thanks, Paul. I went out and bought an MP3 player at lunchtime after taking my CDP in for repair. It's an MSI MEGA Stick 256:

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/ia/ia/pro_ia_detail.php?UID=543

£79.99 from The Computer Shop. It's about the same price online.