CarMad Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 Right.. I want to start putting my fairly large selection of CDs into MP3. I'm not intending to buy an IPOD at the moment but it is a potential. I currently have a tiny Sony MP3 player but use Atrac as it was meant to be better and the tracks smaller. However I want to serve the music around the house via my wireless with a box in one or two rooms and none support Atrac only MP3 or WMA etc. So which is best to encode to to get the best quality. I have a Denon AV amp 3802 and am used to the sound from my Arcam CD player so want to try and keep as close to that. So what software do I need to do all the encoding ? Whats the best format / quality to use ? Any other info to help would be beneficial. I have used google to help out a bit but I thought i'd get some insite from the minds of some TSNers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skifly Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 personally i just use itunes to rip the CD's as it can also look up the track names online etc... then you never have to use it again if you dont want to. Sure your sony jobbie's software can convert to atrac. I am also considering doing the wireless thoing round the house so if you have any good reccomendation of wireless media players then feel free to share away. Currently considering the airtunes thingy as i have an ipod and use itunes quite a bit. rip to MP3 and i guess you want to keep the rate as high as possible but remember that the higher it is the larger the mp3 files. Personally i rip at 128 normally but have gone higher and lower and that is fine for my needs. try a few tester discs at differing rates and see if you can tell... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomk Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 if you wnat good quality rip at 168 - its not much bigger and i notice the difference to my ear... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted October 26, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 Well this months Computer Shopper has a test on the two different types, music players and multimedia players. The Roku Soundbridge M1000 won the music but the Netgear MP101 won the value award for being only £75 at savastore.com. However on the Multimedia catagory the Pinnicle Showcenter 200 won but second and with almost exactly the same features was the D-Link DSM-320, it plays all the music and will display pictures on your TV etc. it has difficulty playing DivX videos but thats not the draw for me anyway I have DVDs for all that. But its only £90 at Dabs so its a bit of a bargain. The airtunes wasn't tested. Hope this helps, the mag is current and still in the shops. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si_GTi Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 For my mp3 needs I have been using MusicMatch Jukebox v10 to encode my CD collection into mp3 format at 192kbps quality, which I've found to be really good - when listening to my older rips from a couple of years back at 128kbps I can notice the difference in quality between the two levels quite easily! If I'm downloading music I use allofmp3.com and again download in mp3 format at 192kbps. As a filesize example a 4 minute track is about 5.7MB in size. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syeldham Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 Doesn't iTunes change copied CD track to MP3? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snail Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 Id advise always ripping at a high bit rate. On headphones and cheap systems you wont notice anything, but put a 128k MP3 onto a decent system, and it will sound pants, and you dont want to redo your whole collection again in 6 months time! Personally i use 100% VBR (variable bit rate) so it uses what it needs rather than a fixed bitrate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted October 26, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 Cheers for the advice so far all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AntW Posted October 26, 2005 Report Share Posted October 26, 2005 I rip and download all my tracks at 320kbps. That gives you near cd quality. 2 main reasons: Storage is pretty cheap now anyway and more importantly, if you want to reduce the quality for whatever reason then you can drop to 128 bit-rate. But if you encode at 128, you can't increase the quality. Hope this helps Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chelsea Mick Posted October 27, 2005 Report Share Posted October 27, 2005 [ QUOTE ] Doesn't iTunes change copied CD track to MP3? [/ QUOTE ] I think it rips cd's to .AAC format by default. See this other thread in this forum to change the import preferences to MP3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted October 27, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2005 I have done lots of digging round and it seems that Windows WMA is better than MP3. Yes or no ? If I use WMA it seems to be usable everywhere except on Apples IPOD just about. This is like a mini format war why can't they make it simple to adopt. If I wanted best of everything I would need 3 different devices that support at least 2 different formats. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syeldham Posted October 27, 2005 Report Share Posted October 27, 2005 [ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] Doesn't iTunes change copied CD track to MP3? [/ QUOTE ] I think it rips cd's to .AAC format by default. See this other thread in this forum to change the import preferences to MP3 [/ QUOTE ] Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shark_90 Posted October 27, 2005 Report Share Posted October 27, 2005 I personally would stuck to MP3, with a decent bitrate and the right encoder. LAME MP3 encoder is arguably the best one around, and with the bitrate set to 256 or 320 if you really want to push the boat out, I'm sure that'd be fine. MP3s are useable no matter what, as the format isn't proprietary, where WMA, ATRAC etc are. ATRAC is better than MP3, but as you say they are not universally compatible. MP3 all the way mate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted October 27, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2005 Cheers mate I think thats what I'm going to do. Am playing with Musicmatch 10 at the moment at might use 100% VBR as a good compromise for size and quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snail Posted October 28, 2005 Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 As Shark says, MP3 isn't the perfect format, but its the only one you can guarantee any multimedia device will support. 100%VBR is the way i use it, although i have noticed one or 2 devices, that dont support bitrates of over 256k. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrianFD3S Posted October 28, 2005 Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 iTunes rips to .aac (as already said) this means that the music can only be played in iTunes on you computer, or on an iPod, no other mp3 players. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted October 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 Well, I have ripped 20 ish CD so far and all is going very well. A, ripping using Musicmatch 10 and its seems fast and the quality good. Today my new toy arrived, a Netgear MP101 its being discontinued but it got best buy in this months Computer Shopper. My friend Mr Ebay sorted me out with one for £56 delivered. It arrived this morning and its up and running with minimal tweaks to PC etc. in only 20 mins and its sounds great. Don't really need one but hey when did that ever stop us getting a new toy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted November 1, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 1, 2005 Update.. Right Music match need money to register otherwise it went to a crawl so it got ditched. Plus the encoding had a few issues. So I'm now using Audiograbber, which has found every CDs info and then adds the ID3 tags. It Will rip the CDs to encode later on. I have got the latest LIME encoder and the quality is excellent. If anyone is about to start or currently is ripping MP3s, check out the best settings to use on the net etc. but this is a great piece of freeware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Regulator Posted November 1, 2005 Report Share Posted November 1, 2005 good piece of software which i use is Adobe Audition version 1 ... not the latest, but the new one has 2 many gimmics in for me ... takes a lil while to encode cd's etc but, it also allows you to select a huge number of output formats and also has a large number of bitrate options ... defo worth considering .... If not, stick to the standard Windows Media Player Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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