Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater MP3 vs Lossless Compression - the proof

Just suggesting that I'd rather buy two drives, if I need to rip them at a file size that is rather large to retain the quality, than go cheap, use only one drive and rip at a smaller file size and suffer a quality loss. Make sense?

The largest bitrate for MP3 I believe is 320....so even at that, with a 250gb drive, you are looking at close to 2000 CDs.

320kbs is in fact the max at this point in time.

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Here are my criteria:
1. Sound quality virtually indistinguishable from the CD
2. File sizes small enough to get 400-500 CD's on readily available, competitively-priced hardware
3. Ripping speeds appreciably faster than real time.
4. Ripping and Music library management software that is easy to use and compliant with listener-area-controllers
5. No super geeky or extremely obscure software/hardware solutions. I am not the alpha geek that most of you are.

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1 - That can be done even with a MP3 at 192kbs if it's done right......I prefer 320kbs. Better safe then no Bass! lol

2 - Already out there!

3 - Speed can be a two way street. Rip to fast and you can get read errors and a few other problems. One thing with EAC and LAME is it's not the fastest way to go. I can use MusicMatch and rip a CD in under 3 minutes but it does not sound the same as when I do it with EAC and LAME. Some do but not all so I take my time and do it the way I think it's right the first time. My method however can take upwards of 10 minutes per.

4 - Tons and tons out there..............you know what and how I rip. As for how I look after my library, Winamp!

5 - It's not the hard once you decide on what software you want use and what codec it is you prefer.

As for LAME being slow and obscure. Not at all. LAME is all over the place and very popular. As for the speed, it all comes down to what software you use, what codec and how good is your CD drive that you want to rip from.

Does that help at all?

Yes, John, it does. Thank you very much for taking the time to explain it to me. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience with those of us who are new to that process.

I'll point out that if you're going to use iTunes for management (and you're not streaming through something that requires MP3s) you can rip with iTunes, using AAC with a high bitrate (160 or above-it's different for AAC) or with the Apple Lossless (assuming you've got tons of disk space).

Oops, I just made it more complicated, didn't I?

Anyway, you don't need a separate program to rip your stuff. I've read a few articles showing AAC as ripped by iTunes to be higher quality than other formats, but I don't have the links, and I've also read articles that say different.

Great discussion.

I'm currently going through the process of ripping my CD collection to MP3. I'm using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with the LAME encoder running variable bit rate (VBR). The detailed settings are modeled after the suggestions here

I've been ripping mp3s fast and furious for the past few weeks. I've only listened to a small subset of what I've ripped so far, but I've been extremely pleased with what I've heard.

I have noticed that the compression logs often show "timing problems" occurred during the process, but ultimately there are no errors and I haven't heard any adverse effects in the mp3s themselves. Can anyone explain what these timing problems are? How might they affect the sound of the mp3s if at all, and is there any way or need to try to avoid them?

Thanks in advance!
Scott

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I have noticed that the compression logs often show "timing problems" occurred during the process, but ultimately there are no errors and I haven't heard any adverse effects in the mp3s themselves. Can anyone explain what these timing problems are? How might they affect the sound of the mp3s if at all, and is there any way or need to try to avoid them?

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Jitter... ie: the ripper is Lucy and Ethel boxing chocolates in that famous I Love Lucy episode. It missed a chocolate.

Slow down the speed you rip at, use a bigger buffer size - bunch of different ways to keep it from happening, but if you're just going to MP3 anyway and you don't hear a little noise burst anywhere, meh... you can probably get away without re-ripping the track.

You'd have to check with EAC itself to find out whether it passes the error along, or checks with the Reed-Solomon coding to try to fix the error on the hardware side, or forces a re-read of the affected sectors... seems a pretty generic error message.

Chances are you're just ripping too fast... if the drive is pushing data at say 32x single spin speed, it's got to spin-up and slow down, spin-up and slow down to let the encoder catch up. Like running a marathon by sprinting and resting.

Bren R.

Exactly! Sounds like a speed issue more then anything else. Are you using Secure mode in EAC? I do and my max rip speed is around the 3X mark. Slow but accurate.

EAC will also take it's time going back over the track to look for errors etc. It all adds time to the process but worth it in the long run.

I'll double-check when I get home, but I know I was set up in Secure mode when I got started. Unless something was changed without my knowing, it should still be that way.

From the little extra reading I've done, it seems that these "timing problems" or jitter do not necessarily contribute negatively to the end product. It's just an indication that the CD or DVD drive took longer to respond than EAC expected. Since I haven't heard any issues in the MP3s I've listened to, I think I'm going to keep plugging along.

I'll have to admit, I've probably been a little greedy. I discovered that I could rip from both my CD-R drive and DVD drive at the same time. I know that the extra load on the machine might not be desirable, but the time saved and the seemingly good end result kept me going.

Not to mention, I'm about 75-80% of the way through roughly 400 cds. The thought of trying this again with a different method is just plain scary.