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What is the best format to rip my CD collection?

2322 Views 34 Replies 19 Participants Last post by jen4950, Oct 30, 2004

The Spectre

Discussion Starter · Oct 12, 2004

What is the best format to rip my CD collection? I have well over 300 CD's

and want to RIP them onto hard drive for the following future purposes;

1. To play back from a Media Center 2005 PC (HTPC and MCE capable laptop)

2. To play back from a portable listening device ie. iPod, Iriver, etc.)

3. To stream to my home theater receiver, & PC's and other devices on

home network

4. To store on NAS server

My plan right now is to rip as .wav files and then convert what I need/want

to lossy format (MP3?) for playback on portable player and laptop. I guess

only down side to this is the amount of space required. Is there a better

way, what are you guys doing?

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1 - 20 of 35 Posts

Scotty L

· #2 · Oct 12, 2004

I'm just doing straight wav, but I only ripped 2 dozen full albums with a sh*tload of storage space. If I wanted to do my whole collection I'd do one of the lossless formats: APE, WMA, or Apple's. They can be unpacked back to the orginal wav, bit for bit.

MP3 is over a decade old and 200gb hds are always getting cheaper, but that's just my take on it.

RobScreene

· #3 · Oct 12, 2004

Having gone through this process with mp3's and then ape's...

1. I'd use exact audio copy (EAC) and the flac lossless format.

2. I like EAC mostly because it also puts the silence gaps at the end of each track, so the next track doesn't start too soon when listening to an album. And it gets it right when there isn't a silent gap when two trackes fade between them.

3. Both audiograbber and EAC can get tag details for the album off a CDDB on the internet to save you any typing. Using flac with EAC means the album name and tags don't get truncated, whereas with audiograbber/ape I think only about 15 characters long were stored.

4. EAC also now has the AccurateRip feature to automatically calibrate the cd/dvd drive's extract-offset and for each rip, it gives a track checksum test against a known database of rips of that CD album by other users, so you know it was a perfect rip with no pops, etc.

5. .ape is the best lossless compression, but .flac is only about 10MB per album more. Plus with well tagged flacs, it would be easily to set a foobar2000 lossless convert feature to ape (overnight) if ever needed. This can retain the tags and artist/album directory structure too.

6. flac requires much less cpu to playback, so is more suited to mobile/embeded devices than ape.

e..g.

I think the slim mp3 or rocku devices can play .flac natively (however I have a netger mp101 that can't)

7. For putting on my IPAQ, I only currently have 64MB SD storage, so I re-compress the tracks down to 96Kbps MP3 using the foobar2000 convert feature and the LAME --alt-preset 96 which is really nice and not too objectionable given it's small bitrate. I'll probably change that when I get a big 1GB SD card for it though.

regards,

Rob.

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grot

· #4 · Oct 12, 2004

I've done my entire library (10,000 legal tracks) as WMA lossless - i love it frankly, no matter how much everyone bitches about MSFT. It works flawlessly, with no outside programs required, and dumps stuff down to 64k files for my Rio seamlessly.

stanger89

· #5 · Oct 12, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by The Spectre
What is the best format to rip my CD collection?

Lossless. As far as which lossless format you choose, look at how you'll be using the files (what players, devices) and pick the format with the best support.

And do yourself a favor and rip them with a program that supports secure ripping, EAC is the standard, J River Media Center also supports secure ripping. After all, what good is lossless compression if you don't have a perfect rip

Jay M

· #6 · Oct 12, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by grot
I've done my entire library (10,000 legal tracks) as WMA lossless - i love it frankly, no matter how much everyone bitches about MSFT. It works flawlessly, with no outside programs required, and dumps stuff down to 64k files for my Rio seamlessly.

What do you mean by "dumps stuff down to 64k files for my Rio seamlessly"

Does windows media player automatically convert and export to the rio?

I may consider re-ripping my collection if it is really that easy. I have an Iriver IHP 120 jukebox. Can I just choose what I want to send to it and it will convert to MP3?

thanks,

~Jay

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stanger89

· #7 · Oct 12, 2004

JRMC can export (and convert on the fly) to portable devices too.

ggator53

· #8 · Oct 12, 2004

Forgive the noob questions: but...Is there a bit rate using the mp3 format to minimize the degradation of quality? I assume this is the reason for the different bit rates one can use to rip CDs? If CD quality is supposedly the best then why is it listed at 128 Kbps when there are higher bit rates?

Just a few curious questions as I begin to rip my CD collection. Looks like I will be using WMA lossless as I would rather sacrifice hard drive space than quality. Thanks.

Jay M

· #9 · Oct 12, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by ggator53
Forgive the noob questions: but...Is there a bit rate using the mp3 format to minimize the degradation of quality? I assume this is the reason for the different bit rates one can use to rip CDs? If CD quality is supposedly the best then why is it listed at 128 Kbps when there are higher bit rates?

Just a few curious questions as I begin to rip my CD collection. Looks like I will be using WMA lossless as I would rather sacrifice hard drive space than quality. Thanks.

Funny how anything digital is often called "CD quality" just because it is digital!

I suppose they call 128k cd quality because it sounds better than cassette or radio. Most people would have a hard time telling 128k MP3 from a CD.

I have been using 160k for MP3, because on my jukebox I prefer quantity over quality.

~Jay

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CCarncross

· #10 · Oct 13, 2004

Different strokes for different folks I guess. I cant listen to mp3 unless its 256k or up(320k). Now that high-res audio media is here(DVD-A, SACD), I've just about given up on any lossy compression formats due to their pathetic sound quality.

Kimper

· #11 · Oct 13, 2004

You can't rip SACD to a hard drive though, can you?

mnn1265

· #12 · Oct 13, 2004

I have a sizable MP3 collection that has been growing for many years. After the advent of the lossless formats I looked into the possibility of transitioning over... I ran some experiments by creating several lossless formatted tracks to compare with my MP3's. My sound system consists of a Dennon 3300 receiver, Vienna Acoustics Haydn mains and rears, a Theatro center, and a Rel Strata III sub. Comparing the lossless formats to the MP3's with several different tracks taken directly from CD I was completely unable to distinguish between MP3 at 320k and the lossless tracks. For MP3's as low as 192k it was pretty much the same story. At 128k I was able to hear the difference.

Salvador

· #13 · Oct 13, 2004

if you have the space and you don't need to transfer your music files to portable devices, go lossless by all means. Otherwise use lame encoder and do mp3. I have my cd's encoded at VBR Extreme (using razorlame as a front end). I did tests on wav files vs the mp3 files i converted. Couldn't tell the difference at all. Down 192kb i can tell the difference.

For reference my system:

M-Audio Revulotion 7.1

SVS 20-30 CS+

Paradigm Studio 20's

Odyssyey Khartago amp

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The Spectre

Discussion Starter · #14 · Oct 13, 2004

Thanks for the input guys. I think I am leaning toward the WAV option as the only downside I can find is the space issue and hard drives are always getting cheaper. WMV is a close second but I worry about long term issues like DRM, and it is MS so who knows how long it will be before they decide on WMV.1 which of course will not be backward compatible.

Once in WAV I figure I can always convert into another format either for portable playback of should I decide compress them onto another format. Now to start ripping 300+ albums and buy more hard drives, Ahhh.

epshih

· #15 · Oct 13, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by The Spectre
Thanks for the input guys. I think I am leaning toward the WAV option as the only downside I can find is the space issue and hard drives are always getting cheaper.

I guess the other big downside of using WAV is tagging. Unless they've changed things, WAV files don't officially support tags like other music formats. With some tagging programs, you can force tag WAVs with ID3 info or some other standard. But like I said, tags are not officially supported in the WAV format so you could have minor issues playing back tagged WAVS in certain players... like the time indexes could be off. In addition, it might be more difficult to transfer those tags when you transcode your WAVs to another format like FLAC, APE, OGG unless you use extremely good meta data embedded in the file names or directory structure. I'm not trying to scare you. It's just something to think about. Lots of ppl on AVS archive using WAV, so I'm sure it can be done properly given proper foresight.

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stanger89

· #16 · Oct 13, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by Kimper
You can't rip SACD to a hard drive though, can you?

You can't even read the disk in a PC.

stanger89

· #17 · Oct 13, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by The Spectre
Thanks for the input guys. I think I am leaning toward the WAV option as the only downside I can find is the space issue and hard drives are always getting cheaper.

Why not FLAC or Monkey's Audio (APE)? With wave you waste half your disk space (even if it's cheap, it's still a waste), and you give up tagging.

Solarius

· #18 · Oct 13, 2004

I use 256k MP3's. over 600CD's into 50GB's. Maybe someday I'll re-rip them all, but probably not. There just isn't any difference in the regular CD to the mp3. 128k is DEFINITELY noticable though. but 192k sounds good. Definitely make sure you use a format that supports tagging. Otherwise you'll want to kill yourself later.

Briands

· #19 · Oct 13, 2004

Strange89,

I know you are a Sage user. How do you handle music on your Sage boxes? I need something with high WAF.

I currently have my collection in WMA, and was considering a duplication to MP3 so I could just use the Sage Jukebox until a more sensible alternative comes along.

epshih

· #20 · Oct 13, 2004

Quote:

Originally posted by stanger89
Why not FLAC or Monkey's Audio (APE)?

Look at his #1 requirement.... must be MCE 2k5 compatible. I don't think MCE supports either of those formats natively. And because of all the MS haters, I bet a WMP/MCE plug-in supporting 100% compatibility will be a long time coming... if ever.

Since he's going to be using MCE, I really think his best bet is to go WMA lossless without DRM enabled. As long as you don't activate DRM during the ripping process, you should be safe from any future DRM rules changes. Using WMA Lossless will also allow him the option to transcode to any other format without quality loss, meta tag his files using a supported standard, easily transcode to a lossy format via WMP for portable use, and transfer tag data during the transcode process. If you weren't using MCE, then my recommendation would be to use FLAC since it seems to have much better support than APE.

1 - 20 of 35 Posts

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