Hi All-
I did a search and the closest thing to it was this:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71509&highlight=
So MY question is, has anyone here done format and rate comparisons?
I ripped about 80 discs with Microsoft Media Player (WMP) 10 @ 128kbs as WMA files.
I figured I better listen to some before I ripped any more so I loaded some of them on my SD memory card and put them in my iPAQ to listen to. The iPAQ had a couple of 192kbs songs on it that sound pretty decent for a hand held device.
My ripped songs sound like crap. Crackles, pops, and blimps…
I don't know if that extra bit of data rate helped or if my discs were scratched and WMP did not have error correction.
Tonight I'm going to try the same disc with the wife’s iTunes software and see if that helps any since I KNOW hers has EC.
Anyone else have input on this matter?
I did a search and the closest thing to it was this:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71509&highlight=
So MY question is, has anyone here done format and rate comparisons?
I ripped about 80 discs with Microsoft Media Player (WMP) 10 @ 128kbs as WMA files.
I figured I better listen to some before I ripped any more so I loaded some of them on my SD memory card and put them in my iPAQ to listen to. The iPAQ had a couple of 192kbs songs on it that sound pretty decent for a hand held device.
My ripped songs sound like crap. Crackles, pops, and blimps…
I don't know if that extra bit of data rate helped or if my discs were scratched and WMP did not have error correction.
Tonight I'm going to try the same disc with the wife’s iTunes software and see if that helps any since I KNOW hers has EC.
Anyone else have input on this matter?
Rab, I think you do well to rip with error correction as EC does, actually, correct errors which, being errors, are about as likely to sound good as monkeys typing typewriters will ....
I would also suggest ripping at the highest bit rate you can afford, space- and convenience-wise. I find 320, for instance, easily distinguishable from 128, which grates on my ears even in the short term, and find wav better than 320, especially in the long term.
I would also suggest ripping at the highest bit rate you can afford, space- and convenience-wise. I find 320, for instance, easily distinguishable from 128, which grates on my ears even in the short term, and find wav better than 320, especially in the long term.
So a friend of mine said he uses these three (3)! programs to rip his discs to PC.
http://exactaudiocopy.de/
http://lame.sourceforge.net/
http://mitiok.cjb.net/
I am now thinking that I will have to do the same in order to make this listenable.
I am doing this to stop scratching my CD's as I drag them to and from the car, and to listen on my iPAQ while exercising but I still require at least DECENT sound.
Saving them uncompressed as WAV files (500 Meg per disc) is not an option, but ~50'ish Meg per disc is acceptable.
I will post later on the developments... I wish I wouldn't have opened this can of worms. Bless the ignorant.
http://exactaudiocopy.de/
http://lame.sourceforge.net/
http://mitiok.cjb.net/
I am now thinking that I will have to do the same in order to make this listenable.
I am doing this to stop scratching my CD's as I drag them to and from the car, and to listen on my iPAQ while exercising but I still require at least DECENT sound.
Saving them uncompressed as WAV files (500 Meg per disc) is not an option, but ~50'ish Meg per disc is acceptable.
I will post later on the developments... I wish I wouldn't have opened this can of worms. Bless the ignorant.
The solution I am trying next. Apparently this has been addressed and partially resolved.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_Lame
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_Lame
I would definately use lame for your encoding, there really aren't any other progs out there that maintain fidelity like that one. As far as file formats go, I'm partial to Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, which are lossless audio codecs, which supposedly compress files without losing audio information. In practice, they both sound MILES ahead of mp3.
And I agree with the previous poster, with mp3 encode at 320 or at least 192.
And I agree with the previous poster, with mp3 encode at 320 or at least 192.
You will need a directshow filter for windows media player, try one of these:
One
Two
I couldn't say which one is more stable or faster, etc, I haven't used either, since I don't run Windows. The first one seems to be more currently maintained, and it seems to be the one I see preferred by most. I would try the first one, and if it seems slow or there are other problems, uninstall the first one, and just give the other one a try.
One
Two
I couldn't say which one is more stable or faster, etc, I haven't used either, since I don't run Windows. The first one seems to be more currently maintained, and it seems to be the one I see preferred by most. I would try the first one, and if it seems slow or there are other problems, uninstall the first one, and just give the other one a try.
IF you encode at 192 be shure to enable VBR.
(it's the default setting of EAC)
It will compress your cds to 60-80Mbytes.
That has a acceptable sound.
If you do not use the VBR option the quality will decrease when the music becomes more complex.
And that is very anoying to listen to!
So either use a high bit rate or use VBR.
Allways use EAC!!! It will even repair your damaged discs!
Nero, winamp, wmp are garbage compared to EAC.
Regards, Simon
(it's the default setting of EAC)
It will compress your cds to 60-80Mbytes.
That has a acceptable sound.
If you do not use the VBR option the quality will decrease when the music becomes more complex.
And that is very anoying to listen to!
So either use a high bit rate or use VBR.
Allways use EAC!!! It will even repair your damaged discs!
Nero, winamp, wmp are garbage compared to EAC.
Regards, Simon
seoman said:
EAC is very good, but repair damaged disks? Hm... Depends on what you mean by damaged, I suppose. Inspired by another thread about scratched CDs, I decided to try EAC on an old very badly scratched CD, which at one point is so bad that none of my CD players get past it, but gets stuck in a short loop. That particular track is 16 mins long, and it took EAC 7 hours to rip it, with highest quality setting. I think the result even sounded worse than the CD itself, but at least EAC didn't get stuck in a loop forever.
As for FLAC, I did a few experiements once, to see how much it compresses classical music. I didn't do any really extensive testing, but the results indicated that at the very best the result was just over 25 % of the size of the original wave file, that was just a soprano and a piano. For complex orchestral music it could get as high as 55 %, which means less than a factor 2 of compressions. But on the postive side, it is lossless.
Well after getting home late from the climbing gym last night I did not get to load EAC or Lame.
Maybe tomorrow or this weekend I will be able to set it up and do some experiments.
When I told the wife that I had to re-rip the discs I did already she said to take Sunday and "play" with the computer to get it right so I can be finished with this.. Sometimes I love that woman even when she's insulting me.
Maybe tomorrow or this weekend I will be able to set it up and do some experiments.
When I told the wife that I had to re-rip the discs I did already she said to take Sunday and "play" with the computer to get it right so I can be finished with this..
Sometimes I love that woman even when she's insulting me.The root cause of pops and clicks
Contrary to popular belief such as Windows is crap etc, the root cause of pops and cracks is:
1. The basic format of the Red Book audio CD standard (i.e limited error recovery) and no way for the basic players to know "where they are", relying on pattern matching at best to stictch together fragments
2. The above leading to discontinuities in the signal causing lossy compression schemes to get into trouble. (Noise compresses badly)
I have done a number of tests, starting with exactaudiocopy, doctored disks, checking out the forums on Hydrogen Audio and contacting hardware vendors (notably Plextor).
Since the pattern matching and other smarts used by exactaudiocopy can also cause other problems ranging from audible to severely reduced ripping speed, I ended up with a hardware solution.
The solution for me is the Plextor Premium CD Burner as my ripping device. I have yet to find situations where software based solutions have produced better sound. The basic difference between this and other drives is that (as far as I have been able to figure out) it has knowledge it's angular position and the software bundle that comes with it allowing you to set parameters such as ripping speed.
To do the actual ripping, I use the plain old Windows Media Player, and this piece of very convenient software has not been able to mess up the end results in any way contrary to what others may suggest. One very nice convenienece is that the CD will start playing (via disk) while ripping, and when the disk is ripped, the drive ejects it and the music stops serving as a notification that I can insert another CD.
To my understanding, the Plextor Premium CD burner is no longer manufactured, but you still see them on eBay (I have 2 now, one for backup). Besides, there is probably little difference between this drive and the other high-end drives from Plextor.
If you have a crappy CD player, which typically has the C1/C2 error correction implemented incorrectly etc, you can do a lot of good with for example the exactaudiocopy application. For me, and my friends, it turned out that the investment in the best CD player we have found to date was more than worth it both in terms of convenience and piece of mind.
Note that if you have crappy CD's, the Plextor will at times not manage to read it. I take that as a proof of quality and have a cheap CD player next to it, which does not worry about such things as audio integrity etc.
Note 2. You probably wonder why a cheap CD player can read data disks at 50X with no issues while ripping CD's is still a problem. The root cause of that is the decision by the inventors of the CD to leave out enough error correcting information to enable one to reliably read an audio CD. There is in fact no way of knowing that you read the audio CD correcly.
Note 3. Since hard drives are cheap, rip to a lossless audio format. I decided to use Windows Media Lossless after having verified that I was able to get back to the same exact audio tracks using a command line utility. The practical upshot is that I get further convenience in that my MP3 players (actually they are WMA players) benefit from automatic conversion to the lossy scheme of my choice on a device basis - someting I set up in Windows Media Player. This downconversion is "perfect" since it does not involve the ultimate sin of changing a lossy format into another lossy format (or bit-rate) since it always starts from the best representation I am capable of supplying from my CD's via my harddisk. Convenient and futureproof.
Contrary to popular belief such as Windows is crap etc, the root cause of pops and cracks is:
1. The basic format of the Red Book audio CD standard (i.e limited error recovery) and no way for the basic players to know "where they are", relying on pattern matching at best to stictch together fragments
2. The above leading to discontinuities in the signal causing lossy compression schemes to get into trouble. (Noise compresses badly)
I have done a number of tests, starting with exactaudiocopy, doctored disks, checking out the forums on Hydrogen Audio and contacting hardware vendors (notably Plextor).
Since the pattern matching and other smarts used by exactaudiocopy can also cause other problems ranging from audible to severely reduced ripping speed, I ended up with a hardware solution.
The solution for me is the Plextor Premium CD Burner as my ripping device. I have yet to find situations where software based solutions have produced better sound. The basic difference between this and other drives is that (as far as I have been able to figure out) it has knowledge it's angular position and the software bundle that comes with it allowing you to set parameters such as ripping speed.
To do the actual ripping, I use the plain old Windows Media Player, and this piece of very convenient software has not been able to mess up the end results in any way contrary to what others may suggest. One very nice convenienece is that the CD will start playing (via disk) while ripping, and when the disk is ripped, the drive ejects it and the music stops serving as a notification that I can insert another CD.
To my understanding, the Plextor Premium CD burner is no longer manufactured, but you still see them on eBay (I have 2 now, one for backup
). Besides, there is probably little difference between this drive and the other high-end drives from Plextor.If you have a crappy CD player, which typically has the C1/C2 error correction implemented incorrectly etc, you can do a lot of good with for example the exactaudiocopy application. For me, and my friends, it turned out that the investment in the best CD player we have found to date was more than worth it both in terms of convenience and piece of mind.
Note that if you have crappy CD's, the Plextor will at times not manage to read it. I take that as a proof of quality and have a cheap CD player next to it, which does not worry about such things as audio integrity etc.
Note 2. You probably wonder why a cheap CD player can read data disks at 50X with no issues while ripping CD's is still a problem. The root cause of that is the decision by the inventors of the CD to leave out enough error correcting information to enable one to reliably read an audio CD. There is in fact no way of knowing that you read the audio CD correcly.
Note 3. Since hard drives are cheap, rip to a lossless audio format. I decided to use Windows Media Lossless after having verified that I was able to get back to the same exact audio tracks using a command line utility. The practical upshot is that I get further convenience in that my MP3 players (actually they are WMA players) benefit from automatic conversion to the lossy scheme of my choice on a device basis - someting I set up in Windows Media Player. This downconversion is "perfect" since it does not involve the ultimate sin of changing a lossy format into another lossy format (or bit-rate) since it always starts from the best representation I am capable of supplying from my CD's via my harddisk. Convenient and futureproof.
Re: The root cause of pops and clicks
That, and the fact that a data CD is structured into sectors that can be easily and individually addressed, so it is fairlly quick and easy to reread data that caused read errors. As you pointed out, an audio CD has no reasonable structure of the data. There are tracks (and the now never seen indices) but within a track there is no positioning information to help the reader finding a particular position.
Petter said:
That, and the fact that a data CD is structured into sectors that can be easily and individually addressed, so it is fairlly quick and easy to reread data that caused read errors. As you pointed out, an audio CD has no reasonable structure of the data. There are tracks (and the now never seen indices) but within a track there is no positioning information to help the reader finding a particular position.
Hi,
I once did a comparison of formats with headphones. Burnt two different tracks on CD, that were ripped, compressed and then decompressed again, each in 9 different formats IIRC. The best was uncompressed, but the difference to some formats were hard to tell. MP3 (lame) at bitrates above 256kbit was very good, but always had it's own "sound" and really a loss in exact highs. A few others were good at high bitrates (WMA too IIRC), but some failed completely (hm, if I could find the CD again..), there were RealAudio and some other...
The best was OGG Vorbis in setting 6 and above (complete stereo separation), and also in lower bitrates it was best. It had a very slight emphasis on the highs, but that could have been solved in newer versions. I would recommend lossless (APE and FLAC or WMA lossless which I don't know) or OGG for lossy encoding. I think MP3 is so popular because it sounds soft and nice with pop music.
Lukas
I once did a comparison of formats with headphones. Burnt two different tracks on CD, that were ripped, compressed and then decompressed again, each in 9 different formats IIRC. The best was uncompressed
, but the difference to some formats were hard to tell. MP3 (lame) at bitrates above 256kbit was very good, but always had it's own "sound" and really a loss in exact highs. A few others were good at high bitrates (WMA too IIRC), but some failed completely (hm, if I could find the CD again..), there were RealAudio and some other...The best was OGG Vorbis in setting 6 and above (complete stereo separation), and also in lower bitrates it was best. It had a very slight emphasis on the highs, but that could have been solved in newer versions. I would recommend lossless (APE and FLAC or WMA lossless which I don't know) or OGG for lossy encoding. I think MP3 is so popular because it sounds soft and nice with pop music.
Lukas
Well I installed the EAC and Lame SW last night on the home PC.
I put in a disk (Lyle Lovett, I love everybody) and the first track had read errors. I let it run for 10 minutes and came back and it was still reading the first track.
I didn't have time to investigate the situation so I shut it down for the night.
The DVD burner is a Toshiba I think.. It came standard on the Dell 5100C. It is a laptop drive in a desktop PC case. I guess they did it to save room. There are NO expansion slots in this PC case. Only choice there would be external via USB cable..
I will continue "playing" with this over the weekend, and will decide a final solution next week and go back to ripping.
Thanks again EVERYBODY who replied... I've learned allot from this discussion, and I look forward to more opinions and comments.
I put in a disk (Lyle Lovett, I love everybody) and the first track had read errors. I let it run for 10 minutes and came back and it was still reading the first track.
I didn't have time to investigate the situation so I shut it down for the night.
The DVD burner is a Toshiba I think.. It came standard on the Dell 5100C. It is a laptop drive in a desktop PC case. I guess they did it to save room. There are NO expansion slots in this PC case. Only choice there would be external via USB cable..
I will continue "playing" with this over the weekend, and will decide a final solution next week and go back to ripping.
Thanks again EVERYBODY who replied... I've learned allot from this discussion, and I look forward to more opinions and comments.
Try Lame with these settings (I use RazorLame):
" -b 160 -m s -h -V 0 -B 320"
I have switched to this setting recently. I also rip with EAC and highly recommend that. Now, whenever I rip, I make both FLAC and mp3's, just so all my bases are covered. The mp3's ripped with the above settings come out almost exactly at 5x compression.
" -b 160 -m s -h -V 0 -B 320"
I have switched to this setting recently. I also rip with EAC and highly recommend that. Now, whenever I rip, I make both FLAC and mp3's, just so all my bases are covered. The mp3's ripped with the above settings come out almost exactly at 5x compression.
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.