ive a ton of cd's i want to transfer into 192kbps quality mp3's...best program?

Ronaldo7

Question in subject...

Cheers guys...

Mr E

http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net

I've been using it for 3 years now, no complaints.
Freeware since last week.

- Dave.

quarryman

answer in subject

parasite

www.exactaudiocopy.de

Mutant_Fruit

It all depends. Do you want the best quality rips, or the fastest rips?

For best quality, i would have to go with Exact Audio Copy. It possesses great error correction features, guarenteeing skip free copies even on scratched cd's.

If you want speed, any other program will do. 99% of em lack good error correction, and just rip as fast as possible. In my opinion, its stupid to rip this way.

For encoding to mp3, i'd go with lame. Thats the best mp3 encoder out there, far superior to any other. If you want help setting up anything, just ask.

CivilServant

CDex

po0k

http://www.freerip.com/
And rip to Ogg Vorbis format.
the iHP-120 should support it through firmware/upgrade.

Woden

whats the deal with the org vorbis format? why would someone want to use it? better quality or something?

BigEejit

Well its a free standard (mp3 is owned by a company who are getting royalties AFAIR)...
Ogg-vorbis heads will say that an ogg files sounds better with the same encoding level ... so extrapolating from that - you can lower your bit settings (file size) and still get the same audio quality as mp3 .....

Woden

i see thank you, and a identical bit rate encoded song on mp3 and ogg is similar in file size is it? the are both kinda compression thingys is it?

Michael Collins

Originally posted by Dataisgod
whats the deal with the org vorbis format? why would someone want to use it? better quality or something?

Supposedly it's better quality per kb but the real thing it's got going for it is open source - Ogg Vorbis players or encoders don't have to pay any license fee to anyone. Still, since it's not a good idea to encode from one lossy codec to another, you can't convert your current mp3 collection to Ogg Vorbis which is a pity - so I'll be staying with mp3s for a while...

Mutant_Fruit

Usefull Fact: Exact Audio Copy can be configured to encode to any format under the sun! Wma, ape, mpc, mp3, vorbis, lh, gogo, zing, real audio, monkeys, wavpack, lpac, rkau... just to name a few. And its dead easy aswell.

In the end, its up to you to choose. Quality rips, or fast rips. EAC or anything else.

po0k

Originally posted by Michael Collins
Supposedly it's better quality per kb but the real thing it's got going for it is open source - Ogg Vorbis players or encoders don't have to pay any license fee to anyone. Still, since it's not a good idea to encode from one lossy codec to another, you can't convert your current mp3 collection to Ogg Vorbis which is a pity - so I'll be staying with mp3s for a while...

You can of course convert, but there may be a slight loss in audio qualitydue to both MP3 and Ogg being lossy codecs as you say.
Also, wrt the "sounding better" afaik they did waveform comparisons between the original source, mp3, ogg and several other audio compression formats at various bit-rates and afaik Ogg came out on top.
If you want loss-less audio compression try FLAC.
Afaik iRiver is also looking to support (if it doesn't already) this format.

And I also highly recommend EAC.
Give it a good quality CD (no scratches) and it'll rip at a decent speed, bit for bit accuracy.
Then encode that in FLAC.

If you're into Video compression keep an eye out for Theora.org and take a look at Xiph.Org regardless.

RE*AC*TOR

i really like the uber simple lamefe.

http://lamefe.sourceforge.net/

El_MUERkO

Originally posted by CivilServant
CDex

/\ thats what i use

BigCon

www.dbpoweramp.com

No complaints. The site also has some useful tagging software etc...

M@lice

I was just wondering why 192kbps?

Which bitrates correspond to cd quality in the various audio formats? I heard its pointless ripping a cd to anything more than 128kbps because thats cd quility in mp3 terms. I thought having higher quality bitrates is pointless because it can't have higher quality than the quality of the cd it was ripped from.

Stark

256 kpbs (when in CBR mode) is CD-quality in MP3 terms.
192 kpbs will be near-CD quality
128kpbs doesn't sound as good as the original cd to me.

You'll get better quality at lower bitrates if you use ABR mode or VBR mode. (ABR mode gives you the same overall bitrate, but varies the bitrate a little in the song when it needs to. I find 128kpbs ABR ~ 160kpbs CBR. VBR gives a slightly unpredictable bitrate but is best quality because encoder has total freedom as to where it needs to use the bits).

I recommend the LAME setting --alt-preset standard (or --preset standard for LAME >=3.95), it'll give you around 192kpbs using VBR mode.
For me personally, --preset medium (LAME 3.95) is the way to go (around 160kpbs using VBR mode). Audiophiles won't agree with me, but I can't tell the slightest difference between MP3s encoded using this and the original CD.

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And then there's OGG Vorbis. I find this is fantastic for my ears. You use a VBR quality setting ( -q ) between 0 and 10. I find even files encoded at -q 0 (around 64kpbs) sound acceptable to me.

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As for ripping tool, I find CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net) is the business, good quality ripping and total convenience. For scratched CDs, you should use Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de). It won't automatically compress the files for you, but it's scratch recovery technology is the best there is.