I use Audacity to rip my Vinyls into 320 kbps Mp3 which is great BUT I also have a few CD’s.
I’ve been paranoid lately and have been thinking that Windows Media Player 10 isn’t gonna cut it when it comes to 320 kbps mp3s.
So, if you can, please give me advice on which FREE Cd ripper is the best quality one out there. I don’t care how long it takes. I want the musical goodness hehe. I want one that will rip into Lossless (Flac, Wave, etc though WAV especially) and into 320 kbps mp3.
I want both so I can keep the FLAC’s or Wav’s as backup.
By the way, should I rip my future Vinyls into FLAC using audacity or should I keep using 32 Bit Wav? (The Wav’s sound awesome but I didn’t know if FLAC was any better though the boot shows I’ve downloaded from bands like Pink Floyd sound cool in FLAC)
Lemme know
*I’ve got CDex loaded on my comp but I heard EAC is better. Which one to pick?
I’ve used CDex for a while. Any program that supplies a WAV file at 44100, 16-bit, Stereo should do it. That’s the format of the sound on the disk – always. Any sound file other than that is going through data conversion.
iTunes will do the job too - also avaible free to download. But it’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, if all you’re using it for is a ripper and not using the library/jukebox functionality too.
It has excellent error checking routines among other things, so as long as the CD is not badly damaged you can virtually guarantee bit perfect copies.
The down side is that if the CD is damaged, extraction can be extremely slow (it has a feature that shuts down the drive after 15 minutes to allow it to cool down before continuing). If the copy is not bit perfect, the program will tell you.
Steve, can you tell me the settings you use on EAC then to achieve the best quality?
Tell me what’s good for
320 KBPS Mp3
WAV
(Though should I do FLAC from now on or is WAV cool? I’ve liked both but Idk which is better… Though since its lossless, they’re the same really… but then again why do online music stores sometimes offer their cd’s in FLAC but with a higher price? Hmm…)
For 320 KBPS Mp3 don’t bother with EAC - use C-Dex instead. It’s just as good for MP3s and much faster.
Most recording programs / hardware can produce WAV files directly, but making FLAC files requires an extra step of encoding as FLAC. The audio quality of FLAC and WAV are identical, but FLAC files are smaller (around half size).
EAC requires setting up according to the instructions (see the EAC website). Once it has been set up, just use the default settings.
If you want accuracy, don’t use mp3 format - it is a lossy format, which means that some of the data is thrown away during the encoding process and can never be recovered.
The advantage of EAC is that copies are bit perfect (assuming that the extraction does not show errors), but as soon you encode in a lossy format, that benefit has gone out of the window so you are waiting longer for the CD to be ripped needlessly.
I don’t mind which program you use - I was just indicating that for ripping to MP3 there is no qualitative difference between EAC and C-Dex, but there is a difference in speed and C-Dex is generally much faster.
There is possibly another advantage of C-Dex in that I have found that when ripping CDs that have unrecoverable errors, not only does EAC run extremely slowly, but the damage in the audio file is often much more noticeable than when using C-Dex. So it would appear that C-Dex is better at minimising the effects of unrecoverable read errors than EAC and in such case will produce subjectively better quality sound.
Fine, I’ll definitely re-rip my CD’s in the best quality WAV’s and then Mp3s too for on the go for my Zune. (Zune Lossless is something I kinda want to avoid, wish they had WAV)
Anyway, last question is that if I play WAVS on my computer using Winamp for example, do I ruin the quality of the file everytime I play it or will it be forever the same because its lossless?
No, the file WAV will stay the same (unlike playing a vinyl record or a tape which changes, minutely normally, with each play due to the physical nature of the media). And an MP3 file once it is created will remain the same with each play - the degradation in quality come when you create the compressed MP3 file from a WAV file or from an Audacity project. And that degradation will remain if you reimport the MP3 file into Audacity for further editing - plus if you than re-export it to MP3 you will create further compression damage/degradation.
Should’ve bought an iPod - they support their own AAC (compressed) , Apple Lossles, MP3 AND WAV
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- they support their own AAC (compressed) , Apple Lossles, MP3 AND WAV