I ripped my CD collection to MP3 back in 1999, and at this point it's kind of a mess. At the time there was no Gracenote, so I did all the artist/track titles by hand. There are no track numbers embedded in the filenames or ID3 tags, and there's no album art. Everything was just <artist> - <title>.mp3 and I used .m3u playlists in Winamp.
As a result, it's a mess. I have all kinds of compatibility issues with different devices because nothing but Winamp uses .m3u playlists, album art is a random mess depending what device/program is trying to automatically retrieve it, and MP3 @ 128k is not ideal anyway.
I've also got an iTunes library in m4a, which seems to play on most modern devices but not everything. They play on my Android phone but embedded album art is hit-and-miss. They don't play on my car's stereo at all.
So I'm going to pull out my real CDs and rip them again to a better format. . . but what? I would like to be compatible with pretty much everything so I don't end up having to convert/tidy every time I use a different device.
I would like album art that works with as many things as will use it - some formats seem to embed images in the files themselves, or do I just keep a jpeg in the folder. . . I guess I can do both.
And obviously MP3 is kind of silly at this point isn't it? I'd get better quality from something different at the same bitrate. I could do FLAC or some other lossless, but I still want these files to go on portable devices, and those formats are still too damned big. I could use WMA/OGG/anything, but which work best in terms of embedded album art and compatibility?
Finally, once I have a format/etc in mind, any suggestions for good software to do the ripping with? I've not done this in a very long time.
Edit: oh, and due to a prog-rock fettish I absolutely want gapless playback to work properly. I'm not sure to what extent this is codec/format/device related though.
As a result, it's a mess. I have all kinds of compatibility issues with different devices because nothing but Winamp uses .m3u playlists, album art is a random mess depending what device/program is trying to automatically retrieve it, and MP3 @ 128k is not ideal anyway.
I've also got an iTunes library in m4a, which seems to play on most modern devices but not everything. They play on my Android phone but embedded album art is hit-and-miss. They don't play on my car's stereo at all.
So I'm going to pull out my real CDs and rip them again to a better format. . . but what? I would like to be compatible with pretty much everything so I don't end up having to convert/tidy every time I use a different device.
I would like album art that works with as many things as will use it - some formats seem to embed images in the files themselves, or do I just keep a jpeg in the folder. . . I guess I can do both.
And obviously MP3 is kind of silly at this point isn't it? I'd get better quality from something different at the same bitrate. I could do FLAC or some other lossless, but I still want these files to go on portable devices, and those formats are still too damned big. I could use WMA/OGG/anything, but which work best in terms of embedded album art and compatibility?
Finally, once I have a format/etc in mind, any suggestions for good software to do the ripping with? I've not done this in a very long time.
Edit: oh, and due to a prog-rock fettish I absolutely want gapless playback to work properly. I'm not sure to what extent this is codec/format/device related though.
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