Favorite mp3 rip level??

[dalfollo]

I am burning my CD collection to disk and I ould like to gear some feedback on suggested levels to rip the CDs to:

- Do you use straight or VBR (variable bit ripping (?))
- Currently I am ripping music at 192 VBR; and spoken word (Comedy/books) at ~80 or 112 VBR

Last time I did a large amount of ripping a couple years agao, i used 256 straight....

Any suggestions appreciated....mostly i will be burning disk for the car; transfering to an MP3 player for the gym....if i really want to hear the music perfectly i can just use my home stereo....so i want to save some space for my collection, but I do not want over do it....these are not archive copies....I wnt it to sound decent...

Thanks.

 

[Schadenfroh]

320 lame

 

[Slugbait]

Because of my audio systems, I need a higher bitrate for decent sound. I go with VBR 160-320 with the highest quality setting. I rip with EAC and encode with LAME...RazorLAME makes it dead simple to batch a ton of albums overnight as I sleep, tho' my Gallatin blazes with encoding. I only do music, so I suppose spoken word is fine at 96.

 

[JAG87]

my collection of 1730 songs, is all ripped straight at 256 with lame.

I suggest if you want to save space, you use 192. anything below that will sound like garbage.

the best option would be wma, if you can play that. a wma at 192, will sound like an mp3 at 256, saving you space and giving you quality.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Maximum VBR

 

[kyparrish]

AAC 128kbps....

I hang on to all of my CD's though in case I want to listen to a CD-quality recording.

 

[dalfollo]

Thanks for the feedback...why do you rip then encode??

For me ripping has always meant rip from CD to MP3 on the PC.....What format do you rip to; if you are then going to encode to something different later??

 

[0roo0roo]

i use lame preset -alt preset extreme for music
standard is fine for spoken word

 

[modedepe]

I rip at 192 lame so I don't use too much space. If I want better quality I generally use FLAC.

 

[Supermercado]

I don't have spoken word but I rip nnusic at alt-preset standard

 

[imported_Imp]

Just re-ripped most of my CDs from 128 to 192 wma. I still can't believe what a difference it made. Feel like I wasted the past few years listening to crap.

 

[PurdueRy]

FLAC

 

[SnoMunke]

Rip 'em to some lossless format... I use Apple Lossless...but any of them are just as good.

 

[SnoMunke]

Originally posted by: dalfollo
Thanks for the feedback...why do you rip then encode??

For me ripping has always meant rip from CD to MP3 on the PC.....What format do you rip to; if you are then going to encode to something different later??

Ripping is actually the process of extracting the audio files (in .WAV format) from the CD. Encoding is compressing those .WAV files into a different format, i.e. MP3, FLAC, AAC, etc.

Most programs rip and encode on the fly to save the user time.. Take a look at how EAC works and you will see the difference between ripping and encoding.

 

[Bootstrap]

Originally posted by: SnoMunke
Rip 'em to some lossless format... I use AAC Lossless...but any of them are just as good.

What is AAC lossless? Is this a special version of AAC, or are you just setting the bitrate really high?

Edit: or did you mean Apple Lossless?

 

[SnoMunke]

Yes APPLE lossless...of course you can only use it with iPods, etc.

 

[OSX]

All my music is in flac.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

EAC + iTunesEncoder47.exe for some nice Apple Lossless files. When I need/use MP3 I use LAME preset extreme modified so that its real stereo (-m s -v 0 -q 2)

 

[SnoMunke]

Originally posted by: mrSHEiK124
EAC + iTunesEncoder47.exe for some nice Apple Lossless files. When I need/use MP3 I use LAME preset extreme modified so that its real stereo (-m s -v 0 -q 2)

I stopped using EAC... iTunes has a "error correction" mode that seem to work pretty good.

 

[Duvie]

I like 224...i avoid vbr cause some players (like DVD standalone players) have issues I have seen playing them back from cd-rs and cd-rws...I stick with constant bitrates...

 

[Bootstrap]

Originally posted by: SnoMunke
Yes APPLE lossless...of course you can only use it with iPods, etc.

I see -- I was a little confused because AAC is not an Apple Codec and has nothing to do with the Apple lossless codec. I was wondering if there was some lossless variant of AAC that I hadn't heard about (which seemed unlikely, since AAC is designed to be lossy, but you never know ).

 

[bigboxes]

VBR QL2... can't tell the difference between that and the highest qual (QL0) and it is about the same size as 192cbr. As for you lossless advocates you might as well leave the CD alone. Ripping to disc is all about the compromise between quality/size. We'd all love 320kbps or lossless, but the amount of space it would take to store/backup is not practical.

 

[tjpark1111]

AAC ain't an apple thing? why won't anyone else use it?

 

[Bootstrap]

Nope, AAC has nothing to do with Apple, except that they're the first to make players that support it (to the best of my knowledge, at least, are there other players that support it yet?). It's designed to be a replacement for MP3, and it's better in just about every aspect. Apple was the first to jump on the bandwagon, and since AAC starts with an "A", people assume it's "Apple Audio Codec". It's a shame more music players don't support it.

More details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codec

 

[SnoMunke]

Originally posted by: bigboxes
VBR QL2... can't tell the difference between that and the highest qual (QL0) and it is about the same size as 192cbr. As for you lossless advocates you might as well leave the CD alone. Ripping to disc is all about the compromise between quality/size. We'd all love 320kbps or lossless, but the amount of space it would take to store/backup is not practical.

Seeing that you are a Huskers fan, I can understand why your recommendation is lousy... Sooners rule!

Joke aside... I had all my music encoded in MP3 format at 320 CBR. When I re-ripped and encoded everything to Apple Lossless, the size of my library basically doubled in size. With large HDDs and iPods have large storage capacity, size was no longer a factor for me... roughly 100CDs = 40GB of space...