Lossless codec for ripping CD's

[Brian Stirling]

I would like to know what the best options are for ripping CD's (music) for playback on an Android phone are. I'm sure mp3's are most common but I'm looking for lossless compression to eliminate the "watery tunnel" problem with many mp3's. I know you can rip the mp3's at a higher bit rate and that helps a lot but mp3's are not very good for high frequency (eg. cymbals) playback.

While were at it, what are some good music players for an Android phone?

BTW, I'm talking about the HTC Evo phone...


Brian

 

[gorcorps]

Use EAC and FLAC compression. There's a ton of guides out there for this setup so you can google from there.

Of course I'm not sure if Android supports all lossless, so you might want to check on that too.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

AAC (m4a, m4p) is a better sounding codec, but I don't see the necessity for high quality files on your cell phone. Lossless on a portable digital player with a sub 1" speaker? You're going to have many more sonic limitations with the audio chipset / op-amp / speaker in the phone than anything. Even if you are listening through an external amplifier and speakers, the circuitry in the phone is probably not of high enough quality to justify a lossless file, let alone plugging it into a high-end stereo.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I've seen multiple blind tests over the years with "audiophiles" and MP3s have been indistinguishable from lossless audio above around 192kbps. Just rip it at high quality VBR and don't bother with lossless. At least not for a portable device.

 

[BenSkywalker]

I don't think lossless is going to help you out much unless you are planning on running an amp with a decent set of cans, but 320Kbps VBR MP3 rips are pretty decent for a portable device.

I've seen multiple blind tests over the years with "audiophiles" and MP3s have been indistinguishable from lossless audio above around 192kbps.

Using what, an iPod with included headphones?

 

[Anubis]

as posts have said FLAC or AAC, however filesizes will be very large, TBH id just rip FLAC/AAC to my comp and then compress to VBR Insane using LAME to go to a portable device, the Droid doesn't have the power to drive even a decent set of cans to where you could tell the difference

 

[Brian Stirling]

I do have a pretty decent home setup with v.5 Paradigm Studio speakers (100's front, 20's back, CC-690 center and Sub 15) but in addition to that when I listen to music on the road I use a pretty nice blue-tooth headphone. I do appreciate that at the higher bit rates the difference between lossless is less and less distinguishable but for me the real weakness with lossy codecs is high frequencies -- particularly cymbals. Even the higher bit rates do an unspectacular job with cymbals.

When I ripped my CD's the last time two years ago, when I got a 16GB gen 1 iTouch, I ripped most of the music at 192kbps but I still do not like the high freq fidelity.

Mind you, I don't consider myself an audiophile snob and I retired my turntable at least 10 years ago (I hardly used it since 1985 when I got my first CD player). Still, I do not like the watery tunnel sound of low bit rate mp3's. The effect is reduced at higher bit rates but it's still there and it bothers me.

Brian

 

[BenSkywalker]

Still, I do not like the watery tunnel sound of low bit rate mp3's. The effect is reduced at higher bit rates but it's still there and it bothers me.

While I certainly don't disagree with your statement the problem is in your devices ability to drive a set of headphones that can reproduce decent sound. If you were talking about hooking up your portable to a headphone amp and driving some Senn 600s or comparable then I'd take a good look at the best lossless format you could get.

What are you going to be using for headphones?

 

[joetekubi]

FTIW,

I rip all "good" CDs to FLAC on my home music server.
I bought a "good" mp3 player - CLIX LPLAYER because it could play FLAC files, and got good reviews for decent sound quality.
For a year or 2, I would hook that up to my home stereo for caual listening.
Recently, I hooked up a HTPC, old Lenovo Pentium M, and found that the sound quality from even low-end Intel on-board chips was much better than the CLIX player.

YMMV, I haven't heard any Andriod music.

-joe

 

[BoberFett]

The beauty of ripping to FLAC is that you do it once. Ripping CDs is tedious, and I wouldn't want to have to do it everytime the latest greatest format is out that only Player X will handle. You definitely don't want to re-encode from one lossy format to another, or you'll really get some raunchy sound. So as it is, I just re-encode the collection to whatever format I want at the time. MP3, WMA, AAC, or whatever I want couldn't be simpler.

The first time I ripped my entire collection I used EAC and it worked, but it wasn't the most friendly experience. I ended up going back later and using a separate program to download cover art, and yet another program to get better tags. I then lost my entire collection to a hard drive crash.

I just recently used dbPoweramp CD Ripper to rip the whole shebang again and it was fantastic. It downloads cover art, uses sort of a voting process between several different tag sources to choose the most accurate tags. It's secure ripping features are really amazing too, to make sure you get the best quality rip, again so you never have to do it again. It's really an awesome program and saved me lots of time and headache. It's not free, but neither is my time so I think it was well worth the money. They do have a 21 day fully functioning trial. I highly recommend it.

 

[Fox5]

I do have a pretty decent home setup with v.5 Paradigm Studio speakers (100's front, 20's back, CC-690 center and Sub 15) but in addition to that when I listen to music on the road I use a pretty nice blue-tooth headphone. I do appreciate that at the higher bit rates the difference between lossless is less and less distinguishable but for me the real weakness with lossy codecs is high frequencies -- particularly cymbals. Even the higher bit rates do an unspectacular job with cymbals.

When I ripped my CD's the last time two years ago, when I got a 16GB gen 1 iTouch, I ripped most of the music at 192kbps but I still do not like the high freq fidelity.

Mind you, I don't consider myself an audiophile snob and I retired my turntable at least 10 years ago (I hardly used it since 1985 when I got my first CD player). Still, I do not like the watery tunnel sound of low bit rate mp3's. The effect is reduced at higher bit rates but it's still there and it bothers me.

Brian

Are you sure it's the bitrate that hurts the mp3s so much, or is it the remastering and frequency compression that does? A lot of studios use a compressed frequency range in order to equalize the volume levels of the highs and lows, and it kills sound quality.

 

[NaOH]

I just use FLAC as a means to back up all my music. MP3 VBR insane for my iPhone. Usually if I'm on the go, then I'm not really in a situation to enjoy every nuance of snoic fidelity anyways, so no point in eating up my storage on my phone.

 

[Slick5150]

I have all mine stored as FLAC. When I'm syncing the music onto my Palm Pre, Media Monkey automatically converts the FLACs into VBR MP3 files. Works great.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

Are you sure it's the bitrate that hurts the mp3s so much, or is it the remastering and frequency compression that does? A lot of studios use a compressed frequency range in order to equalize the volume levels of the highs and lows, and it kills sound quality.

There is very little truth to that. :sneaky:

The studio doesn't MASTER records on major label releases. If you want excellent sounding recordings, get some. Some great music is recorded badly, and vice versa. ALL mastering houses adjust the frequency balance and level from track to track, that's what they do.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

You might as well just use the .wav files because they are not much larger files than FLAC and the highs are as good as you're going to get without the actual masters right in front of you.

 

[uli2000]

I do have a pretty decent home setup with v.5 Paradigm Studio speakers (100's front, 20's back, CC-690 center and Sub 15) but in addition to that when I listen to music on the road I use a pretty nice blue-tooth headphone. I do appreciate that at the higher bit rates the difference between lossless is less and less distinguishable but for me the real weakness with lossy codecs is high frequencies -- particularly cymbals. Even the higher bit rates do an unspectacular job with cymbals.

When I ripped my CD's the last time two years ago, when I got a 16GB gen 1 iTouch, I ripped most of the music at 192kbps but I still do not like the high freq fidelity.

Mind you, I don't consider myself an audiophile snob and I retired my turntable at least 10 years ago (I hardly used it since 1985 when I got my first CD player). Still, I do not like the watery tunnel sound of low bit rate mp3's. The effect is reduced at higher bit rates but it's still there and it bothers me.

Brian

You would be better off with wired headphones, or if you have to do wireless, look at kleer. Buetooth isnt very good for stereo audio due to the low bandwith. I find that it sounds tinny using the A2DP bluetooth profile.

 

[Brian Stirling]

You would be better off with wired headphones, or if you have to do wireless, look at kleer. Buetooth isnt very good for stereo audio due to the low bandwith. I find that it sounds tinny using the A2DP bluetooth profile.

The Sony DR BT50 specification indicate:

Transmission range (A2DP)
20-20,2000 Hz (sampling frequency 44.1kHz)

So, that is the same as the CD itself so there will be no reduction in quality due to transmission method. You claim that A2DP is low bandwidth -- care to puts some numbers behind that?

When I am home I do not use headphones as I have a nice audio kit, but when I'm on the road I'm limited in the size of the crap I can bring with me so I picked up the Sony headphones and have been pretty happy with them. No, they are not going to compete with studio quality cans but they have pretty decent bass that is not overly emphasized and is very clean.


Brian

 

[darkswordsman17]

There is very little truth to that. :sneaky:

The studio doesn't MASTER records on major label releases. If you want excellent sounding recordings, get some. Some great music is recorded badly, and vice versa. ALL mastering houses adjust the frequency balance and level from track to track, that's what they do.

Regardless of specifics, as a consumer we don't really even have the option of getting unmolested versions.

You might as well just use the .wav files because they are not much larger files than FLAC and the highs are as good as you're going to get without the actual masters right in front of you.

Actually, lossless often will get you a file about half the size (sometimes even 1/3, but also sometimes larger), but it allows for tagging and album art and other features that WAV doesn't. I'd definitely recommend high bitrate AAC or lossless, or maybe high bitrate MP3 using a good encoder.

As for quality, while yes, generally you will have limitations on the quality at some point in your playback chain, things very well could change in the future. For instance using the camera connection kit with the iPad lets people completely bypass the iPad's audio circuitry and use an external DAC. Hopefully in the future it gets added to the iPhone as well. Do Android phones use USB as their data/charge connector? If so, then its possible this could be added to Android. There's plenty of portable headphones that warrant going for the higher quality (see custom IEMs for instance).

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

The way I rip FLAC (largest file size) it's not much smaller if at all than the WAV version. I don't even know why I ripped to FLAC. I usually rip to WAV and then encode down to MP3 for my favorite tracks since the car stereo doesn't decode FLAC.

ihad no idea the iPad was set up that way. That's the first thing I've actually liked about the iPad other than the mockery of it.

 

[uli2000]

The Sony DR BT50 specification indicate:

Transmission range (A2DP)
20-20,2000 Hz (sampling frequency 44.1kHz)

So, that is the same as the CD itself so there will be no reduction in quality due to transmission method. You claim that A2DP is low bandwidth -- care to puts some numbers behind that?

When I am home I do not use headphones as I have a nice audio kit, but when I'm on the road I'm limited in the size of the crap I can bring with me so I picked up the Sony headphones and have been pretty happy with them. No, they are not going to compete with studio quality cans but they have pretty decent bass that is not overly emphasized and is very clean.


Brian

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/09/15/44505/bluetooth-gets-audio-quality-overhaul.htm

Bluetooth A2DP has a maximum available bandwidth of 768kbit/s. So, audio compression is necessary to deliver two-channel digital stereo sound.

Also, a good article about the difference between kleer and bluetooth. Its a little technical, but it's easy to see how 3x the bandwith and no compression will make it sound better over bluetooth.

 

[BoberFett]

You might as well just use the .wav files because they are not much larger files than FLAC and the highs are as good as you're going to get without the actual masters right in front of you.

Negative. WAV doesn't support ID3 tagging. If you're going to bother ripping your CD collection, do it properly.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

Negative. WAV doesn't support ID3 tagging. If you're going to bother ripping your CD collection, do it properly.

I don't care about tagging, personally. It's all about the sounds. The .WAV tracks are named and numbered and put into folders by artist and album title, and that's all I really need.