MP3: Re-rip or compress

[Liviathan]

So i have a bunch of mp3's that i originally ripped from my cds at 224kbps....now I want to save some room and take them to 192.

Should I just re-rip from the cds or recompress???

 

[pulse8]

Re-rip.

Recompressing will just lower the quality even further.

 

[fs5]

re-rip... recompressing mp3s is a bad idea.

 

[zimu]

i tend to recompress, even though re-ripping is supposedly better.

depends on whether i have the CD or not though

 

[Liviathan]

I'll go with re-repping...I got the cds. I'll just do it a few cd's a day since I have re-rip maybe 200cds.

 

[Howard]

If you have the hard drive space just rip from CD and encode with FLAC.

 

[thomsbrain]

re-rip

 

[DaveSimmons]

Re-rip with CdEx or EAC + LAME if you won't give in to the 300 MB per CD lossless goodness of FLAC

I must admit though, 256 kbps AAC encoding from itunes sounded just as good to my ear on the CD I tried. But lossless = peace of mind knowing I have a true backup of my CDs and can transcode to any other format / bitrate I want with zero quality loss from re-compression.

 

[gopunk]

what if something is at 320kbps? that's supposedly cd audio quality?

 

[LS20]

so you save approximately 20gig by reripping it into lower quality... now since you're going to do it a few CDs per day.. it'll take a lot of days to finish the collection

20gb harddrives are unbelievably cheap now... is it worth your time?

 

[0roo0roo]

if your taking stuffdown to seriously save space on say a tiny flash player, @128kbs or something, then recompress is possible since it sounds like cr@p anyways. but if your doing high bitrate ....its a waste. redo i t all

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: gopunk
what if something is at 320kbps? that's supposedly cd audio quality?

It's lossy so still only "near" CD quality, just like a jpeg isn't as good as a BMP or TIFF.

You might never hear the difference, but a cheap 160 GB hd can store about 525 CDs in FLAC format so why settle for less? And again, if you want to transcode to MP3 or AAC later for an ipod, flash player, or home LAN there is no re-compression loss.

 

[gopunk]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: gopunk
what if something is at 320kbps? that's supposedly cd audio quality?

It's lossy so still only "near" CD quality, just like a jpeg isn't as good as a BMP or TIFF.

You might never hear the difference, but a cheap 160 GB hd can store about 525 CDs in FLAC format so why settle for less? And again, if you want to transcode to MP3 or AAC later for an ipod, flash player, or home LAN there is no re-compression loss.

yea i was just asking because allofmp3 doesn't offer any lossless formats... oh well.

 

[Sid59]

percieved quality loss (hearing) - prolly nothing
real quality loss - not much to hear any difference


if you ask me, the only worth while reason to re-rip your collection is for lossless. that way, you have an exact WAV copy you can transcode to as many different formats from the original. seeing as you want to save room, just cheat.

 

[dr150]

What is the BEST way to encode a CD using LOSSLESS encoding? What software/engine/forrmat?........

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: dr150
What is the BEST way to encode a CD using LOSSLESS encoding? What software/engine/forrmat?........

EAC + FLAC

Anandtech FAQ on ripping CDs
FLAC homepage

- M4H

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

cdex. I used EAC for quite a while but eventually it just got fvcking annoying.

 

[dr150]

How does WAVPAC compare to FLAC?............It seems that Wavpac is faster at encoding and creates smaller files for lossless encoding?.............

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: dr150
What is the BEST way to encode a CD using LOSSLESS encoding? What software/engine/forrmat?........

I will not say anything about FLAC except to say that it is a nice option, but not for me, or at least right now.


I just used WMA lossless, and it is working fine for me.


Whatever works....as long as it is lossless