Best quality audio codec for ripping CDs?

Tute

Tute

Tute

Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2004
Posts
22,593
Location
Devon, UK
Hey all.

Been using MP3 before for ripping CDs so that I can play them off the hard drive, however from reading around on here, it seems that it's far from the best quality.

In which case, what do people recommend? Space is not an issue (as long as it's not silly like 1GB per CD).

Thanks.
 
I've heard about it, but have no clue what it is.

What's the compression like? (For an average CD)
What will it play on?
What's the quality like?
Does it cost anything?
 
There are a lot of lossless codecs - those that lose no quality from the original CD. Think of it like a ZIP file - it is compressed but you get a lossless representation of the original data after decompression.

So it's more about picking one that's supported by your media player or devices. FLAC is free (that's what the F stands for) and in my experience compresses tracks to 40-60% of their original size on the CD. So ~300MB per album.
 
Okay er... another question about codecs.

My phone supports the following:

MP3/AAC/eAAC/eAAC+/WMA/M4A

If I went to the trouble of re-encoding my music, which of these formats would be the best to give a balance of quality and size? Bear in mind I have an 8GB memory card and i'd like to get at least 20-25 albums on there. :)

Thanks again.
 
Tute said:
Okay er... another question about codecs.

My phone supports the following:

MP3/AAC/eAAC/eAAC+/WMA/M4A

If I went to the trouble of re-encoding my music, which of these formats would be the best to give a balance of quality and size? Bear in mind I have an 8GB memory card and i'd like to get at least 20-25 albums on there. :)

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

160-192k LAME MP3 is all you'll ever need on there. you'll get closer to 70 albums on there with that.
 
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james.miller said:
160-192k LAME MP3 is all you'll ever need on there. you'll get closer to 70 albums on there with that.
Click to expand...

Okay er... what are the benefits to LAME over say, ripping straight to regular MP3?

Any good guides for doing it?

Will anything that plays MP3s also play LAME-encoded ones?

Excuse me asking all this, just that upto now i've just ripped straight to 192KBit MP3 and left it at that.
 
lame is the name of the best mp3 encoder around. it still sticks to the mp3 standard, so anything will play it*, it just ahead of the rest of the encoders in sound quality and transparency (how well it compares to the original). The guide wush posted show you how to set up eac and lamp together. tbh, you wont get better mp3s than by the best ripper (eac) and the best mp3 encoder. the guide is also there for using EAC to rip to flac.

personally, id rip the library to flac using EAC, and then encode from the flac. files to lame mp3, on a per-album basis any albums, any albums i want to put on the mp3 player. It might sound a bit long winded but it really doesnt take long to encode a flac file to mp3 and doing it this way ensure that the library stored on your pc remains lossless and full quality:)


* i am currently having issue with my iphone and playing certain mp3's ive encoded, but i havent got to the bottom of this yet.
 
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Nice.

Looks like i'm going to have to spend some on CDs on payday... as I seem to have "misplaced" some of my albums... :o

;)
 
Tbh while flac is obviously good, if you're running low on space, and don't have high end audio equipment/requirements, a high bit-rate mp3 is more versatile (it'll work with anything :)) and pretty good quality as it goes anyways. It just depends on how rigorous your ears are....
 
LeperousDust said:
Tbh while flac is obviously good, if you're running low on space, and don't have high end audio equipment/requirements, a high bit-rate mp3 is more versatile (it'll work with anything :)) and pretty good quality as it goes anyways. It just depends on how rigorous your ears are....
Click to expand...

look towards the future! a few years ago it would have been a different story because of the price of storage, but these days its really nothing. £41 for a 320gb hard drive. even if you might not benefit right now, it saves a lot of hassle in the long run:)
 
I suppose you're right, but he was saying he wasn't lost for hard drive space :p
I do agree with what you're saying, i just can't really see how things could sound much better *to me* though, i understand technically the audio would be of better quality, but what does that matter when i can hardly hear. Some music is different though i agree :) Theres two ways of looking at my music collection, on average i'd say an mp3 album i have is 100MB, i have 378, (although atm they take up 60GB see the second take :p). We can agree flac takes up 400-500MB per album? Lets do worst case, since we're looking into the future, thats a lot of extra space, considering i'm using a laptop and HDD space although not expensive is still at a bit of premium, is it worth a 4-5x increase in collection size? I cant see so personally...

Or i have 60GB library, 378 albums, work out to about 160MB an album, so were still looking at a 3-4x size increase, thats a lot for what i would count as not 3-4x audio quality! That and flac is not supported by everything, true my pc would be fine, but when it comes to MP3 players, its still not standard, which is a shame, which in turn is more hassle...

Also lets remember 100MB is being quite generous for an MP3 album too, even at 192-256VB

See my dilema?
 
im confused, how do 378 albums take up 60gb of space?

looking at my mp3s, the average size is 4-8mb per track, of which i have 7,421. assuming worst case that they are all 8mb, thats account bang on 60gb give or take a few hundred mb. even if every one of those tracks were divided in to 16 track albums, thats still 463 albums of very high lame mp3. in reality, there are about 12k songs spanning 879 folders. 95% of the folders are full albums with the others being bonus cd's and such. that include 15 or so flac albums.

however, that only makes the difference in space requirements more obvious. the new album from NIN is available in 24bit/96khz wav, and thats a 1.2gb download......

it still shouldnt be an issue with the price of storage though. it all comes down to where you want to draw the line. if you know at any point you'll be upgrading your listening equipment, get it done right the first time and forget about it. its far less hassle in the long run:)
 
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Right excuse that brain far, i quoted artists, what i was on before i don't know (I'm putting it down to copious revision though, i could claw my eyes out). I have 716 albums :) Average 90mb an album, which makes far more sense, but my problem still stands that i can;t really afford for my present music collection to expand 4 times in size, for a very limited gain (in my eyes). When i don't have an infinite amount of space, storage is cheap, but that doesn't change my laptop storage situation (largest is 500GB and its not exactly "cheap")...
 
external drive! you have no excuse:p


but no, it does come down to where you draw it. theres no right or wrong unless you know you are going to want more in the future. then there's only 1 answer
 
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