MP3 Ripping Software

It's all about the equipment

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GemZombie
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#16 Post by GemZombie » Tue Mar 20, 2007 6:42 pm

david wrote:
Toon Town Dave wrote:I rip everything to .wav files and store them on an external hard drive. I can then grab the raw stuff to burn to CD or transcode to MP3, OGG or whatever format I need afterward.
That's a bit wasteful. I encode my CDs as FLAC, which is a lossless compression (and then reencode the individual tracks as mp3 or Ogg Vorbis). The data in the FLAC files are identical to the wav files (after decompression) but take approx 50% the space.
The only problem is that FLAC isn't supported by many mainstream applications, while .WAV certainly is. As much as I love geeking out and using the coolest and newest in technology, I'm not fond of using 3rd party applications and tricky processes to solve a problem that should be that should be simple.

I could be wrong and things have improved since last I played with FLAC, but since the tools I use currently don't support it, it's pretty much out of the question for me. I suspect others might be in the same boat.

Toon Town Dave
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#17 Post by Toon Town Dave » Tue Mar 20, 2007 8:56 pm

Exactly, at the current price of $0.30 or less/GB for desktop hard drive space, it's just not worth the compatability hastles. It's about the same price as keeping backup copies of CDs with negligible physical space so it's a net win.

I do the same as Jesse for my portable DJ music; high quality, variable bit rate MP3. I've never had a problem playing that stuff on any platform and the quality is better than they sound systems and venues are capable of reproducing.

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tornredcarpet
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#18 Post by tornredcarpet » Tue Mar 20, 2007 9:11 pm

One more point for lossless formats such as APE and FLAC in an archival context:
More robust than raw formats such as WAV.
Jesse (Los Angeles, CA/Hampton Roads, VA)

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CafeSavoy
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#19 Post by CafeSavoy » Wed Mar 21, 2007 7:41 am

I don't really see the compatibility issues with flac since I only use it at home as a backup and convert them to mp3 or wave as needed.. All the utilities i use such as winamp, nero, etc. can handle flac.

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Jonas
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#20 Post by Jonas » Wed Mar 21, 2007 8:57 am

Because of the extremely low prices on hard drives I thought of going for uncompressed files when archiving my cd's, but after getting enough geek info about lossless compression, I chose that mainly beacuse of tagging.

With .wav I have simply not found any way of storing artist, album, bpm, recording year, comments, etc in the actual file (unless i give it a heck of a long filename, but then i can't sort the by separate fields), which I can do easily in for example mp3 or Apple Lossless.

As I understand it, those of you who use .wav files use it only for archival purposes, and then have also converted the files you like to dj to mp3, Ogg, Apple Lossless or whatever? No one actually dj from .wavs, right?

/Jonas

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#21 Post by Toon Town Dave » Wed Mar 21, 2007 11:44 am

I have DJ's from .wav's but that was before I had a chance to let the computer run for a day to convert everything.

External USB sound devices and hard drives don't always play nice when you're pulling huge chunks of data. It really depends on how smart (or stupid) the playback software is with respect to reading from the disc, PCDJ Red is the notable one that caused problems.

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Lawrence
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#22 Post by Lawrence » Wed Mar 21, 2007 1:02 pm

What about data-entry. One of the huge advantages of NEro and Media Player is that they access CDDB or other online databases and automatically input the song title, artist, and other info. Does EAC and others do that?
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CafeSavoy
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#23 Post by CafeSavoy » Wed Mar 21, 2007 1:13 pm

Lawrence wrote:What about data-entry. One of the huge advantages of NEro and Media Player is that they access CDDB or other online databases and automatically input the song title, artist, and other info. Does EAC and others do that?
They all mostly access freeDDB. Some access both.

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#24 Post by JesseMiner » Wed Mar 21, 2007 3:06 pm

Currently I use Exact Audio Copy to rip AND encode my music. EAC accesses freeDB to get all of the tag information and uses LAME (standard setting) for the encoding. I find it to be quite easy and convenient, and the resulting files are of course high-quality.

I have stuck with the mp3 format because it works with software and devices across the board. I have never adopted Apple's format because it won't play in Tracktor, the software I use for DJing. And if I run into problems there, I am sure I will run into problems elsewhere.

I find the sound quality of my mp3s to be more than satisfactory. My set-up received the ultimate stamp of approval (IMHO) from Lance after a recent test on his killer sound system at LindyGroove. I have no current need to keep lossless versions on my computer as I have the original CDs in my library to go back to if needed.

Jesse

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#25 Post by Toon Town Dave » Wed Mar 21, 2007 4:10 pm

I prefer keeping the .wav files because of the huge amount of time required to rip the music in the first place. I ended up ripping about 350 discs in a short period of time, my collection grows at about 30-50/year so investing about $100 to store all those .wav files makes sense for the time it will save me. I still try to maintain a set of CDs for DJing, it was handy when I did the Yehoodi show and I also had/have plans to resurrect my live365 station when I have time and if the cost isn't sky high.

I don't store the .wav's on RAID or back them up since the data can be recovered by re-ripping. I do plan to replace the drive by the time it's 3 years old, long before the mean time before failure. I think it's the right balance between convenience and reliability.

With respect to data entry, as others have said, EAC will query freedb, I used to rip music with the creative media player for my own listening pleasure. I've found the two to be comperable for number of errors. Currently freedb populates it and I proofread and correct errors to match the CD case. Even then, the occasional error slips through.

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#26 Post by tornredcarpet » Wed Mar 21, 2007 8:09 pm

Toon Town Dave wrote:I don't store the .wav's on RAID or back them up since the data can be recovered by re-ripping. I do plan to replace the drive by the time it's 3 years old, long before the mean time before failure. I think it's the right balance between convenience and reliability.
But do remember that CDs also suffer from bit rot just as much, if not more than HDs.
Jesse (Los Angeles, CA/Hampton Roads, VA)

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Jonas
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#27 Post by Jonas » Thu Mar 22, 2007 2:02 am

Toon Town Dave wrote: With respect to data entry, as others have said, EAC will query freedb, I used to rip music with the creative media player for my own listening pleasure. I've found the two to be comperable for number of errors. Currently freedb populates it and I proofread and correct errors to match the CD case. Even then, the occasional error slips through.
I still don't get the data entry part, sorry, I'm just not very "tech-ish".

Say I rip a cd to wav files and store them on my hard drive, with information taken down from freeDB or CDDB. Then later I decide I want to encode them into mp3's. Can I then get all this information about recording year, album, etc from freeDB or CDDB in the right places in my ID3 tags, not having to manually move the information from the file name of the wav file (since the wav file can't store metadata like in an ID3 tag as far as I know)?

Maybe when I encode into mp3's from wav's I just in some way connect to freeDB or CDDB once again, and the database recognises my wav files as the original cd (as long as I have stored all the the files from the original cd in a folder so that the amount of data in the folder is exactly as that of the cd, which is the way the database recognises cd's, right)?

Do I make any sense?

/Jonas

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#28 Post by Toon Town Dave » Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:40 am

I encode the metadata in the file/directory (folder) names.

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#29 Post by lipi » Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:46 pm

Jonas wrote: Say I rip a cd to wav files and store them on my hard drive, with information taken down from freeDB or CDDB. Then later I decide I want to encode them into mp3's. Can I then get all this information about recording year, album, etc from freeDB or CDDB in the right places in my ID3 tags, not having to manually move the information from the file name of the wav file (since the wav file can't store metadata like in an ID3 tag as far as I know)?
yes. you'll likely have to write (or have someone write) a little script (with some ugly regular expression) to do so, but this is exactly the kind of thing that computers are really, really good at.
Maybe when I encode into mp3's from wav's I just in some way connect to freeDB or CDDB once again, and the database recognises my wav files as the original cd (as long as I have stored all the the files from the original cd in a folder so that the amount of data in the folder is exactly as that of the cd, which is the way the database recognises cd's, right)?
it's certainly possible. the cd id is based on the number of tracks, their lengths, and their order. if you submit the wave files in the right order, and without padding (and without padding removed), then you can retrieve the right album data. whether this is easy in practice is another question. i don't know of any clients, off the top of my head, that allow you to do this, and hacking up a script to do it may be quite tricky.

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david
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#30 Post by david » Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:06 pm

I have created my own system that I will explain below. I don't expect anyone else to want to use this, but if you are interested just let me know.

My setup consists of a number of python scripts that manipulate my files. It allows me to do several of the steps described below in a single move.

The first step is that it rips the CD to a single wav file, together with a CUE file (actually a TOC file, since I'm using cdrdao). the TOC/CUE file describes where all the tracks in the file are. This allows me to recreate an exact copy of the original CD anytime with a simple command.

The next step is that it compresses the wav file to flac.

It also creates a "meta" file that contains the metadata for all the tracks, using standard Vorbis markup. Initially, this is filled in with data fetched from freedb, but I can edit it with any text editor.

It puts the directory with the flac file, the TOC file, and the meta file in my "master" disk structure, and names it after the artist/album/discnumber.

Then I can run scripts to create Ogg or mp3 files from the master copy. This gives me another set of files in another file structure, maybe on another disk. These can be used with any player etc. With a good tag editor (such as Ex Falso) I can fix all metadata in the track files and then use another of my scripts to update the master metadata files.

The end result is that I have a perfect backup of all my CDs, together will as good metadata as I want to enter (or can find somewhere), plus that I can have mp3s/oggs/whatever in any form that I need when I need it.

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