MP3 Ripping Software

It's all about the equipment

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GemZombie
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#31 Post by GemZombie » Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:26 pm

CafeSavoy wrote: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.
To split hairs, Winamp *can't* handle it until you add a plugin. When I tried it, that plugin was pretty bad. I'm sure it's a whole lot better.

Besides, as much as I used to be a fan of Winamp, it lost me long ago. It's just not that great anymore.

I'm also a Roxio (by ways of Sonic Solutions) employee. So Nero is out of the question ;)

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#32 Post by GemZombie » Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:29 pm

tornredcarpet wrote:
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.
While that's technically true, it's sort of a misnomer... CD's, if stored properly, will last a very long time. Hard drives too, of course, except they have moving parts, which makes them *far* more likely to go bad.

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#33 Post by tornredcarpet » Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:34 am

GemZombie wrote:To split hairs, Winamp *can't* handle it until you add a plugin. When I tried it, that plugin was pretty bad. I'm sure it's a whole lot better.
Winamp actually does it natively now.
Jesse (Los Angeles, CA/Hampton Roads, VA)

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#34 Post by tornredcarpet » Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:35 am

GemZombie wrote:
tornredcarpet wrote:
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.
While that's technically true, it's sort of a misnomer... CD's, if stored properly, will last a very long time. Hard drives too, of course, except they have moving parts, which makes them *far* more likely to go bad.
I know they're supposed to last a century in an light-tight bag in the freezer.
Jesse (Los Angeles, CA/Hampton Roads, VA)

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Mr Awesomer
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#35 Post by Mr Awesomer » Fri Mar 23, 2007 10:26 am

Toon Town Dave wrote: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.
Very good point! Obvliously crappy 128kbs or lower MP3's are going to cause problems, but anything above that is going to be just fine in any club, bar, or dance hall setting.
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Lawrence
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#36 Post by Lawrence » Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:21 am

Jonas wrote: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)?
I don't know why so many people go to the extra, unnecessary step of saving a WAV file, and THEN compressing to an MP3 file to create this issue, in the first place. As Jesse (Minor) noted, you still have the original CDs, so you are essentially wearing both belts and suspenders to keep your pants up. Indeed, losing the automatic data entry is sufficient reason for me to rip directly from the CD to MP3.

"Data entry" refers to the entering the song, album, artist, composer, and genre information. MP3 files have dozens of "tags" (embedded text file data fields) that store this information in the MP3 file, itself. These tags can keep track of not only the song titles and the performer information, but also the album artist, composer, genre, and other information. WAV files don't have "tags;" they only contain the digital music, itself.

As far as I know, the only way you get song and artist information with WAV files is if the program you use creates a separate text file associated with the wav file, which keeps track of it for you on the side. (Like Nero does). Then only that program can use that data info. It is conceivable that the program you use will then transfer this side data to the MP3 tags, but it probably will omit certain tags (like genre, composer, and album artist), and only give you song and singer information. Moreover, again, I don't know why you would want to go to this completely unnecessary extra step.

Absent your WAV software keeping track of the data for you, I don't know of anything that links WAV files up to the music datasbases. Music on CDs are not in WAV format, they are in something like CDAC. I am not sure, but I think you would need to re-burn it onto a CD in CDAC (or whatever digital format is on CDs) to link back up to the CBBD database.
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#37 Post by julius » Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:39 am

Lawrence wrote: I don't know why so many people go to the extra, unnecessary step of saving a WAV file, and THEN compressing to an MP3 file to create this issue, in the first place.
The tedious part of ripping for me is inserting the CDs into the drive a thousand times or more. If I rip to a lossless format such as WAV or FLAC and stash the data somewhere, then in the event of a catastrophic disk failure leading to the loss of all mp3s then it's easy to re-"rip" by copying files over and converting. (Presumably the disk containing lossless data will have a backup as well.)

Of course you could just back up the mp3s that you rip ... but you're backing up a lossy conversion. Hence the intermediate lossless rip. You're backing up the labor as well as the music.

One of my hard drives just ate itself and I lost 62 gigs of mp3s ripped at 128. I reloaded the mp3s from an external hard drive, but I only had 52 gigs of them (been a while since I backed up, whoops). When I began ripping CDs there was no reasonable way for someone of ordinary means to even think of storing thousands of CDs losslessly ... but I wish I had done so, because now disk space is cheap I could just convert all of them to variable bit rate mp3s for better sound quality. Instead, I'll have to re-rip all the CDs.

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#38 Post by Lawrence » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:02 pm

julius wrote:Of course you could just back up the mp3s that you rip ... but you're backing up a lossy conversion. Hence the intermediate lossless rip. You're backing up the labor as well as the music.
What about the data-entry thing, though? Wouldn't you lose all the tag info by going through the intermediate step: especially the composer, album artist and genre tag info?
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#39 Post by julius » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:02 pm

As far as backing up original CDs losslessly I wonder if anyone just copies a disk image onto hard drives? To recover a lost CD you'd just burn the .iso (or whatever, I'm fuzzy on the terminology) to a new CD. Does that work? Is it easier? Obviously it doesn't save as much space as ripping to FLAC.

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#40 Post by kitkat » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:04 pm

Nah. Doesn't take long to drag & drop the music and burn it.

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#41 Post by Toon Town Dave » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:06 pm

In response to Julius' post ...

Exactly.

* Disc space is cheap
* My time is more valuable, I can re-convert my entire collection to MP3 in a day unattended. It would take weeks to re-rip everything.

A collection of .wav files on disc in addition to the original CDs stored safely provides a backup of each there is bit rot on the disc, I have the copy on disc. If there is bit rot on the disc, I have the CD to re-rip. If both get destroyed, there is always the option of re-purchasing.

As for the meta data, a file naming convention is a great, simple way to store meta data. Especially when the metadata is just album title, album artist, track artist, track title and track number. It's readable on any platform without special software.

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#42 Post by julius » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:08 pm

Lawrence: I can't quite remember for sure but I seem to recall that if I just reburn all the wav files onto the CD in the right order, the online databases recognize the CD and shoot me all the track information again.

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#43 Post by julius » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:12 pm

Toon Town Dave wrote: A collection of .wav files on disc in addition to the original CDs stored safely provides a backup of each there is bit rot on the disc, I have the copy on disc. If there is bit rot on the disc, I have the CD to re-rip. If both get destroyed, there is always the option of re-purchasing.
You need a lossless backup of the CDs to back up the music, then you need a backup of the lossless backup to back up the labor.

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#44 Post by Toon Town Dave » Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:31 pm

It all depends what the risk assessment says. I.T. managers always perform a risk assessment. :wink:

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#45 Post by tornredcarpet » Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:55 pm

julius wrote:As far as backing up original CDs losslessly I wonder if anyone just copies a disk image onto hard drives? To recover a lost CD you'd just burn the .iso (or whatever, I'm fuzzy on the terminology) to a new CD. Does that work? Is it easier? Obviously it doesn't save as much space as ripping to FLAC.
Julius, I believe it is actually quite popular now to back up CDs using EAC... which has an option to rip an entire CD into a single file (typically a lossless format such as MPC, APE, or FLAC. The companion CUE file will provide all the metadata you need to play the individual tracks, or burn a flawless reproduction of the first (barring any copyright protection or digital extras).

I'm not too big of a fan of it, however, simply because it is so memory intensive and there's not too many CDs which I like every song on enough to back each and every one of them up.
Jesse (Los Angeles, CA/Hampton Roads, VA)

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