Bernie Hunt

I'm new to the whole portable music scene. What is the best tool to use to rip CDs and what is the best format to convert to?

I'd like to stay wth the highest audio quality and maintain portablity.

I'm looking at using CorePlayer on my Axim.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Bernie

40th Floor

iTunes, the app. Encode to mp3, gapless as of v7.0. The only players you could find that can play those gaplessly (100% gaplessly) are in my sig. You could also go to m4a, which gets you much better bang for your bits: m4a at 128 kbps is probably good enough, while mp3 at 128 kbps is often not good enough. m4a, however, is not that common in the real world. LAME is also a fine mp3 encoder, probably better than the current iTunes, also makes gapless mp3s, but you'll have to find a front end to do the ripping, etc.

*Gapless does not simply mean no pause/delay between tracks. When I use "gapless", I mean as if playing from a CD - no tick or gap between tracks (think a live concert CD); the end of oen track perfectly (100% perfectly) continues to the next track. Few encoders do this (iTunes and LAME are the only two I know that do), and about as many players can process these correctly (the two in the sig are the only I know of, on mobiles).

borgyn

Do bear in mind that the better the quality of the music the more the demand for storage space. If the portable music is for your personal use, would you consider a trade-off between quality and storage?

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Bernie Hunt

Borgyn,

Yes, I understand there is a trade off of size vs quality. I'm looking for the sweet spot between the two. Is there a point where the quality doesn't get that much better for a little more size?

Bernie

Bernie Hunt

40,

Is your website down? I'm only getting a blank page with a mungled email address. Is there more?

Bernie

borgyn

Originally Posted by Bernie Hunt

Borgyn, Yes, I understand there is a trade off of size vs quality. I'm looking for the sweet spot between the two. Is there a point where the quality doesn't get that much better for a little more size? Bernie

Is it safe to assume that your basic method of listening music will be through headphones and/or piping through portable size speakers? Does any of the available formats come close to what you would require?

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Bernie Hunt

Borgyn,

Yes. I'm a big fan of Etymotics for the complete issolation, helps me concentrate better at work. So earphones will be the most common.

I don't have any experience with any format other than red book CD audio so I can't really say. I'm hoping to get a good starting point from this thread and then fine tune as I go. I just don't want to rip a couple of hundred CDs and then find out the outcome is no good, hahaha.

Bernie

Mokubai

MP3 allows maximum portability as practically all pocket music players support it, but there are a number of other formats like the iTunes mp4 format (or m4a, whatever you want to call it) which enjoy some support.

CDEX is a good CD -> MP3 converter, I believe it can do a number of other formats but I've not looked at the list in a while. I just use the built in Lame MP3 encoder. It is extremely configurable to your quality needs so you can decide for yourself how much quality you are willing to sacrifice.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

Ah, here's a list of supported formats:
Lame MP3 encoder
Internal MP2 encoder
APE lossles audio format
Ogg Vorbis encoder
The Windows MP3 encoder (Fraunhofer MP3 encoder)
NTT VQF encoder
FAAC encoder
Windows WMA8 encoder

My personal preference is to set CDEX up to Lame MP3, VBR encoding (32-320kbps) with quality set to 2. This gives files that average at about 192-220kbps but also try to keep as much quality as you can while not slowing down to a crawl. With quality set to 1 it slows down tremendously. The VBR is useful for quality too as some sections of music do not need as many bits to encode as others and so are encoded with less which means more bits can be used in a section that needs it. I am oversimplifying but it's all you really need to know.

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