Off-topic: mp3 ripping bitrate

[Mick Timony]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 12:20 -0400, John Abreau wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Palit, Nilanjan
> <nilanjan.palit-ral2JQCrhuEAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> > I have been looking into how to get the most out ripping mp3 from CDs -- i.e.,
> > best tradeoff between quality and filesize. I have found, from some online research,
> > that 256 kbps is recommended for generally decent audio quality.

When I first decided to rip my CD collection (about 8 years ago) I
tested with various settings and compared them all to the same sound
sample ripped at 256kbps. I found that I couldn't tell the difference
between VBR with a minimum of 128kbps and 256kbps. Anything below
128kbps I really tell the difference.

However, at the time I didn't test on high end audiophile equipment, but
on my PC with Cambridge Soundworks speakers (3 PC's later and I've the
same speakers). Recently I've been plugging my iPod into my 12 year old
Bang and Olufsen stereo system and I haven't noticed much difference in
sound quality. However, I recently got a Sony mp3 Walkman and on
headphones it sounds much clearer than my iPod 3G or iPod Nano, but I
haven't tested the Sony on the B&O.

> >
> 
> 
> I just use "lame --preset standard"; I find the quality indistinguishable from
> that of the original WAV file.
> 
> A bigger concern of mine is avoiding the tedium of re-ripping all my CDs
> whenever I need to encode to a new format.  The second time I needed to re-rip
> my collection, I used FLAC as the primary archive format, and then encoded
> mp3 and ogg from the flac files. That way, if I need to do it again in
> the future,
> I can just write a script to iterate over all the flac files and
> encode to the new
> codec-du-jour without all the extra labor of swapping discs.

If you've the disk-space, I'd go with John's suggest of ripping to FLAC
and then rerip into mp3 or some other format that might exist in the
future. FLAC uses a fair bit more disk-space than mp3, but huge
hard-drives are so cheap these days. Last year I got two Seagate 500GB
Sata drives for $90 each, this year that could be 1TB for $90! 


> 
> I also adopted the convention of archiving each album in its own directory
> along with text files of its CDDB metadata and lyrics, and a 500x500  JPEG
> of its cover image. I use the CDDB text file to generate ID3 tags when
> encoding mp3's, or the equivalent metadata for other formats.

Jonh, Do you manually retrieve the 500x500 JPEG cover art, or use a
script or some other tool to that?

> 

Once you've ripped you'll whole collection you'll need to start thinking
about back-up strategies! ;) I've been running a raid array where /home
and all media is stored, and then I periodically back this up to and
external hard drive using rsync.

-- 
Mick Timony
--

You canna change the laws of physics, Captain; I've got to have thirty minutes!