Off-topic: mp3 ripping bitrate

[Palit, Nilanjan]

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

I found this site (http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html) that has a Perl utility to retrieve cover art images from Amazon.com. However, what I was not clear is whether it needs the slimserve software to work or whether it could work standalone. Anyone use this script or something similar?

-Nilanjan


________________________________
From: Mick Timony [mailto:michael.timony-H+0wwilmMs3R7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 10:44 PM
To: John Abreau
Cc: Palit, Nilanjan; discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
Subject: Re: Off-topic: mp3 ripping bitrate

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<mailto: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!