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Domain: cd-rw.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to cd-rw.org.

Comments · 6

  1. Re:low tech way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting · on Copy-protected CD Tops U.S. Charts

    Simpler, I have found alcohol 120% can copy these CDs to harddisk fine, and the "backups" can be ripped to MP3s, Alcohol 120% Software

    Now you can buy them, copy, then return them because they don't play on your computer/CD player.

  2. Re: losslessly to half the size of uncompressed CD by zeet · · Score: 1 · on Apple Releases Major iTunes Update

    *cough*

    I keep my whole music library in FLAC, and burn mix CDs from it all the time.

  3. Re:Lossless by DeeKayWon · · Score: 1 · on Apple Releases Major iTunes Update
    Lossless support doesn't mean much to me. Not so much because you can't fit as much music on an iPod when using it, but because the files are so large that the iPod will need to spin the hard drive far more often, draining the batteries more quickly. Ask a Rio Karma owner who has tried using FLAC and they'll tell you the battery life is cut by about 40% (Curiously, Vorbis on the Karma cuts the battery life even more than FLAC). And face facts, the iPod's battery life isn't that hot compared to the Karma or the iRiver players.

    I do think lossless is good, but for versatility. I have all my CDs ripped to FLAC because that way when I want to convert to a certain format it takes at worst a small script - no CD swapping again and again. Or if I want to burn a redbook CD, I just fire up Nero or K3b depending on what OS I'm using.

    For my iPod, I use foobar with the foo_nero plugin and Nero 6 to convert FLAC to M4A and preserve tags. The catch is that most M4A files created in other programs are known to cause iPods to lock up or reboot. I and others have found that if you make any kind of edit to the tags in iTunes (say, do a mass tag edit so all comments are "Transcoded from lossless") before uploading them, they'll play fine.

  4. what-is description of the blu-ray standard by UrgleHoth · · Score: 3, Informative · on HD DVD Coverage at CES 2004

    Blu-Ray

    and it seems that HP and Dell support Blu-Ray for what its worth

  5. And for Nero users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic · on Ogg Vorbis decoder chip a reality

    Don't forget the handy ogg vorbis plugin!

  6. Re:But what does it actually sound like??? by withinavoid · · Score: 1 · on AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3

    I decided to do my own evaluation between MP3, OGG Vorbis, and AAC. I don't have a Mac so I used my Windows machine and the PsyTEL MPEG-4 AAC Encoder. I used the latest LAME encoder for MP3 and the latest Ogg Vorbis command line tools.

    I used INXS "Need you tonight" for my source WAV file since it has some good dynamics and great highs. I encoded each format as a 160K VBR file. Each file resulted in nearly the same size, about 3.5MB. I was not concerned with how long it took to encode or with spectrum analysis (though I did do analysis just to see the differences). I found the AAC file to be almost identical sounding to the WAV. The high frequencies were so clear and vivid (symbal crashes at the :58 second mark especially). The lows did not sound muddled. The OGG file sounded only slightly worse than AAC and only at higher frequencies. The MP3 sounded horrible in comparison to the others.

    My Rankings:
    1. WAV (of course)
    2. AAC
    3. OGG Vorbis
    4. MP3

    I've got an iPod and I love it. It's probably the best electronic device I've bought. I use it always (snowboarding, mountain biking, gym, home, car, getting car washed, jury duty, etc...). I was quite happy to hear of AAC support. I applied the 1.3 firmware but have not been able to get an AAC file on there (don't think Xplay supports that yet).

    In a perfect world I'd love to see OGG Vorbis as the standard music file type. It's free to use by anyone and sounds amazing. Apple would make my day if they added support for it on the iPod. MP3 is horrible, unless you have tons of disk space to encode at the highest possible bitrate. Likely AAC will end up replacing MP3 eventually, and that is fine by me since it sounded best IMO, however I am worried about the effects of DRM. I feel that if I buy a CD, DVD-Audio or whatever, then I should be able to do whatever I want with it as long as I'm not giving it away to others (encode in any format, use on any of my devices, and make as many backup copies as I want!).