Slashdot Mirror

Screw the Plextor ... use the Kenwood 72x True CD-ROM. Under windows 98 I can get rip speeds of about 60x-65x. The CD-ROM has a buffer of 2MB and it blocks if it's empty -- I've ripped about 300 or so CDs with it and not one of the rips has skips in it (even my scratchy old Led Zeppelin CDS).

Using this CD-ROM, the bottleneck on my p3-800 system is the encoding itself. It takes only 4 or 5 seconds to rip a 20 minute song, but more than a minute to encode it. This was your original question, though ... I think the most specialized hardware you'll find for MP3 encoding (at this point in the technological timeline) is a hefty processor. Speed really counts, since it's just number crunching. I liken this to the good ole days of software compilation on 386-SX machines -- the faster your CPU the faster a program compiled. I'm sure you know, but the better quality encoding you do, the longer it takes to encode a given song. I usually use moderate/high VBR for all my songs (since I like post-processing using my equalizer) and have found that the only way to speed up the encoding is to lower the quality of the resulting MP3.

I've been using the AudioCatalyst product for about two years now, and it has been (and continues to be) the fastest and best sounding (don't bore me with comparisons of audio plots -- it's not the data that's in the MP3 that matters, it's how it sounds) MP3 ripper/encoder that I've found. CDex (http://www.surf.to/cdex) is a close second since it fits nicely on top of any encoder that you want. I've gotten comprable speed out of Cdex as from AudioCatalyst (http://www.xingtech.com)

The answer, on linux, is pretty straightforward.

Regardless whether you have a Shoutcast or Icecast server handling the broadcasting part of it for you (Icecast works great, and apparantly smokes Shoutcast in the performance department), you'll need to get the icecast package from icecast.org to get the liveice and shout utilities (liveice handles the encoding of input from your sound card and fires it off to the shout/icecast server, where shout will play pre-recorded mp3s as a live stream to a shout/icecast server).

If you're planning on using a slow modem-capable bitrate, such as 24Kbit or 32Kbit, I'd recommend the Xing Encoder, which has vastly superior quality over the free encoders at low bitrates. It may not be free, but it's definitely worth the $19.95. Yes, you will have to patch your kernel to make it work with liveice, too, but the patch appears to work just fine.

If you'd like an example of a show done in exactly this fashion, have a listen to Does Humour Belong in Technology? Our encoder box is a dual Celeron 400, and doing the dual encoding it runs approximately 5-10% CPU.

It's just that easy.

There is the Xing MP3 encoder for Linux that should work with RHS 6.1. For the $20 I spent on it, it's well worth it (and very FAST!)

--

Unfortunately, this is about what we should expect from The Music Industry(tm)(r)(c). They would like to appear to be supporting online music, but really, they are going to do everything in their power to ensure that it doesn't cut in to their sales of CDs. And, of course, I suppose they are going to choose some nice 'open' format like SDMI so that once you've downloaded it, you can't make any copies. Not that I would expect anything more from the company that brought us SCMS and helped stop the consumer DAT.

At any rate this is just another case where we need to just say no and vote with our dollars. Buy the CD instead and rip the music yourself. If you need a good MP3 encoder, may I suggest Xing. It's only $20 and you can get it for Windows, MacOS, or Linux (either Intel or PPC). Also, it's quite fast and sounds better than Opticon Producer (IMHO).

It's already been done.

My experience with MP3 started about 6 months ago. I used bladeenc at first and tried lame as well. What I really hated about bladeenc was the speed. Sure, the audio quality is fairly good and I would freely buy that guy many drinks for his hard work, but the time it takes on my PII-400 is just silly. I mean, it takes about 6 mins to encode that latest "number one" hit into an MP3. I tried LAME, which isn't as good in my opinion (I class myself as having a fairly good ear - I went to sony labs about 5-6 years ago when MiniDisc was first being developed and marketed and I could easily tell the difference between each of the various formats they had - I think that included MP3, but definitely the MPEG 1 stuff at the time). So LAME wasn't as good and took about the smae amount of time to encode. I looked around and found Xing. I purchased their encoder and found it to be fairly good. It sounds much better than bladeenc et al. and it can encode at nearly 4x which is excellent. Their are just a few things that ***YOU*** should know about our friends at xing. 1). They are about to be bought out by Real, so don't expect any product updates soon. 2). The enocder can encode at several times real time on my machine, but even using fifos, or whatever you care to try, there is *no* way to get the xing encoder to read from a mic input (e.g. via esd's PCM output from esdrec) and output in a mannor that would enable me to do live webcasts. This was very irritating as I couldn't understand why their program didn't like fifo's. 3). When I contacted the Xing support department, I got no reply for over 4 weeks and then all I got was a *RUDE* reply from someone who used offensive language to tell me where I could stick my..... etc... - when I threatened to *sue* them or take them to trading standards I received further unpleasant replies and I am left fealing that they have a very good encoder, but they have *incompetent* staff who have no idea of what they are doing, or of any knowledge of customer relations. IF YOU WANT A GOOD ENCODER, USE THE XING ENCODER - BUT BE WARNED, THEY NOT ONLY BITE, BUT SEND YOU OFFENSIVE OR OBSCENE REPLIES WHEN YOU MAIL THEM. I know that no-one will ever read this because it's way too far down the replies list for anyone to bother to read. Jon.

Personally, I would recommend the Xing technology mp3 encoder. It is available for linux, and costs about $20. On a P-233 w/32mb ram, running the windows version under win95, it encodes at approx. 1.5X on an IDE drive. Bitrate variable from 8 - 256 kpbs as .mp3, and up to 384kpbs as .mp2. Anything higher than about 192kpbs is overkill: you can't tell the difference even on excellent speakers. Even then, the differences are only noticeable in classical or other similar music with more pure tones.

http://www.xingtech.com /support/extest/mp3/encoder/index.html
Look at this.. they're looking for linux beta testers....