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Best encoder: gogo, or if you're not on x86, try lame.
Best ripper: cdparanoia.

I may be a little bit biased on the frontend market, but as the author of abcde I highly recommend it. :)

-Rob

Oddly enough I posted this story last week but Slashdot ignored it..... Perhaps because I pointed out that the whole site is an exact carbon copy (check some of the html and layouts) of Myplay.com.

Myplay have been offering an online storage system like this for free for the last 4 months and they don't force you to use their technology, or limit you to streaming only.

So - for all you Unix users who don't want to cart a CD selection back and forth here's an online music HOWTO

(1) Get CD Paraoia or cdda2wav
(2) get LAME
( You can also get GRIP - that's a fancy GUI system that uses GTK - nice and easy)
(3) Extract your favourte CD audio to .wav files
(4) encode .wav files to .mp3 files using LAME
(5) Delete the .wav files

then....
(6) Get XMMS
(7) Listen to your funky mp3's


Now for the anytime/anywhere part....
(8) go to Myplay.com
(9) Get an account (they're free)
(10) upload your chosen tracks
(11) Listen to them wherever you go


okokok but there's more

If you want to show off your music taste you can assemble your favourite tracks into public playlists which anybody can listen to - so it's like creating a radio show. (they use icecast for this BTW)

Plus they've also got a few free tracks, both from themselves and from affiliates like emusic.com....


SO.... my.mp3.com is not Innovative... it's a copy.

So - why isn't myplay in the related links box?

I'm a small-time artist (or was not too long ago anyway). I don't pirate CDs. I really *do* delete mp3s I download if I don't plan to buy the album (and I've bought many albums after getting to hear a few more of the songs on it). When the predecessor of the RIAA tried to stop DAT, it hurt *me*; it took away a tool I needed to record and distribute my music. The industry tried to stop the VCR, reel to reel, and the compact cassette, all tools I needed and used to their fullest. When the RIAA bans mp3 (not that I think they'll succeed) it prevents me from distributing my own music (and trading legit amateur music with my friends). "You want to distribute music without a contract? You must be a criminal."

To drive the point home: Heard much from Joan Osbourne recently? No, because her recording label hasn't liked her second album attempts (she wanted to go in a different direction), refuses to release the music and yet retains rights to it all. Her only option is to not record again. Same with XTC (whose contract recently expired), Prince (who is so pissed at Sony he's planning to rerecord *all* of his hits from the 80s). Don't give me *any* line about the RIAA or the music industry having anyone's interests at heart; their own musicians won't come out to back them.

The RIAA represents corporations with a big fat cow of money at stake. It's common sense: They will act in their own interests. They'll try the easy ways and go for the biggest pot of cash first. That in itself is not greedy or evil (although it is amoral). The tactics they've decided to use are the worst kind of FUD. "You don't believe in the Free Market and Capitalism? You must be a criminal."

The RIAA wants to turn a battle for artists' rights (that's right; I'm on the artists'-- my-- side) into a piracy story. It is not in their interests for artists to have any freedom. That will cut into their profits, so what do you expect them to do? The DVD Forum (which doesn't particularly like Linux or OSS; they want you to play on platforms they can strike Deals with) are turning a battle entirely about interoperability into a battle about piracy. "You want to watch DVDs with unapproved software? You must be a criminal."

Monty
xiph.org

Anyway, we have working not-release-ready code in CVS (the bitstreams are mostly uncompressed, that's the unfinished part), an XMMS plugin, sample encoders/decoders and are currently finishing up the bitstream format by integrating the just-finished VQ code.

Things are moving right along. Expect a public shakedown cruise of the first cut later this month (January 2000). By then, I hope to have some free time to 'freshen' the web pages a bit. Right now, hacking HTML is too seductive to risk ;-)

Monty
monty@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org

See the stuff at http://www.xiph.org/. They're working on several things. Right now it seems they're looking at a general design for streaming arbitrary 'stuff', and are also working on a good audio compression format. The hope is to eventually include video and other audio codecs. Martin

Frankly, I don't think you can beat The Xiphophorus Company.

Not only that, but what they do absolutely rocks. A patent-free GPL'd next generation audio codec? Mmmmmmmm.

Ogg Vorbis is a general purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at moderate fixed and variable bitrates (40-80 kb/s/channel). This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.

Where the pitfalls come from is what is used to rip and encode the MP3's. For the best digital extraction from the CD, CD-Paranoia is the best I've found which doesn't produce those click..click..click sounds like heard when using crappy rippers (it can even recover scratched and damaged audio CD's, too!). For MPEG-layerIII encoding, make sure to use something which produces an exact bit equavelent to Fraunhofer's output like BladeEnc. Lastly, reproduction is very important, too! Use something which produces correct quality reconstruction like MPG123.

You may have noticed that these are all command-line progs. I stay away from the eye-candy stuff unless I know the underlying engine really is quality. But, only those packages mentioned above are really known to be quality(, but they do have some third-party GUI front-ends if you are into that).

Happy Listening!

o
{:')
o

--Phil

BTW- For best possible audio, look into audio-DVD's. They are quite impressive when mastered correctly! There isn't much of a music selection available yet, though.

http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

It makes *SURE* that the data read from the drive makes sense (hense, the 'paranoia' of it). It is generally really fast, except for those scratched CDs which it will carefully try to reconstruct the audio. I can't imagine why anyone would waste time on crappy output from some of those cheezy rippers. I've had friends give me dozens of MP3's which I refuse to listen to because they have that 'click..click..click' in them from the crappy ripper.

cdparanoia seems to rip pretty well. No skips. Never really had any problems with other rippers I've tried, though.