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CD Ripping Services Compared
RX8 writes "Designtechnica compares a number of CD ripping services and talks about the differences in services, price and which formats they will rip your music to. The guide compares 6 different services, all of which are somewhat different in what they do. Ripping services are gaining in popularity because they make it so easy to convert (a.k.a. rip) your entire collection into MP3 files for your portable media device."
This was sometime back when I was playing around with KDE & SuSe. I was searching sourceforge/freshmeat for some cool ripper. they were problems compilin & shit with them. I poked around into /mnt/cdrom in konqueror & HOLY SHIT it has mp3 & ogg vorbis folders. I was shocked to see mp3 supplied by the CD manufacture. later i came to know it was KDE's feature!!! All i had to was copy/paste folder into HD partitions...i was like holy goddamn! KDE has an inbuilt ripper. thats it, i never searched for a ripper. just My 2c.
replace lame -b with flac -6 and you're there. with drives as large as they are now why bother with lossy compression? the good thing about flac is that it also stores an md5 checksum of the pcm data so you even run validity checks on your media. simply transcode to your desired portable music player format at your convenience without having to re-rip!
Ripping my CD's (~450) to a minimum of 192kbps using CDex, you can rip from two drives at the same time, put two CD's in, eyeball the CDDB entries, press rip. Then from that point I go do something else, pop in every few minutes, change CD's rinse and repeat. Worked ok.
Task Mangler
i think the bigger problem was that anyone could download a CDDB CD ID list and get whatever the fark they wanted form mp3.com
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Or Brass/Silver polish. Rub a bit on with a soft cloth and You should be able to get all but the worst scratches out of your CDs.
I actually do this as a service. If you are still interested, please visit www.vinyl2disc.com. Perhaps I'll be talking to you a bit later.
-Vinyl2Disc.com
I'm not going to send my CDs to one of these services, I have been in the process of ripping my entire collection to Vorbis for quite some time. No rush, I have a lot done--enough to entertain me while I am in the process of finishing the rest...
Nothing wrong with that. But I gotta say, iTunes is even better in this department. You can set it to automatically rip the disc (to codex/bitrate x) when the disc is inserted, and eject automatically when finished. I did my CD collection this way; basically when I went to watch a movie or was reading, I'd just open the laptop next to me and put in the next disc when I heard the whir of the last disc ejecting. No clicking at all.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I have a collection of 4,259 CDs. It took me a couple of hours to rip the CDs including lyrics.
Oh, it took my Mac almost a month to rip them, but why would I could cpu cycles as *my* time? iTunes makes ripping damn easy and with PearLyrics you can get lyrics automatically added (for songs it can find).
What I did was connect 3 external CD drives and I had 2 internal drives. I would then load up my trays with 5 discs. I had iTunes set to auto-import an eject.
Minimal effort and very rewarding. Even if I only had 1 drive, it would still have been very easy...but with the money I was saving, I could've not only bought additional drives, I could've bought a new Mac as well.
I simply can't imagine paying for the service...especially when it involves shipping the discs.
16 bits is 65536 *levels* of amplitude.That's a difference of 15 microvolts per level for each volt of audio signal level. You think the human ear is going to differentiate between two adjacent levels? Not to mention that the level is always changing (if not, you have silence). Also, when you convert back to analog, the digital data is filtered which smooths it back out to, in theory, the original waveform.
Now for frequency, the top end of the human perceptual spectrum is about 22 KHz. All those nuances and tones and shading occur in that range. The Nyquist sampling rate to be able to perfectly reproduce (again, in theory) the original waveform is 2x your top frequency, so you sample at 44 KHz.
So you have your frequency spectrum covered, and way more amplitude levels than you need. Add some Reed Solomon error correction to account for scratches and other damage, and you have a decent audio standard despite what some audiophiles claim. When they were developing the standard, Sony and Philips even debated using 14 bit samples.
Nyquist
Nah, mp3.com would query for several random bytes of the cd in question, so the person would pretty much have to have a copy of the cd. I remember the security was considered strong but they lost in court anyway because it was deemed to still be copyright infringement, see Umg vs. Mp3.com.
You missed one point.
It's 16 bits per channel per sample yes, and that is only 65535 possible different values for that one sample yes. But there are 44 thousand samples recorded/played back per second.
Sound is only variations in air pressure. At any one instant in time the pressure is at a particular single level (per channel). So you only need one value for each instant of time. And for human ears 44 thousand times in one second is enough. And 65535 discreet levels is enough to represent the sample. (though some people would say they prefer higher).
It's like, how many different shades of gray do you need for a black and white photograph? You might only need 256 shades of grey to show a very convincing picture (the huge majority of computer monitors can only show 256 different shades of gray).
But basically most musicians should be familiar with the notion that sound can be represented as a waveform. A sound waveform is basically a drawing of how the speaker paper moves over time. Digitizing a waveform is just a case of recording the height of the wave to a certain accuracy (16 bits) every so often (44k times per second).
If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k. I use it to rip all of my CD's to Musepack -standard, get tags, apply ReplayGain, and sort it how I like it. It also has the advantage of not being nearly as resource/memory intensive as itunes or WMP 10.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
What kind of cheap-ass drives do you use? Much to my disappointment, the non-techies in my office have been playing audio CD's on their PCs 8 hours a day, every day, for the last eight years, and never ruined a drive.
You do realize there's a difference between playing a disc(1 speed) or using DAE to rip it(whatever the max speed of the drive is), right?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Here in the 'States, postal theft is taken very seriously. The USPS has an army of Postal Inspectors whose sole job it is to catch employees in the act of theft. IIRC, tampering with the mail is a felony here and can quite easily land you prison time.
My father works for the USPS. At his office they had a guy pick up a Playboy magazine off the line, stuff it under his shirt, and walk out on his lunch break. He walked out the back door straight into two Inspectors who recovered the mail, promptly fired him, and held him for the police to pick up. That's the only known case of attempted mail theft.
In a modern post office here there are raised, enclosed walkways that cover the entire processing floor. These walways have one-way windows placed so that there is nowhere on the floor you can hide. The entire system has a separate entrance so that employees can't see inspectors coming or going. Basically any person in any office could be observed at any time, and they never know whether there's even an inspector present. It's a very effective deterrent.
If you buy insurance for something you ship with USPS, it's put in a seperate "cage" for handling, and only certain employees can even touch it. My father once had a $250,000 stock certificate come through; he personally carried it from the front counter to the insured mail area and had the Postmaster watch him place it in the hands of the guy handling certified mail. They take personal responsibility seriously there.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.