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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best MP3 Encoder?
syd asks: "I'm wanting to convert my CD collection to MP3, and I'm looking for the best MP3
encoder to do the job. The most important factor is the sound quality
of the encoded files. Other concerns are cost, platform, and speed of
the encoder. However, I'm only going to encode them once, and I'm
going to listen to them fairly often, so I'd rather have a slow
encoder that sounds good. I would prefer to use Linux, although I
would be willing to reboot into Windows if necessary. If anyone has
any pointers to some real numbers, that would be most helpful."
A fair enough question. What do you all think?
I have ripped and encoded about 2,500 files myself. I disagree with the other poster who claimed that bladeenc is fast at all. It seems to be a pretty slow encoder for me, but then again I encode at 256K. I have heard that bladeenc will encode in near realtime on a 233Mhz at 128K. But I can tell you that it comes no where near realtime even on my 400Mhz with 256MB Ram. I don't think I'll be changing encoders any time soon unless someone demonstrates a noticeably better sound quality encoder. --Aaron
This is the same encoder used in Audio Catalyst for Windows - it beats the snot out of everything else out there, hands down.
I'm sure you'd be able to write a shell script or something (or use one of the many frontends for rippers/encoders) to encode entire cds.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
---
I'm about to start the process of encoding all of my personal CD's as well, and one thing I'm yet to understand is if there is some degree of CDDB integration with the popular encoders out there, so that encoded files get named properly without requiring much interaction by the user.
If not, then what is the best open-source encoder and CDDB-compatible CD player application, so that I can make a FrankenCoder that will automatically place encoded CD files into the correct directory/filename layout for easy reference...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I agree with most of what you say except for the "gimmicky variable bit rate option." Variable Bit Rate (VBR) is a Good Thing(tm). It allows the encoder to use fewer bits for unimportant sections (like complete silence) and more bits for complex portions using many frequencies. This makes for a better sound quality given the same filesize.
The only disadvantage I see with it is that it messes up some crappy mp3 players, but that's a problem with the mp3 player, not the encoder.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Although most of the focus centers on the mp3 encoder, people often forget that the CD ripper is important as well. While bad encoding may be annoying, skips in mp3s are infinitely more annoying.
For rippers that work on IDE CD-ROM drives, I've personally found all the ones integrated with encoders to be crap. On my (fairly bad) CD-ROM drive, they almost always produce mp3s with skips in them. Worse yet, they don't do much of any error checking to let me know of this.
So I use CD-R-Win (for Windows). It's designed for CD-to-CD copying with a CD-R drive, but can also do CD-to-WAV ripping with any CD-ROM drive. It actually does extensive error checking, and NEVER produces a file with a skip, no matter how small, in it. You have an option of having it abort in an error, or having it retry reading the skipped area a certain number of times to correct the error. To the best of my knowledge, no other ripper has this option. With every other ripper I've tried, I've gotten at least one or two mp3s with skips in them, while cdrwin is 100% perfect.
That said, I'd prefer a ripper integrated with an encoder and CDDB lookup. However, the ripper must be 100% perfect, and NEVER produce a skip. Does anybody know of a ripper other than cdrwin that can do this? So far I've been unable to do so, though I'll continue looking.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've tried CDex, but I haven't been able to get it to rip without skipping at least once per song. It is better than most of the other rippers though, since it at least tells you when it had skip problems. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually fix those skip problems, which is what cdrwin does (and what I'm looking for).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wow, didn't realize it had progressed that far. I'm using CDex v0.15 beta 4, which could be why it's not performing as well as you described =)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Look at http://www.inf.bme.hu/~dancsi/USE!/index.html thex have some decent data about different encoders.
It's as good or better than Windoze, albeit not as stable or fast as Linux, but thats not his point. Just that MacOS is as modern as Windows and used as much or more than Linux and for sure BeOS.
By not spending as much space on bass sounds, you get more bandwidth for other areas of the frequency spectrum.
John
John_Chalisque
and a program called Macromedia SoundEdit, w/ SWA export. I find the quality to be excellent. Anyone else here used that?
Here's a link to a Macintouch.com column w/ comparisons of different(Mac) encoders. Soundedit takes a long time, but it is the best.
Sorry I am stupid, forgot link.
I second your recommendation for Plextor, but don't understand your enthusiasm for Adaptec.
Last time anybody tested, Adaptec cards were no faster than the competition (even a hair slower than some). Meanwhile, if you're reading Slashdot, there's no reason to pay almost double for an Adaptec--even if their phone tech support is better than, say, Tekram's, they still won't likely know enough to help you if you have a problem anyway, unless it's a simple mistake...
I like my 53c8xx-based SCSI boards, and my UltraPlex. My Mitsubishi CD-RW was cheap, and functions okay.
Another nice reason to go SCSI, though, is to get a 2-drive external case (plus a quieter fan than the one that came with it), and stick your CD-ROM and CD-RW on your desktop. Much smaller than a minitower, plus I have a full-sized case on the floor I don't have to lean down to...
Grip + LAME is my choice. The auto rip and eject features are nice for bulk ripping.
I share my rip directory over NFS, and use a perl front end to lame to dispatch encode jobs over the network so it can encode several tracks in parallel. With enough boxes, it doesn't matter how slow encoding is.
Why bother? If you have a cdrom collection, what's the point of converting them to MP3's? Buy a portable CD player from either K-mart or Wal-mart and play them on that. Why waste HD space for no good reason? Ah the Wired mentality at work. Gotta love it. NOT.
Unless you want to upload files over the internet, the best sound quality is only going to be from MP2 above 256k. MP3 was developed for distributing music over low bandwidth connections not for archiving. If you must go with the pack, use Lame, which supports joint stereo. Bladeenc does not support joint stereo. Joint stereo greatly improves the quality.
I personally use bladenc, but I've heard good things about LAME. The key thing is that the Franhaufer (sp?) encoders are really geared to high compression ratios to make 128kbps. They do a swell job of producing good sound at 128kbps. For GREAT sound though, you want to go with 192kbps and bladenc or LAME. Franhaufer is way to tuned for 128kbps IMHO and when you boost it to 192kbps and compare with LAME or bladenc, you can actually hear the difference.
sigs are a waste of space
You must be proud!
Come back when you can keep that Mac up, under normal usage, for months at a time and you may have an argument.
Xing offers their encoder for Linux for $20.
Pros: Fast. Really fast. The audio quality (on a properly supported player) appears as good as l3enc.
Cons: Closed software. Only a few current players will play back files (other players 'warble', 'hiss' and do other wierd things from time to time) produced with it even if you don't go all the way to the bleeding edge and use Variable Bitrate Encoding. In their favor though, Xing has released a decoder which plays back their stuff under the GPL so it is hard to fault them. Freeamp seems to be the only one with a linux player based on the Xing code.
Democrat delenda est
IIRC, RAR doesn't compress much better, it works on the same principle that bzipping a tar does -- you tend to get a better symbol dictionary for compressing when you have a bigger dataset to do it with. zip compresses individual files into an archive. targz/rar puts all files together and compresses the archive.
I was just like you about a year ago, when I found a sound format called VQF.. it provided the quality of a 224 kbps mp3 with 96 kbps. The main problems that I've seen are that encoded does take much longer than mp3, (naturally, since you're packing more data in a smaller space, just like rar takes longer than zip) and also the fact that you can only play VQFs under linux with wine (eww!!).. I've racked up a pretty good collection of VQFs (1615+), and they all sound great.. more info about this format is available at www.vqf.com. I know many people in here are hardcore MP3ers, so that's the reason for the subject.
Hope this helps ya,
MoOsEb0y (mooseboy@vqf.com)
I rip with my HP CD-Writer Plus 7200i at 6x all the time and it sounds great... just my 2 cents
-MoOsEb0y (mooseboy@vqf.com)
I'm afraid that you are mistaken there.. it is given out for free by yamaha, and there is a plugin for winamp, kjofol plays it natively, esprit will play them once you rape the yamaha player of it's dlls, c-4 soon will, and ntt (a japanese company, which originally invented it) also makes a player. quite clearly, there is significant support for it, plus how often do you see 96k (or even 80k!) MP3s that sound good?
correction... yamaha.. even if both companies have japanese names =), oh did I mention that solidaudio is making a portable player (similar to rio and mpman), which will play VQFs?
The encoder is free from yamaha.. and ntt for that matter, and VQFs are playable under wine, tho I'd prefer a native player =\
In one point, I find this comparison rather biased. All the audible sound testing is done by only 10 people, and not only that, but with classical music, which HAS to sound crisp.. if this test were taken with rock, VQF would definately win hands down.. the way VQF works is similar to realaudio on steroids, in the respect that it smooths out distortion, so that you either don't notice it, or it's not annoying (i.e. jpeg vs. fractal)
According to a thi finnish HIFI-magazine, 128kbit/s gives only poor to mediocre sound quality, 192kb/s is nearly acceptable, and 256 is near-CD quality, comparable to MiniDisc. And it IS from a high end Hi-Fi point of view.
This was from an article where they tested Diamond's Rio PMP300 and Macab's DAP32.
Among the tested encoders were bladeenc (linux and Windows), CDex (Windows), Electronic Cosmo's MPEG suite (Windows), Encoder-js (Linux) and MusicMatch (Windows, comes with the portable players).
No sig. Go away.
Of course, if you don't want to pay the premium for a Plextor, there _are_ other options out there that will get you at least as good results (bitperfect-wise) as a Plextor would. I've heard that the Panasonic 24x and 32x IDE drives do bitperfect extractions at 8x and can hold their own when it comes to scratched CDs. I myself use a 36x Pioneer IDE (though I hear the SCSI works equally well if not better) which gives me 12x across the disc (switches into CLV mode to do DAE!) with bitperfect results. I extracted a whole CD 3 times (each time took about 5 min.) and compared each track to each track. No differences! I've tried tray-load and slot-load versions of the 36x and both worked the same. I paid $60 for mine (OEM).
:-)
BEWARE other Pioneer drives, though -- Pioneer did a good job with the 36x firmware, but they have a reputation for not being consistent when it comes to DAE. The 32x Pioneer was getting great DAE reviews for a while, but then a few months later it was getting not-so-good reviews. It appeared that the only difference between the drives that worked and the drives that didn't was the version of the firmware. The newer firmware broke DAE. Then the 36x models were released and everything was okey-dokey again. Now the 40x Pioneers are out and DAE is broken yet again. (I've got a 40x Pioneer as well and the reports are true -- it does not do bitperfect DAE). At least we know that Pioneer has the ability to manufacture drives that can do good DAE.
So, if you can get a 36x Pioneer for cheap, go for it!
I just downloaded it after reading all the posts. I think it works great. It sounds much better than Xing's encoder, but that might be due to "joint-stereo." (I can't seem to notice a difference between LAME/BladeEnc other than LAME is a few kilobytes larger -- both sound great.) Thanks.
Is there anything "open source" or for Linux that'll rip and encode at the same time?
Most modern computer platforms except MacOS. :op
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
I happen to already have that album encoded, so I played it and listened closely for any problems. I didn't hear any. The song is called 'Last Dance'.
I've been ripping tracks with cdparanoia (alpha prerelease 9.4) and encoding with bladenc (v0.76) at 128kbs from a 20x drive, though cdparanoia makes it clear that the data speed on the drive doesn't effect the rippping speed.
This is on a Pentium 200 Mhz machine with 128 megs of memory, an IDE cdrom drive and an IDE hard drive on seperate controller. I run X, play MP3s, act as a gateway for another box, a file server (including MP3s) for that box, a server for a couple NCDs, and I've been playing CivCTP. Idle CPU goes to distributed.net.
In spite of that load I manage to get 3 CDs encoded each day. I've now got about 150 CDs taking a little over 7 gigs.
The wav files tend to take about 10 megs per minute, and the MP3s take a bit over 1 meg per minute.
Yes, that means I've got more than 4 days of music available. And a lot of jewel cases collecting dust.
PCWeek isn't the most unbiased of sources. In general I don't like that magazine very much.
I can't comment on the review in c't directly, but personally don't plan on switching away from MP3 anytime soon -- it sounds good enough, and nobody 'owns' it. For me to buy into a proprietary standard, it would have to be A LOT better... and none of them, so far, are.
Whatever RIAA wants, SDMI is NOT going to happen. I guarantee it.
This is unsubstantiated rumor: take with salt.
I have been told that that Maxtor owns Quantum. Drives from both come off the same assembly lines, but Quantum gets 'pick of the litter'. In other words, Maxtor builds drives from the platters that Quantum didn't want/need.
In general, apparently, you get better drives if you buy Quantum over Maxtor. But you will pay more for them, too.
Don't know about you folks, but I'm getting nervous about how cheap drives are getting. The damn things are spinning 120 times A SECOND in there. Quality is likely to take a nosedive with the incredible financial pressures that drive makers are under right now.
We've had a LOT of Western Digital 9GB SCSIs fail at work. We brought in about twenty of those drives about 18 months ago, and eight have died. And those weren't even cheap..... I think we paid $850 each or so. WD has been very nice about replacing them, but they still broke.
It worries me when I see drives of about the same size and speed rating (EIDE, admittedly) for $150 in just 18 months... that is waaay too much price pressure. Something has got to give, and I fear it will be our data.
Because of it's speed, I use Xing's command line encoder to encode. I use VBR HQ, and the resulting mp3's average around 200kbps for newer music. Some of my older music turns out around 112, and are still indistinguishable from the original. Not bad, considering that for difficult parts of the music it jumps up to 256 or 320kbps. For not-so-demanding portions, it will drop down to 96kbps. I also figure that drive space is so cheap that I shouldn't skimp on quality.
:)
For ripping, I use cd-paranoia III on my linux box. That sucker can rip from dirty discs, even with a few scratches. It's slow, but yields a very stable wave file. I built a perl front end that looks the cd up at cddb.com. After it rips, it sends the wav file over to my PPro w/ WinNT, which encodes, tags and renames the file. Am I the only one that uses a cluster for creating mp3s?
I like fraunhofer's codec, but v3.1 doesn't run on WinNT (documented bug...) and it takes an eternity to encode files. Besides, they seem to be concentrating on 128kbps and below, mainly for streaming music over the internet. On top of that, there's no possibility of VBR.
My perception of BladeEnc is that it plainly sucks. Maybe that's because I've heard horrid-sounding samples of music encoded with this encoder. I just recently read that there are bad versions floating around. It seems that if Blade is compiled with code optimizations, the mp3 output turns out *different* from what it should.
I can't be sure, but there are two artifacts I hear most often in mp3s in a.b.sounds.mp3. The first is a distinct background, garbled digital wooshing sound, accentuated most when treble is turned up. The other artifact I hear I call "spoons". That's where you hear a really high-pitched "ping", like two spoons being whacked together, on cymbals and other high-toned instruments. I attribute these to Blade, probably unfairly, but there seems to be a lot of crappy mp3s out there... and someone doesn't know s/he's making them.
The most promising encoder I have seen is LAME (LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder) (LAME). They just put in VBR support, and they have a much improved psycho-acoustic model over the ISO code. And it's all open source. Neat-oh!
MP3 encoders are just another religious debate in computer land. What really matters is which one sounds best to *YOU*. Do some experimenting, make sure you're using headphones. Try a few different encoders on the same wav file, and do A-B comparisons. Try different kinds of music (I found picking-guitar and audience applause are difficult for some encoders). You're correct: you only want to encode your collection once, so you want to make sure it's done right!
The last thing I want to mention is Joint Stereo. Personally, I like it, as it gives the left and right a little more room to store data, but I have noticed a *very* slight reduction in channel separation. The left and right aren't as separated as the original. It's extremely hard to notice, and in my opionion, very much worth the increase in quality.
-dodja
BladeEnc is a great encoder, but there are a few issues:
:).
1. It's slow. It takes the K6-2 300 in the other room about 2 times the length of the song being encoded to encode.
2. Avoid BladeEnc 0.80 and 0.81! They randomly produce fucked up MP3s when encoding in batch! I found this out the hard way. After encoding several CDs and listening to the MP3s on the Windoze machine in the other room, I tried listening to them on my machine using XMMS... some were okay, but some sounded like random noise, or were too slow/fast, etc. This is a bug that the author acknowledges was in 0.80 and was supposedly fixed in 0.81 (although it wasn't). I don't know if a new version is out that has fixed this, but it's safest to stick with 0.76.
Other than that, BladeEnc is a fine choice
From the artists I've talked to on mp3.com and amp3.com, Bladeenc isn't that great. I usually just use mp3 producer pro, but its interface tends to be a bit flakey. For batch encoding a bunch of cds, you can't beat anything like CDDA Extractor that does builtin CDDB stuff and track naming all the way through encoding...
But I've tried a number of different encoders under Linux, OS/2 and Windows, and I'm currently settled on MusicMatch Jukebox 4.0 under Windows95. I know, I know, we all know Windows bites, but this app has really functioned extremely well for me and I even went ahead and registered it to get up to 160kbps sampling rates. Their web site is at: http://www.musicmatch.com/.
Cheers...
I'm surprised you made no mention of size and bitrate, which in the end will have much more to do with the quality of your music than the encoder. Any of several good encoders (Xing, Fraunhoffer (sp?)) will get the job done, but they'll be a noticeable difference in quality between 128kbps, 160kbps, and 192kbps. Contrary to popular belief, 128kbps is not CD quality. CD quality is about 1440kbps, IIRC. So already you can see that you're losing over 90% of your music data just going from WAV to MP3. Hopefully this illustrates why encoding at higher rates is so important - every last bit counts. If I were going to convert my entire CD collection to MP3 and then (god forbid) possibly get rid of the CDs, there's no way I'd do it at anything below 192kbps - maybe even 256kbps if I just stuck everything on CD-R. Bitrate is that important. I don't even keep any downloaded MP3s under 160 anymore; I just delete them all. Get the good MP3 encoder, to be sure, but then make sure you encode at a high enough bitrate. Try it for yourself; encode some MP3s at 96, 128, 160, and 192. It's possible that years of being an audiophile has made my ears picky, so it's basically personal preference. You'll probably notice quite a bit of difference going from 128kbps higher.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Non-loosy audio compression?!? I believe that is an oxymoron. I've used l3enc, Fraunhoffer windows CODEC, and Blade. I prefer blade for it's speed, and high bitrate that I can't get out of the other two. As for quality, I can't tell a difference between a CD and a 160kbps MP3 from Blade on my Aureal Vortex with a $30 set of head phones. Only on live recordings would I be worried...
I started using BladeEnc on windows and when I went full time to linux tried out a couple of encoders before going back to BladeEnc. It has consistently shown itself to be of exceptional speed and quality.
Recently I ripped my modest collection of 25 albums over a period of a few days using ripit, a perl script which does a cddb lookup of the tracks, rips them, and then encodes them with bladeenc or lame.
I wouldn't consider ripping a cd collection without cddb these days, after doing it the easy way it would be far too painful to do it manually.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
If BladeEnc is good for mp3s then, god, mp3s are pretty dire quality.
I've heard worse encoders it has to be said but they were unlistenable.
Don't use mp3 to encode at all - use something non-lossy if you are so concerned about audio quality...
Wow, interesting replies all around. Welp, I was introduced to CDex tonight, and I must agree that it is awesome. Previously I have been an AudioGrabber addict (for those brief moments in Windows), but CDex 1.20beta5 is really nice. Anyhow, on to the meat and potatoes.
;)
;)
;)
;)
I tried the latest downloadable releases of BladeEnc, LAME (.DLLs only, of course), and the FHG-Radium (== optimised) codecs. I ripped under Win98 using a Plextor UltraPlex 40max hooked to an Adaptec 2930B; my machine is a diehard overclocked Celeron 366 PPGA to 550 (384 MB RAM). My encoding settings are for 192 kbit/s at 44.1 kHz simple stereo (NOT joint-stereo) for track 01 from the 1995 Del Amitri CD, _Twisted_ (the song being "Food for Songs"). I have a Diamond MonsterSound MX300 hooked up to Cambridge SoundWorks (the SoundWorks model) speakers. In short, my system is pretty decent for personal testing.
The BladeEnc 0.82 Intel DLL took approximately 2 minutes and 5 seconds to encode. The LAME 3.14 codec (I can't find any mention of it on the LAME history page, however) included with CDex 1.20beta5 took 1 minute and 1 second. The FHG-Radium codec took 2 minutes and 18 seconds.
My take, from "best-sounding" to "worst-sounding" (note the subjectivity; I don't claim to be unbiased =): FHG-Radium-> LAME-> BladeEnc.
As much as I dislike rebooting just to encode mp3s, I have to admit that the FHG-Radium codec is hands-down the winner. The intro segment with the hi-hat is superb for testing high-frequency response in the encoded MPEG-1.0 layer 3 file, and while all three codecs produced top-notch quality high-frequency response, the FHG-Radium codec retained the "finesse"/crispness of the hi-hat; the remaining two did not retain such crispness. (Caveat: I am EXTREMELY picky about crispness in high-frequency response.
Interestingly enough, CDex's internal mp2 (MPEG-1.0 layer 2) encoder produced a file of equal if not better quality than the mp3 produced by the FHG-Radium codec. This may be due to the nature of the mp3 routines. Additionally, it took just fifty seconds to encode. =)
My recommendation? If you're looking for professional quality, then you may wish to invest in hardware encoding (no software solution will ever top those!). If you use Windows, then FHG-Radium is your best bet. If you use *nix, then LAME is your best bet. If you straddle the fence a bit (as I do), then choose whichever the sun shines on that day.
As a side note: the versions of the codecs, with the exception of the FHG-Radium one, that I tested were not the latest and greatest. I believe LAME is up to 3.24 (beta) and BladeEnc is up to 0.85 (beta). Next time I'll test in Slink.
Everybody is saying that x mp3 encoder has better quality than y mp3 encoder. However, I was wondering as my ears are not that good, how in fact these conclusions are made. What mathematical/scientific process determines that the quality of one mp3 encoder is better than another if they encode the same file at the same bitrate? It seems as though no one is giving this person a direct answer with at least some research or links to research. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling anyone a liar. I just wanna see a little proof that one encoder produces higher quality files than another.
I've never tried BladeEnc at 256k, not enought disk space. But at the standard 128k format, it sucks.
The higher frequencies doesn't sound anything like the original. Making the file useless and painfull to listen to.
mp3enc is maybe slow but produce far more better mp3 files at 128k.
Yep, the Fraunhofer codec is pretty much unbeatable when it comes to quality. Most people say they can't tell the difference between encoders and I can't under most conditions but when I put on my high-end studio-quality headphones, I can tell the difference between them. You notice it most when you hear high-pitched noises, which appear a bit "tinny" when encoded with other codecs. I think it would be sweet if someone hacked WINE (or something else maybe?) to let us use Windows CODECs under UNIX.
Try out Lame, you might really like it. I use to be a hard core bladeenc user, but I encoded mp3's side by side and listened to them using bladeenc and lame, and found that lame was more than twice a fast, and didn't have some high frequency distortion that I could hear in blade.
Try them both for yourself, you will hear the difference.... Lame works better for me
It's so easy to use that you can plop a CD into the drive, hit the CDDB button, put check marks next to the songs you want to encode and then you can leave. Come back in a little while and the songs will be ripped, normalized, and encoded at the bitrate you specified in the directory you specified with the songnames downloaded off the Internet.
You can definitely hobble together several different programs (Xing makes an encoder for Linux last I checked) under Linux to do the same thing, but it's really worthwhile to reboot into Windows for this one...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
Personally, I use LAME because it's fastest and not noticably worse (perhaps better) than the alternatives I've seen.
My preferred ripping/encoding frontend is Paloma. It does CDDB lookup, calls cdparanoia and an encoder, and stores your MP3s in a relational database. I really like the ability to generate playlists based on arbitrary queries of the database. It's very slick.
Paloma also supports division of the files into "buckets" of a fixed size. Say, 650MB. Useful if you want to burn your collection onto multiple CDRs, either for backup or to carry around with a laptop.
I only have about 10GB of MP3s so far, but I just bought a 27GB drive to store most of the rest of my collection, and I expect I'll fill it soon.
One suggestion for speeding the process of converting your collection, if you have several hundred CDs: Buy another CDROM drive! It only costs $30, and it speeds things up by a lot.
I have been using bladeenc for quite awhile now, and the sound quality is great, and it is the fastest encoder available on any platform.
Is it anyone else than me who have noticed that some encoders (I've tested Radium enhanced FhG) use a lot more time encoding "difficult" songs, like jazz music, than when encoding less complex music.
My P2-233 easily encodes in realtime when encoding a Underworld disc, but it does a lot worse when encoding a Charlie Parker disc.
I use a perl script called ripit.pl that rips the tracks from a cd, uses CDDB to name them, and encode them into mp3s. I can't remember where I got it but all the credits are still there, I wish the author had put their email or web address in the info block.. Anyway, it rocks, but it uses cdparanoia and bladeenc so I'm modifing it to use Xing with cdparanoia.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
If you're a serious quality fiend, don't bother with 8hz, bladeenc or any of the other ISO derivitives. Typically, they only improve on the speed of the encoder, not the quality - and the standard ISO psycho acoustic model has a number of errors.
Go and download LAME. Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder, it's a patch against the distribution 10 ISO example source which replaces the psycho acoustic model with GPSYCHO, adds variable bit rate support, joint stereo and a host of other goodies. I tested it out the other day, and it was consistantly encoding as fast as bladeenc and at a much better quality - less 'brittle' sounding in general, and without the high pitched sound artifacts that other encoders produce in about 20% of the things I've encoded (at 128 kbit, admitedly).
Just where can mere mortals find a low-cost encoder, or, for that matter, a Linux player?
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
BladeEnc 0.76 - 12:00
LAME 2.1f - 8:17
Xing 1.5 Beta1 - 2:32
I haven't re-timed it with the production version, but it should be as fast or faster.
As far as speed goes, there is simply no comparison. Its quality is quite good, too - and VBR encoding can give you better quality for the same file size.
On the downside, it won't do stream encoding with pipes, so it's useless with liveice. In my opinion, that was intentional (they don't want to kill sales of StreamWorks). If you need pipes, use LAME.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Specifically, with the production version 1.5 encoder, the -N option cuts out frequencies greather than 16 kHz. THAT IS NOT THE DEFAULT.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I've had no problems with recent versions of x11amp/xmms, mpg123, or freeamp, even when using VBR.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Personally I like Krabber, even though I don't use KDE myself (Im a WindowMaker guy). It uses BladeEnc I believe, and it's got a nice GUI (I haven't tried a recent copy of grip though).
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Working for a Cable ISP, $24.95 for a 64k/64k and $49.95 for a 1024k/128k... Of course, working for the ISP, I get about twice that... ;) The rummor is that we might open it all the way for the $49.95 price. Definately the way to go... until ADSL gets to be cheaper/faster/more reliable. Still a couple of years from that though.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
I've used a lot of encoders over the years, and I keep coming back to Fraunhofer. If you're converting all of your CD's to MP3s, then pay for this encoder. You can't beat the results.
Now if someone would just make a portable "discman" for playing joliet CD-Rs, then I'd be a happy man.
Sorry you WinTroll, you're talking garbage!
/. is getting annoying recently, I must say...
c't is the authoritative source for geeks and nerds (who understand German or Dutch) and way more independent and credible than that ZiffDavis crap like PCWeek.
From the c't article "As is the custom with Microsoft, the introduction of this new proprietary standard..." sounds like they didn't do their homework since this is an open standard, Nullsoft didn't seem to have any problem adding support for ASF to Winamp.
Garbage. Nullsoft has to license it like everybody else. Where's the source, where's the (OSS) encoder? ASF is absolutely proprietary.
MP3, while having some patent woes, can be encoded with an open source product like LAME.
PCWeek says that ASF sounds as good or better than MP3
There is no backup of that claim whatsoever, it's just a short note, so it's highly unlikely that they tested it properly (it wasn't even released by then).
The c't article OTOH presents an excellent test complete with audio samples and precise descriptions where ASF fails miserably in comparison to MP3 whith distortions and a lower signal resolution. It is, however, comparable to other pure streaming formats like Real Audio.
The number of trolling MS employees on
Actually, Xing's MPEG encoder no longer does that, and is in fact the 3rd-best MPEG encoder out there.
No matter how fast your CD-ROM, if you just run cd-paranoia it'll rip at 1x. I was pissed for a long time when my new pioneer 36x SCSI wasn't any faster than my old 8x SCSI, until I was prompted to look at the man pages...
Try cdparanoia -Z on your CD's with no scratches, that disables all the paranoia checks and thus allows max speed ripping (I'm a lot happier now :)). If you've got scratches and stuff, look into the other options that'll fix the problems you have, but skip the problems you know arent on there.
I've had disappointing results with Fraunhoffer. The authors admit that they wrote it with low bitrate voice recordings in mind.
In general i suppose it isn't bad, but it's joint stereo I dislike. It's an imperfect way of doing things.
Some of the bands i listen to sometimes use weird qsound-alike spatial effects when they mix the album. fraunhoffer slaughters those and makes this swooping noise. it's irritating. Tracks of note are LPD's "10th Shade" and Japan's "Gentlemen Take Polaroids"
I wouldn't say bladeenc is perfect. But, well, nothing is. I use bladeenc and it isn't half bad.
From all reports, Xing's encoder uses a really cheezy approximation of the codec. That would be in keeping with Xing's history in the market - their mpeg video encoder creates mpeg videos that are comprised entirely of index frames.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Due to a combination of work/university, I can't listen to my favourite radio show (Mark & Lard on R1 in the UK, if you're interested). I've tried all sorts of hacks to record the show, from taping it onto video cassette, to the current method of encoding it using the Realplayer 5.0 codec (Real seem to have removed the command-line interface with G2, so I can't script it). What I would really like to do is encode the show (2 hours long) into MP3 format, in real time (at a low bit-rate, obviously). Any ideas? Linux options preferable...
I've tried the others, and found them clumsy to use.
I listen with cheap headphones, so 96kbps is fine enough.
OK. I noticed the score, and thought, this one must have answers. Not.
The question was about the best quality MP3 encoder. And that isn't even mentioned here. Why the score increase?
As for the Windows flaming, i do DAE in Windows ALL the time, and just play Quake II or so while doing so. My load hovers between 0.05 and 1.5...
GCS/MU d- s+: a- C++$ USH++$ P- L+> E W++$ N o-- K- W++@ O-- M- !V PS Y+ PGP- t+ 5(+) X- R tv? b++++ y++(+++)
In my experience Xing MP3 Encoder is one of the fastest encoders and sounds very good (a Linux port is available). I've found that the Fraunhafer encoder(sp?) in High Quality mode has the best audio quality. With the right encoder an MP3 is very hard to distinguish from a CD if the bit rate is 256 kb/sec. Hope that at least gets you started!
-Tom
Since everybody has an oppinion on this subject I think the best way to figure out what the majority thinks would be a slashdot poll...
;)
It may be a better one than some of the ones lately
To both:
First off, I can't complain about my SBlive. I wish that it had an external DAC, but I'll live. IMHO, it's great for the money.
Second, If you can go from DA to MP3 (with normalization) with a 3 minute song in about 15 seconds with any other encoder, please let me know. Until I know of one, Audio Catalyst will continue to be my choice ripper.
My choice-Audio Cayalyst+Plextor UltraPlex
I've seen DAE speeds in excess of 24x. Plain amazing to me.
bladeenc is optimised for high sound quality at high bit rates.
I ate something that disagreed with me. Maybe I should have cooked him first.
Real Jukebox will happily convert straight from CD to MP3. It'll use a digital connection to do so (rather than playing the CD and recording it), it records at 6x speed on my machine and if I use error checking, I almost never get skips on the CD. It also has CDDB access.
Recommended - although it only runs under Windows, so you'll have to rip under that and then come back to Linux.
My Journal
Convert the MP3s to AIFF and burn them onto a CD. It is a piece of cake.
The Layer I,II and III codecs for MPEG are ok. However, the file format that's been adopted as MPEG-4 has been out for over a year, and has a wider range of audio codecs available. You can even embed and mp2 or 3 inside it, in addition to video, text, URL tracks, sprites, VR, MIDI, Flash and much more.
If you haven't figured it out already, I'm talking about quicktime.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
...after all, you're the one who has to live with :)
:) and you'll probably notice
the results.
Seriously, a lot of people seem to like the
$200 Fraunhofer encoder over LAME, but for the
music I've encoded, I think it sounds better.
(Fraunhofer's sounded muddy to me)
It all depends on your music... for example,
there's a certain synth used by a certain
group that sounds absolutely horrible under
any of the ISO based encoders I've tried...
yes, even Blade. LAME is the _only_ one that
could reproduce it, except the pricey one
mentioned above. (this is at 128kb/s)
The ones I would recommend trying are:
Fraunhofer (demo, capable of 30-second encodes)
LAME
Blade
8hz
Those are some of the ones I've tried... can't
remember the others (I already deleted them).
Anyways, use cdparanoia to rip a song or two that
you really like (and are _very_ familiar with) and
use each one to encode it. Listen carefully to
each one ( loud!
a difference.
If you decide to use something other than
cdparanoia to rip the CDs, be sure to rip the
same track several times (into different files)
and compare them with "diff". I tried one that
is supposed to be based on cdparanoia, and every
single rip was different! With cdparanoia, you'll
get the same data every time. (YMMV)
Good luck!
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
The site he is refering to that has detailed comparison of some popular encoders can be found HERE I have found it to be a really fair analysis.
There is a really a good comparison of MP3 encoders, with an eye towards those for the Mac. He does a pretty good pseudo-scientific review of the sound quality, which encoding rate (128? more, CBR or VBR?).
Check it out:
http://www.raum.com/mpeg/reviews_quality.html
Colin
All you people using BladeEnc, I really hate to break it you but you are losing sooo much quality because of all the shortcuts that bladeenc takes.
I've checked out LAME, and although its not as fast as bladenc - it sounds alot better. Its a nice middle between the quality of l3enc and the speed of bladeenc. Its for this reason that I switched over to LAME.
Also, there are alot of nice console frontends that use LAME. So really, you're only being a zealous fan of bladeenc if you choose to keep using it.
Just my 2c.
I'd have to go with AudioCatalyst 2.0 using variable bitrate one notch above default quality.
AudioCatalyst uses Xing to encode. Compared to l3enc with -hq it sounds much better. BladeEnc introduces high pitched ringing artifacts.
On a PPro200 I can simultaneously rip and encode using variable bitrate at about 3.0x normal playback speed. This is CPU limited; I've seen it as high as 10x on a fast celeron.
While I realize these comparisons are pretty qualitative I feel I have some important tools to help me do the job right, such as my pair of Grado SR-125's plugged into a NAD 1300 series preamp.
AudioCatalyst has other important features when it comes to ripping+encoding a number of discs. For example, it can automatically name your mp3 files using info retrieved from CDDB (and gives you a pretty good degree of control over exactly how the names are formatted).
It also provides a variety of different ripping methods, from ASPI to analog, to help ensure that no matter how funky your disc is, you'll still be able to get mp3s out of it.
If you want to call my bluff on this, contact me and I might be able to provide you some 'demo' songs encoded with AC2.0.
mdm
For ripping, I always use cdparanoia under Linux.
It does error correction when it can (but some
discs are beyond repair). That may help if I'm
correct in my understanding that you get those
errors in the WAV files. Also, I've seen a lot
of variety in CD players for ripping accuracy.
Using bladeenc to convert these WAVs to MP3s,
I don't get discontinuities or errors.
I've only recently started messing w/ mp3's and I was wondering what software might exist that would allow me to convert mp3 to CD audio and burn an audio CD. I'd like to put some of the mp3's I've downloaded onto CD to listen to when I have a CD player but not a computer handy.
CDex is my ripper of choice for windows. IT rips and encodes, and tells you when it had skip problems. It reads from CDDB and gives you an effective batch-naming systems with lots of nice variables preset.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
For "convenience", sure, go ahead and rip your digital CD's, but don't forget they were made at 44kHz x 16bit x 2 channel = 1440 kbps. CD's are a bad enough approximation of analog already. The highest mp3 encoding I've seen is 320 bps, but until I get a digital output to an external DAC, the signal will still suffer from the EM nightmare inside a PC. Hold on to your CD's.
tcboo
On Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing album, try encoding the very last track (I forgot what it's called) with different encoders. It's a really difficult song for MP3 encoders to get right, esp around 23 seconds into the song when the cello starts. Every encoder I've used so far screws up the cello at 128kbs, but you can compare which encoders handle it better than others.
Make sure you listen to it with headphones on instead of speakers. If the encoder is sub-par in quality, the cello will have some kinda wobbly sound
Simply put, Lame is the fastest encoder especially with the -f option (which lowers sound quality, but I couldn't detect a difference) Lame also supports variable bitrate encoding (better sound quality, but slower) generally, I think it is the most versitile of the encoders. BladeEnc on the other hand gives the best sound quality at bitrates OVER 128kb/s but equal or lower quality at bitrates equal to or lower than 128kb/s (from teh BladeEnc website). Also, the BladeEnc website, I believe has a link to a site that compares MP3 encoders. Note that Lame requires the ISO-encoder which can be difficult to find, but usually goes by the filename of dist10.tar.gz or dist10.tgz if you decide to go the Lame route.
--Akeru
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Another good format is AAC. Never really caught on but the quality is very good, similar to VQF in that you can encode at a lower bitrate than mp3 for higher quality. File size is also a bit smaller as well.
Unfortunately there aren't many tools for it. Look for the Quartex encoder if you want to play around with it. The only real mainstream AAC player I know of is KJofol (which is a very nice audio player for Windows, the sound quality is much better than WinAMP imo) which is at www.kjofol.org. Unfortunately, I haven't had any luck getting it to work under wine (although I can't say I've tried it lately).
This page
has a pretty good collection of aac tools. For my money, the Astrid/Quartex encoder is the best.
Also check this page
http://www.ixpnet.com/~lzhanson/comp.html
for a good comparison of MP3, VQF and AAC.
Or you could get a 27 GB maxtor (imho, better than the quantums) for $260 (http://necxdirect.necx.com/hai/prod_page.html?key =0000139200&nonce=guest) Kind of nice. I have 2 17.2 GB maxtors that you can get for under $180 at surplus auction. They serve me very nicely, along with another drive for a total of 40 GB right now, and soon to be about 70 with that 27 GB maxtor). To answer the question, cdparanoia and bladeenc are good for what i do. I actually care about sound quality, so i encode at 160 or 192 now, and that seems to work nicely. Couldn't tell the difference between that and the original cd when i did some informal tests last year, so I pretty much don't use audio cds. Yinon
Interesting. On the other hand, couldn't it theoretically stuff more useful data into a given bitrate.
Ops, how silly of me - AudioGrabber not AudioCatalist - which I find to be the comercial rip off of AudioGrabber design for the need-to-be-idiot-proof-masses.
The Audiograbber UI was licenced/sold to Xing for use in their Audiocatalyst product.
Plextor are still the best (up to 24x ripping with the 40x drives). Expensive but they're genuinely quick, quality drives.
There used to be a list of drives and ripping speeds on mp3.com - anyone know what happened to it?
Unless you want to distribute the music via the internet (with the consent of the artist ofcourse), why compress it on your HD? I use my good old CD player and record player, or even a walkman to hear music... The quality is even better, since it the music doesn't have to go through the process of ripping, compressing, decompressing and reproduction by a soundcard...
I sure hope MP3 won't replace the CD, the way the CD replaced the record, because imnsho this time it would be a downgrade.
In my case, I've got over 200 albums on CD. Because I'm a uni student, it's hassle transporting them to/from uni every time, plus I don't really have space to store them all in my (small) uni room.
The other aspect is cost and theft - 200 CDs cost a lot to insure, wheras the 20 CDRs that they're compressed onto cost barely anything.
And when I need music for a journey or something, I can just burn an audio CD for my discman (or put it on MiniDisc when I finally get one).
I'm a lazy b*stard as well - the CDs are on a shelf across the room and I'd have to get up to find something :)
Its a frontend for rippers, encoders, and id3 tools (makes song title, artist name etc part of the mp3 file).
I've used it with cdparanioa and bladeenc, but haven't gotten the id3 stuff to work. I think you need xmcd to use the cddb stuff, but I could be wrong on that part.
One cavet: ripenc rips the cd, and then encodes the wav files, instead of starting to encode as soon as the first track is ripped.
Bladeenc seems slow, and I'm too lazy to try different encoders. I have dual 450 celerons running RH 6.0, and my 44x CDROM always finishes ripping (assuming the disk isn't scrated) before bladeenc is done.
You can find all this software and more by searching on freshmeat.net.
This depends more on the CD-ROM drive than the software used. If you have a good drive that can read Audio CD's in a good way, it'll work under any software. Conversely, if you have a bad drive, that really has problems doing digital copies off an audio cd, then a lot of the software out there will suck. One of the best drives I had (it died a painful death), on old NEC 4x IDE, could read at full 4x speed, every time, using any program, no problems. No skips, ever. This new 40x drive I have can barely read audio cd's at 2x speed, and needs jitter correction. bah.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
First of all, it's very hard to give any hard data here. My personal opinion based on experience is that if you use
$ cdparanoia -Bz "1-" to rip entire disc and encode it with bladenc at 256kbps, mp3 quality won't be a bottleneck, at least on my system. I have a reasonably good amp/speakers that cost me $250 for speakers and $320 for amp (paradigm minimonitor 3's and nad C340) and when I listen to mp3s I can hear internal computer noises, cdrom spinning up, static discharges, internal power supply, etc. I have a reasonably good audio card (sb audiopci64 based on ensoniq 1370 chipset). Encoder's quality is not the bottleneck in this case. It might be if you go with extremely high end sound card like Event gine ($300?), but i woudln't bet on it. overall cdparanoia/bladenc at 256 is easy, fast, and good enough unless you invest money in soundcard and invest ALOT of time in testing various configurations.
- Rainy
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Personally, I would recommend the Xing technology mp3 encoder. It is available for linux, and costs about $20. On a P-233 w/32mb ram, running the windows version under win95, it encodes at approx. 1.5X on an IDE drive. Bitrate variable from 8 - 256 kpbs as .mp3, and up to 384kpbs as .mp2. Anything higher than about 192kpbs is overkill: you can't tell the difference even on excellent speakers. Even then, the differences are only noticeable in classical or other similar music with more pure tones.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I've been ripping and compressing mp3's
with the Grip proggie... Works kick butt.
Nice interface... flawless mp3info integration...
even a submission button for adding your (unfound)
cd info to the mp3info db.
I know some folks don't like the xing encoder.
Personally I find it to work fine for my purposes.
The best part about Grip is that you can use a variety
of different encoders... use your favorite.
Also rips/encodes flawless mp3's with moderate to heavy loads on my amd k6-2 375.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Windows-wise, the best i've found so far is BladeEnc for encoding with EAC. As usual with Windoze software, though, EAC isn't free speech. But it does do a good job ripping...
As for grip, i found it so annoying to use that i went ahead and wrote my own frontend using perl-tk and CDDB.pm from CPAN...
-----
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Sorry, it had to be said :P
my other penis is a vagina
"Disappointed by the mistaken souls who describe anything Xing as high quality (it omits whole frequency bands for speed)." Except that it doesn't. It USED TO. For the past 18 months or more, Xing has used a repaired version of the encoder, to allow the higher freqs to be encoded. So, you seem to fall into the mistaken souls category, I'm afraid.
Illegitimi non carborundum
I use CDRWin to extract my WAVS and encode them :)
with AudioCatalyst (with a UltraPlex 40 max of
course). I think the ripping part of AudioCatalyst
(AudioGrabber) really stinks... I like the
encoding part (Xing MP3 encoder) though. Previously I used a freeware tool (simply called
Mp3compressor, version 0.9f is the last) which
used a Faurenhofer (or whatever they're called)
codec for compression (and since they included the
codec for free, it was not very legal and got
cancelled).
Anyway Xing is about 5 times faster then
Faurenhofer and that is the reason I use Xing, and I can't really hear the difference, but then again : I got a cheap stereo and like death metal
so I won't really hear a bit extra distortion
I encode 4 minute songs in about 50 seconds.
I use Xing. (VBR, higher quality setting)
The "radium" variant is merely a later copy of the codec, packaged by pirate krew, radium, who seem to release mainly audio software. Last time one of my users had some of their software (it tripped the virus scanners, and thus was noticable :-), the filenames seemed to start ra- (in this case sound forge, it appeared, as ra-sf[..]).
:-)
:)(
So it's not something you should ask frauhofer about, unless you want them to get very very pissed indeed.
There's a lot of misinformation in this Ask, worst than most. Disappointed by the mistaken souls who describe anything Xing as high quality (it omits whole frequency bands for speed).
I guess that the moral here is that the wannabe linux horde are still unable to do multimeeeeeja worth a damn; I suppose it's not really the platform for it. Cheap headphones in the office, and an sb16 clone seems about as far as most folks can go, hardly deep hifi..
Programmers with sound equipment are about as scary as programmers with screwdrivers
I go with lame too. It's faster than hell and sounds awesome.
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.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Bladeenc works great for me. IMHO I think it has the best sound quality and decent speed.
On another topic, though, has anyone tried Xing? I heard that they had the fastest encoder.
-TomK
I've been using the Radium version of FhG's codec for quite some time with Windows. If you can find it, you'll find that it does a pretty damn good job at 160kilobits/sec, which is where I'd recommend you encode everything. Anything higher will give you better results, but 128 will sound a little tinny.
My true test of an mp3 encoder/codec is one that can accurately handle cymbals, hi-hats, and tinny sounds without the sort of flanging sound that plagues MP3.
IF you are serious about high quality ripping and :). As an added bonus, :(
speed you should really go with a decent SCSI
cdrom and controller. And if you are going to
spend money on SCSI, spend it on an Adaptec
controller (2910,2930,2940) _and_ a Plextor
CDROM. I got myself a 2930+Plextor 20x and I
can rip CDs at 12x if the CD surface is not
too scratched (which won't happend if you rip
your own CDs, does it?
you can easily hook a SCSI CDR burner later.
For the software, CDParanoia is great but
I like CDCopy a lot. It's cheap and provide
on the fly MP3 encoding using a variety of
encoders (yes it's under Windows
http://www.cdcopy.sk
I'd have to say that AudioGrabber does a really nice job of ripping CD's. It didn't work on my 8x ATAPI cdrom but worked fine with my 8x SCSI cdrom.
To encode, I use AudioCatalyst.
Both of these utilities are for Windows.
Here's my question. I'm currently using grip with cdparanoia and bladeenc. The problem is that the wave files that cdparanoia rips aren't normalized before encoding by bladeenc. This results in pretty crappy sound. What are people using to normalize wavs before encoding? And it sounds like I'm gonna have to check out LAME. Anyone have a url? (I'm lazy)
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
I've been a big fan of Xing for a while. Their MP3 encoder just owns. I can get a 5 minute song into a 128kbps MP3 in around 1:30 or less.
IMO if you arew going to convert a whole lot of CDs to MP3s, speed will be an issue....add 1-2 minutes per song onto the encode time, and then multiply that by ~12 per CD, and then multiply that by the number of CDs and you start to get a lot of time saved.
I highly recommend Xing. Their Linux encoder is a simple console app (read: script friendly, ready to have a GUI built around it). Check it out.
Just take your AIFF or WAV or whatever file and
use bzip or gzip -9 and there you go. No loss.
Sure, the resulting file will be larger than a 160kbps mp3 of the same thing, but that's the compromize. Really, as disk space and bandwidth continue to become more plentiful and cheap, MP3 (and other audio compression schemes) will go away.
Do a listening test of Xing @ 128kb/s vs the real CD. If you can't tell the difference / don't care about the difference, use it, since it's the fastest.
Personally, the quality bugged me, and I used a program with the lastest Fraunhofer encoder in it (which does not have the frequency cap on it). There are a number available, but unfortunately they're all windows-based. It was *very* difficult for me to tell the difference between the original source file and the files encoded at 128 with the high quality setting turned on.
Of course, using this setting, Fraunhofer encodes at less than 1x, so it's pretty essential to set up some sort of batched mechanism where you can rip and fill your HD with unencoded wavs and let the encoder chew on them while you're sleeping. Otherwise, you'll be spending a LOT of time in front of the box switching out CD's. Actually, you will anyway, but you can get a lot more rips done in a short amount of time if you're not waiting for the encode.
As far as CD-ROMs go, I can't recommend the ASUS 40x drive more highly- it rips consistently at 5x-10x without a single error that I've heard so far in my 200+ CD collection. There are faster drives out there, but they don't come as cheap- about $50. Well worth the money, especially if you consider how much time you will spend encoding a collection of any size.
theres a reason there are no updates
MP3 Compressor is illegal it uses a stolen version of the Xing codec. Xing sued and won over the use.
lame is a great encoder, and it is the only one i use under linux. unfortunatly all the cd rippers for linux suck (a least when using ide cdroms, probably are fast with scsi). In comparison i get around 2x rips with cdda2wav and cdparanoia and somewhere around 8x rips in windows with audiograbber (4x if i turn on encode on the fly).
if you need lame under windows there is a ripper called cdex that uses it http://surf.to/cdex
but if you're going for quality and speed i would go with a regged audiocatalyst and encode them at 192 or 320 (if you have that much space available)
only drawback with audiocatalyst is 256 is not supported.
Check http://www.sulaco.org/mp3. Look at the betas, the most recent beta has worked well for me.
Get yourself a Plextor 40X Max CD-ROM drive. It rips at 17x, blazes through my cd's.. On a Celeron 450 I can rip much faster than I can encode (using lame with -h option).
Not only the encoder is important - Also the ripper is. I have been using cdparanoia as a ripper and bladeenc as an encoder (sometimes I use the grip frontend for them), and it works pretty good. Quality is as good as I can expect... Speed (for encoding) was between 0.5x and 0.6x on an AMD K6-II/400 (running Linux).
No. Bladeenc uses the default psycho-acoustic model from the so called ISO dist10 source code. Unfortunately, this code has a large bug in it: the psy-model allocates bits for the left channel first, leaving the right channel with the minimum of four bits per subband in the worst case. This can be remedied by using huge bitrates with bladeenc, but that uses more space than encoding with LAME in a variable bitrate mode for the same quality.
Besides, songs encoded with a dist10 based encoder (8hz, bladeenc, others?) tend to lose some of the bass sounds (compared to the CD original).
Then there's the pre-echo detection bit, but you can read all about it here.
Windows Softwarem l) :( (I ripped Weird Al's running with Scissors, then handed it to my friend who ripped/encoded at the same time using MusicMatch Jukebox, he was doing 160kbs vs my 128kbs _and_ was faster. All I was doing was encoding. Oh well, both these are free, thats some thing at least), but has good quality overall. Encoding ususally matters for what I'm listening to... Weird Al eventually got 160, while Last of the Mohicans Soundtrack (Celtic Instrumental) got 192, b/c anything less was disgusting. The quality of your sterio is also something to take in account. If you are still using the $5 speakers you got with your computer, then 128kbs is fine. But a nice pair of JBL's with a set of Altec Lansing 48s makes sound descrepancies very noticable.
///jeff
I use Exact Audio Copy for the ripping (http://studserver.uni-dortmund.de/~su0165/eac.ht
And then BladeEnc for the encoding.
I *know* blade is not the fastest,
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
I can't say I have played with Soundjam... But I have used Mpecker And AudioCatalyst from Xing. AC gets my nod... Encoding is simple and CDDB/ ID3 creation is all automated. Mpecker is free and has a funny name, but is in pre-release. And the latest beta expired as of August 8.
Download Nexencode
Also whatever you do end up using, please let it not be AudioGrabber. It Sucks. Yes, that's a capital "S". [no flame please]
The FreakHo
Me, I now use grip under debian linux for such things. It combines CD player, ripper, choice of encoders, choice of bit-rates, ID3 stuff and CDDB lookups all at once. ;)
As far as the encoder goes, I'd recommend something simple like either bladeenc or mp3encode (which is what I use, FWIW). If you grab the source for it and use pgcc to compile it for yourself, it'll be about 8% faster than using a normal gcc-compiled one. (Yes, I was sad enough to use mp3encode as a benchmark in checking pgcc
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
This is so stupid i'm not even going to replay to it.
g
Grabbing an entire CD is as simple as 'cdgrab'.
Not only does it use CDDB, it gives you a chance to correct its output as well.
Encodes in the background while ripping.
Includes SMP support (runs two or more encoders at once) for those who like to push the envelope. Just do 'cdgrab -j 2'.
Lets you customize the output scheme (defaults to Artist_Name/Track_Name.mp3)
Optionally creates playlists in original track order.
In Debian Potato NOW! :)
Of course, being the author, I'm biased
Check it out at http://packages.debian.org/cdgrab
I agree. About the only thing I use my windows partition for anymore is gaming, Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Flash, and ripping my Cd's. after that I simply make a symlink in my home dir to /98/mp3z so's I can get to them quick in the Linux partition, and all's well. I used MusicMatch when I got my Rio and it was alright, but RealJukebox free version offers so much more, it's free, it records faster than most other things mentioned, and is more configurable than MusicMatch. Only problem I have with it is that it's processor intensive. Of course, that could be because I am trudging away on a P200!
/Sig/
Yup he did, and it doesn't surprise me. I'm ready to go out and get serious disk space like that as soon as I get established and ready to rip CDs. I'm tired of CDs. I have 300+ and have run out of room in the CD case. So instead of building/buying a new case, I'm buying hard drives, throwing them into the server I already have, and recycling a little used computer as a player (for my stereo, the computers can do it themselves, of course).
Anyways, 300 CDs at ~50meg a pop is 15gig. My collection ain't huge. With prices like $210 for 20.4 gig, why not go mp3s?
If you are going to encode at 128kbps I would recomend encode (ftp://wopr.campus.luth.se/pub/mpeg_layer_3/).
If you want higher bitrates (160+) bladeenc is a good choice.
A revealing song, to test things with, is the old Beatles song Martha My Dear, in which the voice of Macca distorts badly at 128kpbs using Xing or BladeEnc but sound fine with encode or the Fraunhofer encoder.
Some of Iron Maidens songs also has this effect; i.e. the ones in which Bruce Dickenson goes wild up in the high pitched tones.
/Lars
I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone serious about creating MP3's with the highest quality should simply use this encoder. It is VERY slow but that shouldn't matter to anyone who cares about how their music sounds. I used to use bladenc but to get it to sound good you have to set the bitrate through the roof, no thanks. I'd rather save diskspace and encode at 128 with mp3enc. I encode with the qual=9 setting and I can't tell the difference between the MP3s that come out and the original tracks on CD, and I'm listening to them through a pair of $75 dollar headphones. The program is EXPENSIVE however. If you don't have the case bladenc will work if you don't mind 12 megs MP3 files.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I have yet to try any ripping on my linux box, but CD Copy is hands-down the easiest and most flexible ripper I've seen for windows. Zero problems, well almost zero... the cddb stuff is a little cantankerous from behind the corp firewall... but the encoding is perfect.
I've found that for encoding at 128Kbps, MP3 compressor provides the best sound quality, and it's decently fast. Alas, Windows only, but I have two boxes, one dedicated linux and the other windows, so it's not an issue for me. MP3 Compressor is also free, though I haven't seen any updates in a long time.
- =^o.o^=
ive got some problem with this, it is much faster than LAME
here some data:
some 33 MB wave take(each with VBR 4, no gtk):
-PII/308 (Lame version 3.13 on GNU/linux;
kernel:2.0.36 gcc 2.9): 5min ca. 30 sec
-PII/308 (NT 4 lame codec (version 0.22 engine 3.14) of CDex): 2min 33 sec
why is there such a big difference?
i have taken the compiler optimation options suggested in the makefile, then it took 4:30 on linux, still nearly two times as slow...
I indeed said I have a 20GB drive on my server, and it is smack full. /home
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda10 17434405 16395783 130416 99%
In reality, I only have about 16GB on the machine, but I have around 12-16 cds not on the drive due to space issues. I use that box as a firewall to the in-apt network. It also is used as a desktop system for guests. Basically, the drive is full because of the OS overhead, other proggies, and then many many mp3s.
My next HD won't need to have the OS overhead on it, and besides a small swap partition, the entire drive will be dedicated to mp3 storage.
I've been debating on how I should set it up so that one dir has all mp3s on it. I checked into RAID, and I don't think I want to do RAID0. It takes an awfully long time to load 20+ GB onto a HD, especially using a 12X CDROM, and if one of the drives crashes under RAID0, all is lost. I was thinking about making another partition that would consist solely of symbolic links. This should make all mp3s available from one directory, without the worries of one 30+GB partition crashing.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
This is a valid question anyone who encodes should consider. I currently have over 40 mp3 CDs worth of my collection that I've encoded. I've maxed out a 20 GB HD and will be purchasing another to put the rest of my mp3s on my server.
I encoded a large portion of my collection using Windows, specifically Audiocatalyst. It works really good most of the time. However, it did not work great with all my drives. My HP 8100i CD-R is the best drive I have to rip with. My DVD Drive and older CD-Rs would have too many skips. In going back and listening to my collection, I still run across songs that have blips in them, though this is rare. Audiocatalyst rips and encodes so fast, you don't have time to listen to all the songs prior to burning a CD, so I expected a bit of this. Of course, when you rip under windows, don't expect to be able to use it for anything else, unless you love reading hex on a blue background.
I am currently using Linux to rip and encode, and I have much better results. My CD-R is still the fastest drive to rip with, but I can rip with a 2nd gen DVD, and a 12x CD-R. My 4x4x NEC CdChanger is the only drive I can't rip with. I use CD Paranoia. It is currently for linux only, and has ripped flawlessly for me, even when using BOTH drives (CDR,DVD) to rip on a P200MMX 128 MB RAM. That's a pretty modest machine. I use it to rip, encode, WHILE using netscape, irc, several terminal sessions, and distributed.net. Sure, my load hovers between 3 and 4, but the machine is usable and doesn't crash.
I currently am encoding with bladeenc, which is much slower than the Xing encoder. It is better at higher bitrates - 160 and above - than the Frauenhauffer(sp) encoder. However, I've been using it at 128 because I find that I still get great sound. I haven't tried the Xing encoder under linux, but perhaps I will today.
You will run across many sites that analyze the quality of mp3s encoded at different bitrates by different encoders. The gist of those sites is this: The higher the bitrate, the better the sound. Nothing beats the Fruenhauffer encoder at 128, but most other encoders aren't noticebly different.
My personal experience is this - if you are encoding so your machine can serve up thousands of mp3s to listen in the background as you work, 128 is fine, and choose the encoder you like.
A great X frontend is gRip - which uses cdparanoia and bladeenc and has cddb capabilities built in. It has debs and rpms if you are looking for ease of installation.
email me with any other questions. miracle@procyon.com
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
i had alot of trouble with ripping audio cds a couple years back. i tried alot of ide's and about 40% of the audio i ripped had littl blips and whatnot.
i got a 32x scsi pioneer drive. in windows it was really inpressive. i could normally rip from 9x to 11x. imho ide really just doesnt cut it for sustained transfer rates.
-- john
Its simply the best. Its definately NOT the fastest. Its also comercial and $200. Bladeenc is faster, but at 192k and higher its not even close. LAME is the best free encoder. Check out LAME's web page as to why lame is better than bladeenc (sound samples) and why the FhG encoder is still the best.
If I am not mistaken, VQF is a Sony product.
yeah, go with blade.
IDE blows for ripping. Use scsi. IDE cdrom drives are dime a dozen and just aren't made with quality in mind.
And about that blit/blut noise, I have a 6x that does that. I have no idea why. It plays cd's normally (yeah yeah i know there's a difference between ripping and and playing but I like to think not
~Kevin
:)
Next time I butt-kiss a product, I won't use the myname@the_product.com as the email adress.
(Actually I'm going to look into it, I have to pack songs in my limited-space libretto.)
CY
I share the opinion that Bladeenc's sound quality is not up to par for my preferred bit rate (192K), so I installed notlame to replace bladeenc in grip. In a few weeks I've built myself a 1500-song archive with the benefits of both worlds: convenience with good sound quality.
But cdparanoia is too slow!!
-Standfast
1. I alway rip the CDs at 1x speed or I get "blit", blut" noises, even with brand new ones. Did someone experienced good results with higher speeds? 2. I Tried AudioCatalyst Demo (with variable encoding rate or fix rate) but I always get "shlimp shliump" noises with mpg123, X11amp or even Winamp. So I still use mp3compressor. 3. I'm using 128Kbits/stereo rate. Some friends of man said thet the resulting music can't be earable whith headphones. Am I already dumb ?
The exact encoder you use doesn't make much difference, it's matter of what codec it uses.
If you make mp3s with bitrate 160 or less, you should use Frainhgoffer-based encoders (such as l3enc).
If you make mp3s with bitrate 192 or more, then the best choice is ISO-based encoders (such as BladeEnc).
ISO-based encoders on lower bitrates (less than 192kbit/s) produce some unpleasant noise (you will hear it if you listen your music on quality hi-fi systems).
XING-based encoders should not be used at all. They produce very poor quality mp3s, and they cut off all frequences above 16000hz.
Here are the reasons not to use VQF:
1. MP3 is the standard now, widely supported. For example, have you seen VQF car player somewhere? (don't tell me VQF is the standard of the future, it has been available for a very long time already and still is used by very few)
2. The quality of VQF is argueble. Some people tell it is better, but many (myself included) see it is as inferior to mp3s.
- Supports variable bitrate, which basically means it encodes silence better than those heretic eurotech parts...
- It is fast. bladeenc encoded mp3's about 0.25 times real speed, while Audio Catalyst encodes faster than real time!!! (prob. about 1.2X.. it depends) (That's on my P166MMX)
- Very high quality encoder. Apparently encodes up to 20KHz...
- Rips your CD's for you..
:)
The drawbacks are that it runs in windows, and has to be registered or something... Well.. i'm trying to get it to work under wine, and as for the registration thing.. there is a crack somewhere...If you are using gnome, go with grip and bladeenc. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but I am encoding my CD collection right now with this method and it is certainly the most convenient I've found. A bonus is that bladeenc is now under the LGPL.
I would like to make a SCSI tower for fast (and multiple) MP3 ripping. My question is how fast can I expect this pricey purchase to work for me? I've looked at some SCSI adapters saying they can handle 80MB/sec. But does that mean a 40X SCSI CD-ROM will rip at that speed? I'm sure there's some computation needed for converting to WAV format. However, is it possible to rip a whole CD in less than a minute? Half a minute? Also, what CD-ROM/HardDrive ratio can SCSI handle? I know that SCSI is good at handling multiple reads and writes that IDE can't handle. But could I rip 7 CD's on 7 SCSI Cd-Rom's and use only one SCSI hard drive? Also, has anyone run encoders with dual processors? I was curious if you could run your favorite encoder more than once, and get good speed results. -Rader
Under Win32, the so-called "Radium" variant of the Fraunhofer-IIS Professional codec is pretty much the undisputed quality champion at 128 kbps. The newer versions of the Xing encoder are almost as good, and way faster (30 seconds or less to compress a typical track on a fast Pentium II/III). On Win32 you want to stay away from older versions of Xing, and you also want to stay away from the gimmicky variable-bit-rate option on the newest version.
As far as a multiplatform encoder goes, the LAME (LAME Ain't an MPEG Encoder) project claims to have made numerous improvements over the standard ISO reference implementation on which most other freebie encoders are based. However, LAME is still far, far inferior to Radium/Fraunhofer at the usual 128K bit rate. I found that it was necessary to run LAME at 160 or even 192 kbps to achieve the same quality that Fraunhofer delivered at 128.
YMMV...
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx
As many people have written, FhG is unbeatable at 128kbs. I think it is $200 for linux, cheaper for windows.
In my tests, Xing($20?) and LAME are pretty close and both give
acceptable results at 128kbs. I have samples where LAME does better
than Xing, and vice versa. (but I am probably biased).
BladeEnc produces output identical to the ISO dist10.tar code. Thus
it has not yet fixed many serious bugs in the psycho acoustics and bit
allocation routines. You can see a list of these bugs on the LAME web
page. One example: the pre-echo detection turns on the window
switching exactly one frame too late. Thus the pre-echo is completely
missed and the window switching causes more harm than good.
Since you are going to invest a lot of time into encoding, I think it
would be worth it to downloading the free encoders, and the demo
versions of the commercial encoders and do your own tests with a good
pair of headphones. Test the music you like to listen too, and listen
to short passages dozens of times. Some encoder artifacts you wont
notice at first, but once you "learn" to hear them, you'll really notice them. The LAME homepage has many test cases with notes
on what types of flaws to listen for and what techniques we have coded
to improve the quality.
Mark
Yes, high-bitrate, true stereo MP2 is still quality king when it comes to relatively small file sizes. But with very high bitrates, you can afford to use dual stereo.
You should use dual stereo to maintain the best channel separation; this is useful for preserving surround sound information. It also sounds better if your amp uses phase diffusion.
OTOH, it is the least efficient channel mode (it simply allocates exactly half of the total bitrate to each channel).
It is still the dark of night.
http://www.inf.bme.hu/~dancsi/USE!/index.html
Very informative and detailed. Graphs of outputs give a more objective view.
yeah, I found VQF a while back, and was, I must admit, rather impressed with it at first. it was great that a 96kbps file sounded much better than a 128kbps MP3. but that's the problem-- that's as high as it goes, while MP3 goes up to 320. and disk space is cheap. :) and the quality, well it depends from song to song. I found a 96kbps VQF roughly the same quality as somewhere between a 160 and 192kbps MP3. but enough about VQF. (and if you want another argument against it, it's proprietary. ;)
personally, I seem to always want to be different, so I looked for other formats. AAC was good, but there really isn't a standard yet. RealAudio isn't bad either. I'm never going to try M$ Windows Media format, no matter what anyone says about it. ;)
so now I'm back to MP3. specifically, using AudioCatalyst. (and before you complain about Xing dropping the high frequency range, that's fixed in this version). all I can say is, high-quality VBR is very nice. especially on my very nice Altec Lansing speakers. :) :) :)
feel free to flame me-- I'll ignore it. ;)
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
With the -hq switch (high quality), it takes forever and a day, but has the best quality I've ever seen. You can also batch stuff up easily with DOS batch files, but it doesn't handle long file names, which can be a pain. Stick with 8.3, and l3enc is the best. You might have a little trouble finding it, though.. I think it's copyrighted or something. I still have my old (pre license) version, and it works great.
"Please don't sigh like that, maam"
Get Xing's audiocatalyst - affordable, everything you'd want in an encoder, and it's fast. Much faster than blade and other encoders i've seen.
It's worth buying - i've tried alot, and this has made my ripping too easy. Needs windows...
I have never had poorer quality mp3 then when I used audio catalyst even at 160Kbps. i guess I get to be picky though because I have a sb live plugged into a home theater system
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
For ripping from CD to .wav, I use Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 (homepage). Easy CD-DA uses CDDB, so you don't have to type in names of tracks. It also allows you to format the output names of the files you rip (for example, %a - %n would be Artist Name - Track Name). With a 32x CD-ROM, I regularly rip audio at 7x (at least).
For encoding MP3s for quality, I have found that Audioactive Production Studio (homepage) is hard to top. I usually make my MP3s at 160kbits/sec, and the difference in sound quality over 128kbits/sec with this program is incredible. Although it takes a while to encode (plan on encoding your files while you're sleeping), the sound quality is well worth it.
I hope this helps you find the software you're looking for.
The Real Jukebox is one of the fastest encoders I've used, and the free version will record up to 128kbps in quality, The pro is higher but I dunno what. But anyway It's a good ripper, a little slow on the playing side tho,
There are quite a few reasons why some MP3s sound better than others. I will try to explain some of them: The quality of the MP3s has a lot less to do with the particular encoder you use and a lot more to do with the user choosing cheap sound cards, speakers and not actually understanding the process of "ripping" a CD. I can't tell you how many times I have come across MP3s on the net that sounded like someone just recorded the audio through the soundcard instead of digitally extracting the audio. Also, I have listened to MP3s on MANY different systems from 486 DX266 machines to Petium II 300s. Some using cheap onboard sound cards and others with Digital IO connected to pro level monitors and A/D convertors. Pretty much ALL MP3 encoders on both the Linux and Windows platforms do a fine job of encoding as long as you stay above the 128K rate. However, if your system can't do the math accurately and quickly enough, the sound quality will suffer no matter how good your sound card is. If you have a cheap sound card, then the quality
will be even worse. I had a PCI S3 based sound card. It was the noisiest, most worthless piece of shit I ever heard. All my MP3s sounded horrible on it. But, when I played the same MP3s on my Pentium II 333 with digital IO, a pro A/D unit and pro studio monitors; They sounded great. Your hardware matters.
Certain types of music suffers at 128K due to spectral content. For instance, my KMFDM stuff sounded awful at 128K encoded with 'bladeenc' for Linux. However, when I bumped it up to 256K, it sounded EXACTLY as the CD. My Miles Davis discs required at least 192K. But, heavily processed music like techno (My Aqua or Spice Girls discs) sound excellent at 128K. MP3 has the hardest time acurately reproducing enharmonic sounds such as jazz brushes and hi-hats. Distorted guitar suffers as well. This has EVERYTHING to do with the algorithms. They are looking for specific, predictable harmonic patterns. Anything that doesn't fit within those criteria will sound very bad. That is why Heavy Metal, Industrial, Jazz, Classical and some Rock can sound crappy. Much of the instrumentation is enharmonic in nature. But, techno and heavy electronics are synthesised to follow those harmonic structures precisely, so MP3 has no problem encoding them with full quality at 128K. If you like "loud" music, you're better off encoding at 192K or higher since the distortion in loud music creates sounds with an enharmonic nature. I've tried nearly every encoder for Linux and Windows and they all perform about the same. You must pay more attention to the type of music, it's harmonic structure and general amplitude in order to choose the right bit rate. Also, don't try to get by with substandard components.
Oh yeah, another thing... DON'T GET SUCKERED IN BY "AUDIOPHILES". They are THE worst resource for quality audio information. Much of the audiophile beliefs are complete science fiction. They only THINK they hear things you can't. I mean who in their right mind would believe that placing green stickers ($475 for a set of 12) on your walls at strategic locations is going to affect sound??!! (This is based on mystical hooha about green being harmonically related to certain frequencies that emphasize clarity and presence.) Or that a gold plated power cord ($175) is going to improve the quality of your audio by any noticeable level. They're only after your money. Beware of anyone calling themselves an "Audiophile".
Hope this helps... "Pro Audio Guy"
I try to be fu
Personally I think Macromedia's Shockwave Audio exporter produces the best quality files. It's several times slower than other encoders, but if the highest quality is what you want (and presumably it is since the whole point of MP3 is saving space vs. raw uncompressed sound... using SWA exporter lets you use lower bitrates w/o losing as much quality) then I think it's the way to go.
I'm not sure what form this is available in for x86 machines. It's available from Macromedia as a free plug-in for SoundEdit 16 (a Macintosh sound editor). For most people who don't have SoundEdit, there is a nice program here that interfaces with the plug-in. This program also strips the proprietary header info that the Macromedia plug-in adds to encoded files. See http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d2linjo/mp3/
I personally prefer Music Match Jukebox. It is more reliable on my computer than AudioCatalyst. AC tends to have some problems with my ide dvd-rom. MusicMatch 4 is free if you only want to do 96kbps encoding, but it costs $30 for up 320kbps. http://www.musicmatch.com
---Got Coffee?---
Isn't that what Sagan used?
For a ripper, Cdcopy impressed me greatly. I'll have to try cdex that someone mentioned above. I used to leave a stack of CDs next to my machine while I was at work with a note "If the tray is open, please put the disc in the pile at right. Then load in a new disc from the pile at left and close the tray."
That's all it took. Cdcopy would sense the new disc, read the ID, go on CDDB and get tracknames, rip and encode each track, and when it finished the last track it would eject the disc. No monitor, no keyboard activity needed.
For an encoder, I use bladeenc which is very fast (near realtime at 128) and the quality seems excellent.
And regarding multitasking while it's working, sure! Under Windows 95, I'd encode, surf, chat, even occasionally play an mp3 at the same time. No problems and no skips. (My drive is an HP CD-RW drive, the 7200i, which iz 2x2x6 and rips at about 4x)
I'd like to see network distribution of the encoding process. I did this once on a roomful of 486sx33's using DesQview, Novell Lan Workplace for Dos, and batch files. It ran but it was shaky at best. Has anyone done better?
It's their best product (don't like the mediaplayer). Extremely easy to use and it automatically grabs the CD-information like artists and song-titles from internet.
-- Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people
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.
As odd coincidence would have it, not 5 minutes before reading this question, I had done a "blind test" of the only 3 free Linux coders that I know of: bladeenc, 8hz, and lame. I had a few samples with pretty good dynamic range, encoded each with each of the encoders, and then set up random links to them so I wouldn't know which was which.
The result? bladeenc was clearly the best overall. Despite some of the hype I had heard about L.A.M.E., it was definitely the worst in one case, and overall it was pretty consistently at the bottom.
Incidentally, I was using bladeenc v0.82, and it seems quite a bit faster than the last version I had tried (0.76, maybe?). On a P166-MMX it took about 30 seconds to encode my 10 second samples.
As for other supporting software, I use cdparanoia for ripping, and either Krabber or mp3c to coordinate the ripping, encoding, labeling process. The nice thing about mp3c is that you can make it create a batch file for you -- I nice the script, and nohup it (or use at) and let it go. Then I can log out, and my wife can log in and use the computer, or it can work while I'm asleep.
try compiling with -O3? i dunno oh wait, thats right, not open source :P
-bugg
I use grip, which comes with cdparanoia built in, for a clean install, and can work with pretty much any command-line mp3 encoder. I would suggest bladeenc because it can do a lot of bitrates. I think 192kbps sounds good and keeps the files pretty small... grip also does CDDB, which means you don't have to do your ID3 tags manually, as long as you have mp3info.
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
Yes, audiocatalyst is the best encoder in my opinion. Especially with the full version. You should really give it a try. It has fast CDDB support, which is really smooth.
For Mac, SoundJam(TM) MP 1.0 is just out and pretty cool. http://www.soundjammp.com/
(by Casady and Green)
The Melt o' Rama psyhcodelic screen is great, especially when listen to Geeks and Space mp3's
I use all three (Krabber is a front end for bladeenc and cdparanoia). It is real nice, it uses a CDDA server interface that gets the names of about 75% of classes. on my PII 300 it takes about 3 minutes to rip a song, and 6 minutes to encode it. so I can do a whole CD in about 2 hours. not blindingly fast, but it is easy, and produces good sound.
I use AudioCatalyst.. Pretty sweet interface, and you are able to select a wide range of sound qualities.. It's pretty cool.. One step ripping, encoding, and normalization..
The best mp3 encoder is undoubtly Fraunhofer. It's the undisputed champion of mp3 quality. Out of the mp3 encoders I have used I have found lame in high-quality mode and a tweak found on the webpage to define smaller packs to be the closest to fraunhofer as the people who write lame said.. perhaps %90 of fraunhofer. Bladeenc is not suggested due to the fact it uses ISO encoding not pyscho-aucstic(sp) which is much better. I believe the l3enc is also based on that design. (correct me if I'm wrong l3enc people). Xing is also very fast and very good and support variable bit rates which can greatly increase quality. (Lame also supports VBR, though it cuts my compression time to 1/1.3 on a 450celery). I typical use lame with forced-joint stereo, and at a 160bit rate, If I use VBR I can get a better quality but at a big proformance cost. I hope this helps you.
As far as I know - from Xing techs website and a number of other sources....joint stereo actually limits stero only to higher frequencies and uses monto for bass sound. It's better in terms of filesize, and dosen't really detriment sound [since your dubwooofer is obviously mono] but it certainly dosen't increase quality - its encoding less [but irrelevant] data.
_
Who told you that MSAudio is better than MP3?
The acclaimed computer magazine c't have done listening tests and concluded that sound quality of MSAudio is worse than MP3. Read the full text here: Internet Audio and Video: Microsoft contra Apple and MP3.
IMHO, lame is the best encoder out there for linux. Its based on the iso code, but seems considerably faster and better quality than other encoders based on that code (bladeenc for example). I use it in combination with cdparanoia, an exeptionally fine ripper. Lame gets about 1.4x on my celeron 333. There are several frontends available for both, grip and krabber spring to mind. Find all these great products on freshmeat.
I've tried and talked to people who encode a lot, so this has some backing.
BladeEnc while fast, is not a very good encoder from a frequency response perspective. Audibly, it takes a good ear to hear the diff though. I prefer LAME as an encoder. Now a lot of people say FhG (fraunhoffer) is better.. but I've tried fraunhoffer and it has some faults:
1. It takes a hell of a long time to encode
2. It does sound a bit muddy at times
3. There are a few songs where the encoder
has problems (Track 1, Snivilization by Orbital, last 5 seconds).
In conclusion INMSHO use LAME.
Uhm, did you say you have a 20 GB server full of MP3s?
sig: sauer
CDex is OK In my book, fast(?), free & easy to use.
.mp3's do I make? Like 4 a month so my opinion is vastly uneducated.
But then again how many
:-\
crazy dynamite monkey
What do you all think of it?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I've tried all the linux mp3 encoders I can find (l3enc, mp3enc, bladeenc, etc..) and I've found that if you are encoding for audio quality, I use 160 kbps, they all sound the same.. Bladeenc is the fastest though.. To automate everything I use Grip w/ cdparanoia and bladeenc, just pop a CD in, hit Rip+Encode, and you are left with exactly what you want..
btw, in case it hasn't been explained, cdparanoia is a ripping program.. Its audio quality is great because of some very good algorithms to elimate jitter / scratches / any other audio problem.. I can give it a CD that will barely play in my stereo and the wav's that come out of it are perfect.. If it finds an audio defect, it tries to go over that spot on the cd again and again to get the right data..
urls:
Grip -> http://www.ling.ed.uk/~oliphant/grip/
Cdparanoia -> http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
Bladeenc -> http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/
hope this is of service,
Dave
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
Firstly, I use AudioCatalyst 2.0 for my personal ripping/encoding needs. Sure, it's only a Win32 app... but the encoder does a very nice job of high bitrate and VBR files. While it ocasionally produces hiccups in the music, encoding is so fast that it isn't really too much of a hassle to re-rip the CD.
:)
That aside, there seems to me to be about three our good compression formats available out there aside from MP3.
In no particualr order:
Micorosft Audio 4.0: On the demos on the microsoft webpage, one can easily hear the difference between a MP3 and a WMA file, with the WMA sounding much better. But, for some reason, on my machine at home I cannot get such positive results. I find sounds like cymbal crashes and flanges to be weirdly distorted. It may be my low system specs (P166) that cause the encoder to preform so poorly (it seems to encode only in real-time).
VQF: People have said it elsewhere here, but I'll say it again - VQF rocks the mid range bitrate world, but, get it out of the ~80kbps range and other formats just simply sound more true to the recording.
RealAudioG2: This codec is suprisingly good. It is far better than MP3 at equivalent bitrates. I think Real liscenced some tech from Dolby or something because the endoded output sounds different from previous versions of the codec. You know the feeling that, after you've listened to your entire MP3/VQF/RA collection, you can tell which song has been encoded with which encoder without looking at the screen. Well, this new version just doesn't have the same distortion characterstics (like when people sing 's's in MP3 you get those neat little sound granules) as the last one did, which is good. But, the main problem with this format is that you need to use the realplayer to listen to the encoded output. I don't know about a Linux ver of realplayer, but the windows version is extremely unstable.
With all of these formats, it's easy to see why people stick with MP3... there are simply too many other (and occasionally superior) formats from which to choose.
That's my $0.02
The best I've found for 24k is l3enc. Unfortunately you need to pay for a serial number to make it record for longer than 30 secs. They changed the name from l3enc to mp3encode btw. Someone else mentioned that others may be better at different bitrates.
Bladeenc is faster from what i've read (I didn't benchmark, just compared sound quality.) l3enc has a high quality mode which is too slow for live encoding at 24kbps on my K6-420mhz (400 overclocked) and a regular mode which works nicely for speech (I haven't tried the regular mode for music.)
--numb
Okay everyone, please read this FAQ. It is a common question:
:)
http://www.mp3-faq.org
It will answer your questions. It all depends on the songs, your ears, speakers, etc.
The FAQ does list the best encoders to use.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
not open source or free OR linux-based, but it'll encode up to 320Kbps, and it can record up to 7x the speed of playback, depending on your machine (don't know whether it'll be much slower to encode at high bit rate or not)...plus it grabs the track name from CDDB. here 'tis...
Monkeytreats
Yeah, I've been using VQF for some time and it's really quite good. It really reduces download times while actually being better quality than most MP3s. One drawback is the relative unavailability of it, compared to MP3. So when I can't find something I'm looking for in VQF I do look for it in MP3. But I expect that will likely change as VQF becomes more widely known.
I agree there! My UltraPlex drive rips CDs at almost 20x, and using WinDAC, it will also rip directly into MP3 format. But I prefer ripping into .WAV files (it's faster) and then using MP3 Compressor which IMHO is quite configurable and allows for excellent quality. On my P2-350, MP3 compression occurs at about 1x in Windows.
I am just writing to inform everyone that after careful, long, tedious research, I have found that, peanuts not pecans, are Bob's favorite nut.
I'm sure you're realived.
I'd have to say AG mated to the BladeEnc, provides the best possible sound. I didn't use the older versions of the AudioCatalyst (Xing Enc)since it would strip off the few top KHz of frequency. However, the newer ones (1.5)give very good quality and let you have the speed advantage of no intermediary WAV file. That's my 2 cents.
amen. vbr is the way to go
i have misplaced my signature.