How did you find out about the whole encoding process?, Discovering EAC, Lame, Flac etc. Options

[ConCave]

I remember the first time that i found out about ripping and encoding, it was about 4 years ago when i was using WMP8 to rip my cds into WMA 64 kbps (Cold so cold ) and thinking that the pops and skips in the audio were part of the encoding. And then i found CDex (Great when your a newbie) and i was blown away i could rip my music without skiping and in 128 kbps mp3 man this sounds a hell of a lot better than wma. Then stumbling across HA and found that i was doing it all wrong i should be using "EAC (Secure mode) + Lame 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard" and i've been using these settings ever since.

So how did you start in the world of audio encoding.

ConCave

This post has been edited by ConCave: Jun 7 2006, 03:08

[TheGrimRipper]

I remember recording some music onto a PC in about '96 and thinking "wow whis sounds great". The PC only had 8Mb RAM though and a 500MB hard drive so it was kinda limiting. No encoding at that time, just saving as WAV.

Then I tried it a bit more on my next PC (10Gb har drive) for which I bought CoolEdit 2000. Ripping all the tracks and then opening each one in the wave editor and saving as mp3 (fraunhofer encoder) 192K - sounded great but I did get some skips/jumps occasionally. I used to store them back onto CDR - hard drive not big enough to store anything extensively.

My new PC has allowed me to rip my whole collection now and I'm a happy bunny!

[Synthetic Soul]

I was using EAC before I became a regular here, and I had toyed with Monkey's Audio. I guess I must have come across various people recommending EAC (who knows, maybe it was earlier visits to HA) in order to switch from CDEx, which I used in the beginning. I don't know where I got Monkey's Audio from, but I remember wondering why I would want to encode tracks at such high filesizes when I had MP3. I played with it for a few hours, digged the monkey, and then forgot about it.

I was actually using the Radium/Fraunhofer codec at 128 CBR before I was turned to LAME soon after visting HA regularly. I had used LAME before, intermittently; most notably at work where the Radium codec might not be appreciated. I don't think I trusted VBR at the time, as it all seemed a bit "out on the edge".

My first introduction to encoding was some Bill Hicks soundbytes I downloaded in the mid to late nineties. They were in an unknown MP2 format, which lead me to Winamp. I thought Winamp was mega. I soon started playing about with MP3 (LAME, Blade, Xing, L3Enc) and VQF, which was the successor to MP3...

I don't ever remember having problems with pops or skipping, although obviously some poor quality given the list above.

I became a regular here after discovering some of my CDs were deteriorating, and started looking at a good backup plan. I've waffled on about all this before. I had obviously visited HA a few times on my travels previously. I have no idea why I became a regular; I suppose it was because I posted and was in discussions, rather than just reading "archives".

This post has been edited by Synthetic Soul: Jun 2 2006, 16:00

[ConCave]

Ah! you just reminded me of the good old Xing encoder havent thought about that in a while is that still used today, havent even checked to see if RealPlayer still use it or not.

ConCave

This post has been edited by ConCave: Jun 2 2006, 15:53

[jarsonic]

I started using CDEx with the --r3mix preset once I got to college, and I started encoding my own music for the first time. I later switched to EAC, however (and the --alt-presets).

[Madman2003]

At some point i ran into some strange files with the extension .mpc, later i learned what they were. My first ripper was eac secure mode(later on test&copy too) using mpc q7 or q8. Then i switched to flac. Later i switched to cdparanoia and made my own script to do the stuff i was missing from eac (like test&copy). All this started started a few(3-4 probably), when mppenc 1.14 was already out and used a lot (i think). So it was much later than most.

[Lance Uppercut]

For me it all started when I got my 4G ipod in 2004. I was so into it and I found iLounge, which referenced HA and Exact Audio Copy. Since then I've been back and forth between AAC and mp3 -v2, -v5, etc. I finally settled on 128 pseudo variable AAC iTunes for portable use, FLAC on an external hardrive for home use.

This really is the greates website and I must check it at least 10X a day!

[xmixahlx]

audiograbber ->
remix site/forums ->
lame ->
hydrogenaudio ->
NOW

...i wouldn't be surprised if that was really common (back then) it seemed like a bunch of people (newbies, like me) came to HA with a bunch of funny ideas from roel...


later

[clintb]

audiograbber ->
remix site/forums ->
lame ->
hydrogenaudio ->
NOW

...i wouldn't be surprised if that was really common (back then) it seemed like a bunch of people (newbies, like me) came to HA with a bunch of funny ideas from roel...


later

That's the exact same progression of how I got here.

[de Mon]

LAME 3.93 VBR 160-256 with -k switch using AudioGrabber to rip.

Thanks to HA.org I switched to 3.90.2 APS and APFS->3.90.3 APS and APFS>Ogg Vorbis aoTuV 4.51 LE now using EAC to rip.

[Andavari]

I found out about ripping and encoding to a lossy format back in the Fall of 1998 using Iomega's zip disk software (IomegaWare) that had some crappy encoder, nonetheless I must credit it for my introduction into ripping and encoding music since I didn't know anything about it.

I think starting in 1999 (unsure) I found out about CDex and LAME and used that combination for a long time until I found the R3mix forums (no comments on that please). Then my education into secure ripping and proper encoding was put onto the correct path by reading threads and getting help from people like CiTay, and others whom I've unfortunately forgotten their usernames. I have to give allot of credit to CiTay for his help back in the day for setting me straight when I clearly didn't have a clue.

[Hollunder]

My first ripping experiences must have been with musicmatch 2.x or something like that (they now have version 8 or even more.. hell knows..), well and i guess my first interest in encoders occured because of its inability to transcode wma to mp3.
My interest has grown over the past few years but i'm still a noob, just reading, learning and happy with EAC, flac and lame.

[56Nomad]

For me it was Napster. I decided to install it one night and see what the fuss was all about. I started doing searches for tunes and kept finding them. I immediately had to find out how people were making these MP3 things.

[skelly831]

I started ripping/encoding with Nero about 5 years ago, then after some wondering about quality I googled some stuff about MP3, wich led me to some know-it-all ripping guide from some site I forgot, it mentioned Lame, EAC, Musepack and some other stuff. After searching around for info on those things the same site kept popping up, and that site was hydrogenaudio.org.

[Firon]

I was using Winamp and played with the diskwriter it had a lot, often trying to use LAME in ACM mode to make some MP3 WAVs to send over AIM.
At some point I found one of the sites that distributed LAME binaries, and played with the various versions, reading the docs to find out new settings and stuff. And from there on, I came here some time later, and I'm now a foobar2000 lover. Makes encoding so much easier! I used the LAME VBS script to do it before...

This post has been edited by Firon: Jun 3 2006, 04:07

[rudefyet]

I found CDex/Vorbis a long long time ago...but I don't think I started using EAC/Foobar2000 or got really picky about my audio till I found this site

I just browse around and soak up information I guess...that would explain my 2 1/2 years here but only 66 posts

This post has been edited by rudefyet: Jun 3 2006, 04:57

[HotshotGG]

Started back in the day of Cdex 1.10. I knew about LAME and then I stumbled upon Vorbis in it's infancy (like the idea of an open-source codec). I thought the idea was ingenius and I was amazed at how you could achieve a compression ratio of more than 11x that of a regular PCM file on a CD and still achieve transparency

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Jun 3 2006, 05:55

[audiomars]

Started with CDex, went to Xing/ Audioripper (for speed, maan!). Went back to Cdex to rip to wav files and encoding using Radium's hack of the FhG encoder. Discovered Lame and r3mix preset, heard about HA.og. Visited here and been with EAC, Monkeys Audio (earlier) WavPack (current), and Lame (3.97b2 now) since then. It's been an eventful trip with frustration now and then, but being with the HA.org community has made it memorable

[Drexl]

I think it started for me back in 1997 or 1998. I used AudioGrabber and Bladeenc (I think) in those days. Due to limited disk space, I used 128kbps (CBR). I remember that the encoding of a single file took about 20 minutes or more on my Pentium 120Mhz (overclocked to 133Mhz), so I would set up a batch to encode before going to bed.

This post has been edited by Drexl: Jun 4 2006, 10:13

[jmartis]

For me it was Napster. I decided to install it one night and see what the fuss was all about. I started doing searches for tunes and kept finding them. I immediately had to find out how people were making these MP3 things.

exactly like that, except it was with Kazaa . Before I was using Samplitude to rip CD's to WAV, and they just sat there, stuffing the whole (4GB) drive.

J.M.

This post has been edited by jmartis: Jun 4 2006, 10:27

[ShowsOn]

I started encoding to MP3 using I think blade.dll and AudioGrabber, but had no idea what good settings were to use. All I knew was that 128 Kbps was good for downloading over modems, but didn't sound very good, but I didn't know what a better setting was.

I did some searching, and found a webpage for -r3mix. From there I found a link to HydrogenAudio. So I started using LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard.

Once I upgraded my computer witha 200 GB hard disc I started re-ripping everthing to FLAC. When I bought an iPod, I first transfered all my APS MP3 files over. But later transcoded by FLAC files to iTunes AAC, to save a bit of space.

[legg]

Back in 1994 I used to use adpcm for storing some music, I had to record them with the soundcard 'cause there was no rip feature in the drives available by that time (2x).

Then around 1998 or 1999 I started to fool around with the fraunhofer command line encoder. After years of doing my mp3s that way I switched to CDex and until last year I switched again to EAC.

This post has been edited by legg: Jun 4 2006, 14:52

[hlloyge]

First software I used for extracting were WinDAC for ripping and Audioactive Studio for encoding, some time in 1997. I was so into WinDAC for years, it worked for me, it had this rereading mode that helped with some CDs... but as time went, I switched from warez to freeware or registered software I use. So, I listened to reccomendations on usenet groups I visited, and setup EAC+lame, it was looong time ago, 5 years now.
Occasionally tried ogg, and for lossless I use either FLAC or APE, depending on what's currently available.

Ivan.

[legg]

of course, how could I forget about windac!!

*ahh the nostalgy

[bjackson128]

I remember ripping my whole CD collection and being so excited that I had an "exact" copy of all my CDs on the computer! (96kpbs WMA haha) I came really close getting rid of my CDs at that point, but luckily I found out about EAC and Lame before I did anything stupid! Probably less than a week after I finished ripping my music to ~192kpbs MP3, I learned about lossless encoding and had to pull the CD book back out.

This post has been edited by bjackson128: Jun 5 2006, 20:42