Newbie needing advice

Let me start by saying that I am not a audiophile. I have a run of the mill sound card with $100 speakers. I do however love music and have a collection of about 12 gig.

My first question is

Is something like advanced mp3 converter worth buying or is there free alternatives that is just as good or better... for someone like me?

My second question is

What would be the best format to use for someone with the normal equipment I have. What would save the most room yet sound good on normal hardware. What format and setting?

My last question is

Due to sloppy tagging over the past year (by me) I have no cordination in my tags. What tags do you guys prefer and what is the best application for a beginner to use to tag them with. I plan on killing all tags and starting over.

Just for the record, I did read some of the faq and do some searching. I found some of the info hard to understand or advice conflicting with other advice. I thought it would be easier to just put it all in one post and ask the experts.

I appreciate any and all advice. I am not sure if it matters but the two players I use are foobar 2000 and media jukebox. Thanks again

I've done a quick google search for "advanced mp3 converter". As far as I can see it converts from one lossy format to another. As you probably know, this is called transcoding, decreases quality and should only be done with a good reason. If you have the originals better encode directly from CD.

There are many free programs capable of this, e.g. dbpoweramp, germanix encoder, foobar2000.


Depends on your needs. To get an impression about quality differences between formats you might want to visit Listening tests forum and read the results of recent 128 and 64kbps tests.
Especially at lower bitrates quality differences between codecs depend also on the type of music. The listening tests are a good starting point but finally best thing would be to do your own tests with your music and your equipment. Another thing to consider is hardware support. If you already have got or are planning to buy e.g. a portable player, you might want to use a format that is/will be supported. So far there are players that support mp3 (of course), Ogg Vorbis, AAC (not HE-AAC) and WMA (not WMA9Pro).

Very Powerful tagging solutions are foobar2000's mass-tagger and file-info boxes and Case's Tag combined with speek's frontend, if you don't like working with the cmd.line. Both support a multitude of formats and very powerful automation features, which should satisfy all your tagging and renaming needs.

The best tagging application i've ever seen and used, is MP3/Tag Studio 3. You can download it from here: http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/

Foobar's mass-tager doesnt even come close to it..

Hmm.. Shareware.. ID3V2... only mp3..
Not for me, thanks.

You can choose between ID3v1 or ID3v2. And it's named "MP3 Tag-Studio", so what did you expect?

No one answered your second question, so I'll attempt to do so. MPC is the most popular here for lossy audio storage, but don't convert your mp3s to mpc, because you'll only lose quality.

Rerip from your CDs (you still have them, right? ) to MPC, and disable the Winamp equalizer (if you're using Winamp). You might also like Ogg Vorbis or AAC, which aren't quite as good as MPC for lossy archival storage, but they're gaining support for hardware playback.

I assume by this you mean "should I spend money on an encoder/ripper/tagger?". The answer is no. For an encoder, use LAME which is arguably the best MP3 encoder. It sounds great on it's --alt-preset standard setting. Get it from Rarewares. For ripping and tagging, most around here running Windows seem to like EAC however I have heard great things about CDEx too. On Linux, I use abcde. A Google search should hook you up with any of these excellent free programs. If you have extra money lying around, I am sure the developers of these programs would appreciate some of it

Go with lame's --alt-preset-standard setting if you are ripping from CD. It's really the best tradeoff between size and quality when it comes to MP3. The files are quite large, but harddrives are really cheap.
Ogg Vorbis is another option - it sound similar to Lame MP3 at high bitrates. I think the -q6 mode is similar to alt-preset standard in quality. You could also try MPC - but I can't comment on it because I don't use it. The best option is to try some formats and decide what is best for you. You can't go too far wrong with any of Lame MP3, Vorbis or MPC though.

If the music is encoded in a lossy format (MP3, OGG, WMA, etc) already, just leave it as it is.