Hi guys. I have a question. I just bought an udiobook on CD (6 CDs). and I would like to rip it to listen on my iPod. What is the best way to do this? Should I rip it like a regular music file at 192 (alt-preset-standard) or would I just be wasting space, and eoncode at a much less bitrate. I was thinking since its just speech I should be able to encode at a much lower bitrate without sacrifiing quality, also making it mono?

Any help would be appreciated.

Subjective opinion here: I use 22K sample and 32K bitrate. I listen to a lot of audio drama and these parameters yield very good speech quality. There's a plethora of fine audio (both new and old) available on the Internet. God bless Al Gore for making it all possible. You might want to check out this web site

http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp

Though the audio quality is just so-so, the price is right.

Depends a bit on source material/sound quality, but after trying some lower settings, I use 56 or 64 kbps/22kHz mono FhG or iTunes encoding for most audiobooks now.

Also check out Audible.com/iTMS audiobooks, for some good stuff playable on the iPod. Been a member for over a year. I reencode them for 'freer' playback though.

guys Im a newbie so let me ask you. I have neverused LAME or watever. Basically I would use it but set the bitrate to 64 or watever. There is an option in EAC for that? Because from reading the posts I got the impression that I can only encode at the presets.


Also about audible. ITs a lil too expensive for me... Plus it sucks that I can play the mp3s on any other player. such as an mp3 cd player because they use some kind of special codec.

I'm using:

--alt-preset standard -a -b 80 -y

oldnick. Any chance you can actually tell me what those switches mean?

If converting your audiobooks to mono isn't an issue to you, I find the "--preset voice" switch works fine for me (for audiobooks/comedy albums/speech) for iPod listening, and creates much smaller files than anything that involves "--alt preset standard".

According to Gabriel "--preset voice is the same as --preset 56 -m m"

Is it transparent? Not to me, but it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make on most of my recordings of this type. If I find the sound quality bothers me, I go to "--alt preset standard", just like I do for the rest of my music on my iPod.

A much longer conversation with other (imo, more complex) suggestions can be found here

--alt-preset standard, modified by:
-a downmix stereo file to mono
-b 80 bitrate (8...320) , with vbr it means minimal bitrate
-Y ignore almost all signals with frequencies>16 kHz

But if you are using it on your iPod, wouldn't the aac format be a better option in terms of quality/bitrate performance?

yea but in case I decide to play it on different player, they might not support AAC. Thanks...

guys help. Im getting an error that keeps saying that the external compressor returned an error... what am i doing wrong?

It seems I am getting this error everytime unless I am using --alt-preset standard.

So --alt-preset standard seems to be the only one that works. Howcome? Also is it normal for the bit rate to jump aorund when using --alt-preset standard and playing with winamp?

It seems the -Y doesnt work for me. Howcome?

--aps is variable bitrate, it uses more bits when needed and less when not to get a transparent end audio file

vbr is good

I did a fair amount of testing on this topic back in January. See this thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ic=17526&st=0&&

If you don't need your audio books to be in MP3 format (e.g. just playing on the iPod, not on a car MP3 cd player or any other portable device) then you might want to play round with AAC encoding. With the iPod, you ought to be able to get good results ripping to AAC (M4a) with iTunes using fairly low quality settings. From the iTunes menu->Edit->Preferences->Importing->Setting->Custom and try dialing down the settings, and testing that the results are still acceptable.