Hi - new poster here ... about to buy a iPod nano.

I want to start ripping and encoding my CDs at, say, 160 VBR AAC.

Is there any point in getting a perfect rip with EAC if you're then only going to encode the songs to lossy?

I'd like to use iTune's ripper for convenience, but I'd make the effort to use EAC if it made a significant difference in quality.

I don't have the space to file away big lossless files for later, so the rip will be for immediate lossy encoding only.

All my CDs are spotless, by the way, so they'll hardly make a challenging rip. (if I'm not misunderstanding what EAC does)

Thanks for any advice!

Galilee

For spotless CDs, the standard apps like WMP and iTunes are just fine IMO.

Until some months ago, I used to rip everthing in EAC secure mode, but as I got older I lost patience and switched to burst mode.
Had not a single audible glitch yet, and 35x speed is so sweet.

What size Nano? 1GB? 2GB? 4GB? Unless you intend to use it as primary storage for your music collection, I would advise a higher bitrate. Through typical buds you are extremely unlikely to hear any difference, but if you should, as many have, start playing your Nano through your good home stereo or through high-end buds like Shures or Etymotics, I would use as high a bit rate as I could, consistent with the amount of music I want to carry and the amount of memory space in my Nano.



If your CDs are as pristine as you say, the answer is no. At least in my opinion.



How much space are we talking about? 250GB? 500GB? 1TB?? I found a deal at CompUSA not too long ago for a firewire/USB combo 250GB external drive for $99.00. Right now, there is a deal, also at CompUSA, for a 250GB internal PATA drive for $58.98! We're starting to talk almost lunch money here! I just don't understand people, in this day of hard drive space getting to be as cheap as beach sand and seemingly in free fall, balking at ripping lossless due to lack of space!

I always rip twice - once the usual way, with EAC/LAME or EAC/Nero AAC or QuickTime 7, with CBR at 320bps. Why? Compatibility. No player will ever object to MP3 CBR. Nor will an iPod cough at a CBR M4a. I never carry in my player more music than I can listen to in a day, or a week, maximum. I don't try to use my portable device as an archive for my entire music collection. I just don't think that is either practical or wise.

Then I rip a CD image with cue sheet using EAC/FLAC. That way, I have a compressed archive that I can use to recreate a bit-for-bit copy of the original CD if I should need or want it. Or I can use the cue sheet to transcode that FLAC image to files using any other lossy codec I should decide I want later on, without having to rerip.

Because I am ripping and encoding twice, this is a little time-consuming and space inefficient, but as I said, space is CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP, and with practice, I have honed the process to a fairly smooth and trouble-free procedure.

If you just rip to lossy 160kbs AAC now, to save disk space in the near term, I virtually guarantee that at some point in the not-distant-enough future, you will be re-ripping. I think my approach gets the pain over with quickly and for good. Spend a little more effort, and you will have a lossless archive from which you can easily re-encode on a whim to whatever neat new lossy codec comes along in the future, for use in whatever neat new players.

Just my opinion...

Another factor that increases the cost is getting a 2nd drive as backup insurance in case the 1st drive crashes. But even 2 x 250gb drives for $120 is still cheaper than reripping lost CD images because of a drive failure.



To clarify, do you actually spin and read the physical CD twice?

My stragtegy has started to change as of late.

For something I rip lossless, I want it as perfect as possible as that is my master for any future lossy transcoding and if the master is smudged, the copy will only be worse. I use my most accurate drive in secure - T&C - CRC - AccurateRip and re-rip any tracks that didn't pass AccurateRip. If the album's not in the data base, I'll just rely on the CRC.

If I'm just ripping music for my adult kids or friends that I don't want for myself, I'll just do burst - T&C - CRC on my fast drives and call it good.

Edit: I rip to a RAID 1 mirror array to protect my time investment too. It will take hundreds if not thousands of hours to rip my present and future music collection. I plan on eventually upgrading to RAID 5 for more efficient use of storage once I get another drive or two.

Hi Galilee,

I realise that this is not the point of your question, but if I am making *lossy* files then I don't see any point at all in making higher bitrate versions than my ears can differentiate. Recent (fascinating) listening tests published on this site suggest that any of the popular codecs will be near-transparent at 128kpbs VBR, and for normal listeners who have not trained themselves to pick up the subtle signs, in common listening environments (eg your car), 128K VBR is almost certainly indistinguishable from the original.

I can certainly confirm that, for this old musician, 128VBR Lame sounds absolutely *perfect* in my car or on Zen with the PX100 phones. In fact, I started out insisting on at least 192K MP3s, but when I started to fill my 60Gig player, I really started to get honest with myself and admit that 192K is wasted on me. Perhaps you are gifted with finer hearing than I am, in which case, good luck to you!

On the other hand, even these old ears can detect a crappy rip, so I always use EAC in secure mode. Nothing is more annoying than to leap in your car and find hops and skips in your fave track. I don't worry about AccurateRip, but I do insist that EAC reports no errors.

See ya,
LBB

I'm getting the impression from this post that you feel that Secure T&C is better than Burst T&C, but even when the CRCs match in both cases?

Not necessarily. I think it depends on the drive. My faster less accurate NEC 3500AG drive seems to trigger that EAC red error correction indicator a lot in secure mode so I leave in in secure mode with T&C/CRC to make sure. My slower but more accurate TS-H352A drive is a snail in secure mode and with no more accurate CRCs. So I run it in burst mode, T&C, CRC and AccurateRip.

I think the burst mode is good for accurate drives and secure mode is necessary for less accurate drives. T&C + CRC is the minimum qualifier and AccurateRip is a bonus when your album is in its data base.

I'd rather run everything in burst mode but I don't trust some of my drives enough.

I certainly understand not bothering with burst mode if you think you're going to get errors but if the CRCs would have matched in Burst, using Secure mode didn't do anything but cost you additional time and wear on your drive.

Personally, I let the condition of the disc dictate my ripping method. If the disc is in the database and a rip without a test in Burst mode gets me accurate results that's all I'll do as it is all that is necessary. For the rips where I also perform a test, matching CRCs using Burst has never steered me wrong. I cannot say the same for matching T&C CRCs in Secure mode.

It's sometimes hard to know how a disc will rip. Clean looking ones can be full of problems that make ripping them difficult. Scratched ones I thought would be a problem often rip just fine.

I just don't trust my NEC drive as much as my Samsung and that was my deciding factor. Of course we can just switch from burst to secure and back fairly easily depending on the circumstances. The NEC is lightning fast in burst mode but unless the disc is pristine, the results aren't usually acceptable and I end up re-ripping and waste more time than if I'd just ripped secure in the first place.

Over all I don't see an accuracy advantage of secure over burst as long as you use T&C, CRC & AccurateRip to validate the rips.

Thanks for all the replies!

The problem I've got now is that I started off just wanting to rip my recent CDs for filling a flash player to go jogging with ... and somehow it's a small step from that to thinking about how I can archive my whole collection in a lossless format.

I got EAC up and running and it's great to know that a rip is accurate or not. I'm using it more out of interest than any real need for it at the moment, but when I've digested everything in these forums (!) I'll make a start on my archive ...