It's true, I'm deaf. I first started losing my hearing at 14, first hearing aids at 23, first cochlear implant (bionic ear) at 39 (two years ago). First glorious iPod a year ago (not a fanboy of Apple but certainly a fan of the ability to hear and enjoy my music once again). My deafness is a hereditary thing. I'm having surgery to get a cochlear implant (in my unimplanted ear) next Thursday, Feb. 7th. Soon thereafter, I'll be bionic in stereo!

I've ripped a few dozen or of my CDs into ACC format via iTunes so that I could relearn to hear music via my implant. My iPod has really helped in that regard. When I'm plugged into my iPod the extension of my auditory nerve is being directly stimulated by the music. It's pretty wild when you think about it.

Music is difficult to hear via an implant. Repeated listening to one track several times is necessary before my brain "gets it". Even when I get it, I've a tin ear. "Sharp" is not an adjective used to describe hearing with an implant. But, the music I already know from growing up sounds pretty damn good (my auditory memory fills in whatever I don't actually hear now). Soon, I'm going to see how well I can do with new (previously unknown to me) music.

The point of all that is that I don't hear that well but in order for me to hear better, I need to be certain I have at least a good source file free of dropouts or other interference. I'm much less likely to ascertain a pop or dropped note than all of you. Yet, I'll have no chance of learning the lost note if it isn't in my file. It is sort of a catch-22 situation because I won't miss something that isn't there but having it missing won't help my relearning process.

My wife an kids use the same music library and they hear fine. But, I listen to different music than they do.

With my upcoming surgery, I'll be at home for several days for recovery. The downtime as well as my desire to get my new ear to relearn to hear music has gotten me thinking about my 200 or 300 CDs and how I can best digitize them for future use. Lounging around seems like the perfect time to be swapping CDs into the computer. I'm willing to redo anything I've already ripped. I've spent a couple days reading these forums and others and now I'm not certain what I want to do anymore. I've over analyzed this to the point where I think I need help sorting it out from some of you wizened veterans.

I was planning on standardizing on a MP3 format so that I could attach cover art and lyrics to each track. Having lyrics attached is a great help when you are trying to relearn to hear. In fact, having lyrics available is really important to me. I've found a good Yahoo widget, iPod Companion, to help me get the lyrics. It isn't perfect but with a lot of time, I can get the job done, I think. I also like MP3's standardization even though it is lossy. I doubt either I, my wife or kids will hear the difference. My iPod has limited space though. It is an 8 GB nano. My wife has a 2 GB nano and the kids have 1GB Sandisk players. We've found that my wife is fine with 128 ACC. The kids seem to do well with 128 WMA (maybe even 64 WMA). Because of their limited capacity, I used the lowest bitrate for the kids so they could get the most songs on their devices.

Now that Amazon is selling DRM free music, I'm willing to spend some money on digital music. Until now, I've refused to purchase digital music because of the DRM. Amazon provides their music in 256 MP3s.

Given the fact that the family is probably going to be purchasing a number of 256 MP3s from Amazon, I'm thinking of creating my library in that format and at that quality level. I figure that way all of my content will be consistent. Then I can be sure the lyrics and cover art are added to the files.

Finally, here come the questions:

If I standardize with 256 MP3s, is EAC with LAME still considered better than using iTunes to create the files?

Once I have my 256 MP3s, I'm going to want to synch to the devices. Will quality suffer greatly if I have itunes sync the songs at 128 ACC?

How about if I re-encode to WMA for the kids?

Any comments/suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance. I'm ready to rip but the deluge of Info. out here has buried me and stopped me in my tracks. That normally doesn't happen.

Instead of EAC, I would recommend dBpoweramp music converter (it's a CD ripper too). It's more intuitive to use than EAC and it supports AccurateRip, something I would not suggest anyone go without. It can natively rip to MP3, AAC, and WMA. I would recommend dBpoweramp over iTunes any day of the week (and I use EAC with REACT2 myself). I am not sure if dBpoweramp can rip to all three formats simultaneously saving you the hassle of reripping, but I bet there is someone at this forum that knows.

Unless you mean that each of you has their media that no one else listens to, these are my thoughts on formats. Another reason you don't need to transcode your MP3 into AAC for iTunes and WMA for Windows Media Player is both players can natively play MP3. It wouldn't make sense storing the same song 3 different ways, taking up 3 times the space. If I remember correctly, there is a slight size difference between WMA and MP3 favoring WMA at 128kbps. From what I read, AAC at 128kbps outperforms MP3. Someone else with more knowledge of AAC will better inform you.

I have no iPod (if I did I would buy one that I can Rockbox), I know essentially less than nothing about the iPod, but I thought when it synced media, it just put your compatible files (MP3s, MP4s, and M4As) straight to the device. If it doesn't do that but must transcode to AAC before going to the iPod... bummer. It does not transcode MP3s to AAC for syncing.

In the meantime EAC supports AccurateRip, too. So this is not a point of decision. I'm not able to say, which program is better, because I never used dBpoweramp until now, but AFAIK these programs are the only ones, which support AccurateRip. I agree with SamHain86 that this is a must-have.

I was not trying to imply EAC does not have AccurateRip. EAC having AR and now supporting AR on image rips, I will never leave it.

If the OP was going for some deluxe lossless archive structure, I would recommend EAC. But, this is general use and probably prefer a track-per-file library, so why bring out other artillery when dBpa will do this job.

EDIT: I know of no other program that support AccurateRip besides dBpa and EAC.

I have a Nano and a Classic, which I feed with iTunes on a Mac. I can just drag a folder of mp3s onto the iPod, and it all goes over without transcoding. I am sure that I once saw an option to transcode mp3s to AAC, which I deselected, but I can't find it again.

OP should note that the iPod organizes stuff entirely by tags, and ignores file names and folders. This can cause problems when ripping CDs, especially of classical music. It is worth while getting the tags right at the ripping stage (speaks from bitter current experience).

Good luck with your rediscovery of music.

So what about setting up multiple encoding schemes from one rip? I thought to have read that one can have dBpowerAMP encode into multiple formats with only one rip. I know there are other solutions like MAREO, but is MAREO able to encode to WMA?

Yes use either EAC or dbpoweramp but don't convert lossy formats to another lossy format. It is worse than if you just encoded them as 128k aac files. Both lossy formats compress differently so you lose info the first time you compress then you lose again with another format. Much better to rip and store in a lossless format and convert them as needed to put on your Ipod. I like the aac better than mp3 on my ipod but you need to try it and see. Bionic ears may like mp3 better. Good luck and report back if you would.

By the way Ipods do support mp3's natively without re-encoding to aac. I've heard that misconception a lot lately.
http://www.apple.com/sg/ipodnano/specs.html
About the new nano but also a chart showing a comparison on all the Ipod models.

Thanks, everyone. You are giving me lots to think about. Of course, with more thought comes more questions.

A bit more background is appropriate. I use a PC and I have Tivo so I want to be able to access our library wirelessly on the Tivo so it can be played over our stereo. I know Tivo natively supports MP3. I believe there is a way (some hack) to get the Tivo to play AAC files. I haven't read in depth about that so I don't know if I'm up for that challenge or not.

What I've gathered from your responses is that regardless of what I do, I should dump iTunes as a ripper and stick with dBpoweramp if I want an more friendly App. and go with EAC if I want to go lossless and/or if I'm not concerned with the ease of use. Also, dBpoweramp might just be able to rip once and encode in multiple formats (mp3, AAC, etc), if that is the route I decide to take. I am trying to avoid the multiple formats to the extent I can though.

I realize that both players will play MP3s natively. But, size matters here. Some will argue a 128 AAC is similar in quality to a 256 MP3. Assuming that is true, the MP3 file is twice the size of the MP3 file. So, we only get 1/2 of the music to fit on the player. :-(

Conceptualy, I understand the taboo of going from lossy to lossy format (i.e. mp3 to AAC or mp3 to WMA). I read a good explanation of that somewhere over the last couple of days and it makes perfect sense. I had hoped someone was going to reply to my initial inquiry by saying, I re-encode and I'm okay with it. That would have made things easier, I think.

If I were to only use the music I'm ripping from my CDs, I would probably go for a lossless format as an archive and encode the library to 128 AAC to import into itunes. Then I would use the 128 AAC to sync to my ipod. Then I would probably hack my Tivo so it played AAC and I would probably just re-encode for the kids (in WMA) for now, until they are old enough to justify their getting a better/larger mp3 player.

The reality is that I expect I'll be buying more and more digital only tracks (mp3s) from Amazon. So, my music library over time will have more and more MP3s in it.

I think it is time to have my wife and kids do a listening test. Despite the taboo, I'm going to see what they hear when going from MP3 to AAC and MP3 to WMA. If they can't discern the difference, I'll standardize on MP3s and re-encode. If they can tell the difference, maybe the best bet is, for now, to encode everything I have on CD in AAC and purchase new material in MP3. If I do the latter, I just need to be willing to sacrafice space for the new material that will be left in the 256 MP3 format.

BTW, the option to transcode to your iPod is only available on the screen that shows your iPod. It is only available when you have your iPod plugged mounted in iTunes.

MichaelW said,

"OP should note that the iPod organizes stuff entirely by tags, and ignores file names and folders. This can cause problems when ripping CDs, especially of classical music. It is worth while getting the tags right at the ripping stage (speaks from bitter current experience)."

How does this cause problems when ripping CDs? And, why especially for classical music?

When ripping via EAC or DB, are there easy ways to import cover art and lyrics (and all the other tags)?

If so, once ripped and tagged, when I point iTunes to that ripped library, will iTunes be able to find the cover art and lyrics? I suppose so because they will be made part of the tag file, right?

Thanks again for all the help. I'm making progress, albeit slowly. If nothing else, I'm better framing the trade-offs that I'm going to need to make.

I ripped many CDs I eventually lost. I was fed up with all the various MP3s and WMAs, so I mas transcoded to 128kbps MP3. I can live with myself. Unfortunately I will be spending the rest of my eternity punished by the Audio defile.

• How does this cause problems when ripping CDs? And, why especially for classical music?
  From experience it is merely convenience to have proper tags made at the time of encoding. It can be a real drag to find out that some of your albums are improperly tagged. I can only speculate with classical: often the titles of classical works are very long only because there is so much that goes into describing that particular piece.
  
  
• When ripping via EAC or DB, are there easy ways to import cover art and lyrics (and all the other tags)?
  Some one else can better explain this. I believe it is possible, but I have no experience with embedding lyrics.
  
  
• If so, once ripped and tagged, when I point iTunes to that ripped library, will iTunes be able to find the cover art and lyrics? I suppose so because they will be made part of the tag file, right?
  Probably. If not, I believe Foobar2000 can. This is something I will be looking into soon.

The problem with classical stuff is that the tag scheme is devised for popular music, and unpopular music tends to have a lot more information per track (work, movement, tempi, all sorts of other stuff). I have ended up with information on movement number etc in the artist field and so on. Doesn't matter if you're working with a hierarchical directory structure, but bites on an iPod. Also, whilst the pre-set genres have micro-fine distinctions for popular music, everything from Palestrina to Steve Reich tends to get classified as "Classical." You say you're going to do the ripping in a leisurely fashion, and you're probably going to have to do some manual tagging; it will be easier to do it as you rip, while you still have the album notes in your hand.

Good luck

Michael

Ah now I understand. Thanks for the clarification.

Something else you might try. Mediamonkey. I use it in place of Itunes and so far I really like it. It is somewhat similar to Itunes and has some easy auto tag methods. The basic version is a free download and actually it might be all you need. www.mediamonkey.com Funny name I know but it's actually quite good if you have been using Itunes. The nice thing about it is that it plays almost every format and will convert lossless and lossy files to other formats. It will also rip but I do like EAC because of the secure methods it uses. The more experienced here might have other opinions about it but so far it seems very good.

Yes I've sometimes transcoded lossy to lossy (usually temporary copies) for my low quality portible mp3 player. It works and there's nothing all that wrong with it. But the simple fact is that it's sub-optimal quality, so if you're looking to get the best quality for a given bit rate you're best to aviod it.


Though AAC is generally considered better than mp3, (more so at low bitrates <128k than higher bitrate btw), it's certainly an exaggeration to say 128k AAC = 256k mp3. In recent public listening tests 128k AAC has come out extremely close to Lame -V5 (typically 135k to 140k with the most recent lame codecs.) Very many people find the slightly higher bit rate for mp3 a worthwhile tradeoff for better compatibility. I think you'll get the greatest space savings overall by just having one format that plays without any trouble on everything, that of course is mp3's strength.

Understood and I agree with your last sentence. Ideally, that is the holy grail that I seek. I'm happy to give up a slight size diff. (say 128 vs. 135 or 140) but, I have trouble giving up twice the speace (128 vs. 256). If I'm going to be purchasing Amazon MP3s, they'll be at 256. That level of quality is a good thing, until you want to load a bunch of stuff on a capacity limited iPod. The easy answer is to get a bigger iPod. But, I prefer flash over hard drives.

I thought the current recommended version of LAME is 3.97 (I thought I saw that on the Wiki). You speak of V5. I assume that is a more current, under development version of LAME? And, since it is not the recommended version, it isn't quite ready for "prime time". Any comments/clarification is appreciated.

I haven't been able to do any listening tests yet. I've been busy cross country skiing since I won't be able to do that for several weeks after surgery. Maybe I'll be able to do some listening tests before the Super Bowl party tonight.

I'll report back here just in case there is someone like me who has similar conflicting goals. :-)

As always, thanks for all the Info. You guys are great.

-V5 is a LAME preset, not a LAME version. v3.98beta6, I think, is the latest version.

Yes Lame works best in variable bit rate mode where it uses various quality "presets" in the form of a "-Vx" command line paramter. Here "x" is a number from 0 to 9 with "-V0" being the highest quality (and bitrate) and "-V9" being the lowest. The most popular settings for normal music tend to be from -V5 (about 135kbs) through to -V2 (about 200kbps). Variable bitrate gives really good results because it can keep the average bit rate (and hence to file size) reasonable while still letting the instantaneous bitrate go very high in places where the music requires it.

Here are some recent (blind) public listening test comparisions of Lame -V5 versus other codecs (including AAC). Make sure you take a look a the summary of overall performance and bitrates near the end of the page.

http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html

http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.htm

Maybe mp3 is not as bad as you thought it was. If 128k AAC is acceptable to you then Lame -V4 at about 160kbs should be at least as good or better.

Wow, this is fabulous. You folks are crazy. But, I mean that in a good way. :-) You all are crazy in just the way I need you to be. :-) This is facinating stuff.

(blushing) Thanks for the -V5 explanation. My ignorance was shining through, brightly.

Well, it is definitely time for me to start playing around with some ripping to see what I can accomplish. I can use my wife's and kids' ears to help guide me. That combined with the data you just showed me will requre me to rethink parts of my strategy.

If I understand you correctly, the variable setting becomes the minimum setting for the bitrate. Do any of you know how Amazon's .MP3s are encoded? That is, how do they compare to a -v5 or a -v4? Or, better yet, how do the quality of Amazon's digital songs compare to a well (LAME) encoded .MP3?

I'm just curious.

I can answer my own question(s). Google is my friend. :-)

The following forum topic answers my questions: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofive...php/t57747.html


Given this information, I believe my choices are as follows (somewhat simplified):

1. Standardize at 256 MP3 with variable bitrate. I will lose a decent amount of space (I think) but likely not the 2:1 I was thinking earlier. I was discounting the effects of VBR.

2. Standardize at less than 256 MP3 (as described in the above post) for the music that I rip from CDs and only use the additional space for the 256 MP3s I download from Amazon.

3. Standardize at 256 MP3s and re-encode to something less for my/our ipods/digital music players.

If my wife and kids can audiologically stomach #3, although messy from an audiophile viewpoint, it is probably my best bet. I can always try #3 and fall back to option #1 (assuming I'm ripping at 256). However, if I try #3 and then want to go to #2, I better be ripping in a lossless (FLAC) format or I better get some weird satisfaction from ripping (not).

MediaMonkey looks very interesting, particularly if I'm going to try and do #3. I've not installed it yet but I will as soon as I have a few hours to myself (post surgery most likely). Can anyone give me the cons to using MediaMonkey?

I believe I've fallen through the looking glass. Tea anyone? LOL :-)

Why standardize at 256kbps? Is that really a showstopper for you? That does not make sense to me.

Variable bitrate cannot be 'standardized'. It will always vary with the music, so to speak depending on the preset used. Of course the variable bitrate presets of Lame are aimed to reach a specific bitrate, however it is on a best effort basis and not mandatory (as with constant bitrate).

I would just go with plain vanilla -V2 if you are so concerned about the possibility of hearing artifacts. This is the standard and transparent to the vast majority of people with the vast majority of material.

I mean, Lame -V5 is transparent to me. With Ogg Vorbis, -q2 (96kbps) is also transparent to me with most material as well. I don't think you should worry too much. Just go with the standard (-v2) if you want peace of mind.

Thanks, Beto. Good Info., that. I'm not hung up on 256. I mistakenly thought I had to specify both a variable bitrate (e.g. -v5) and a over all bitrate 256 (ala iTunes).

It is definitely time for me to stop typing and to start doing some ripping. Thank you all for your help. You all have been great.

When I have a resolution, I'll post it here just to round out this thread.

Thanks again.

It can rip to 3 formats, or more at the same time (including Lossless) in Codec Central is the [Multi Encoder] utility codec.

@pcondon
One question, which I hope will clarify things.

As I understand it, you're re-learning listening to music, to put it simply. It's for you easier if you already know the piece, which suggests your working from the overall shape of the music, to put it crudely.
My question is, what sort of accuracy of reproduction do you need? My thought is that pops, clicks and dropouts in the recording will be a serious problem, but minor losses of high frequencies, or artefacts that are at the limit of audibility for experienced testers, are unlikely to be a problem.
(I base this on my own experience: V5 is transparent to me, but when I first tried ripping from vinyl, I got samples dropping out, and the effect on the rhythm made me feel distinctly unwell.)
If my assumption is right, you need to be very sure about ripping, I think, but something like LAME at V5 (or maybe V4, for luck) would be fine.

I might of course be entirely wrong, but as you want to do it right, it's probably worthwhile getting precise ideas of your needs.

Good luck.

This is an accurate description of what I am doing and how I hear with my implant. Subtlties of the music will be lost on me. They might not be for the wife and kids though. I'm trying to do one rip of all our CDs that will last a long time. "A long time" also includes adding art and lyrics (read as "time consuming"). That said, I'm certain my wife doesn't have a golden ear. The kids by virtue of their age have better hearing but they aren't old enough or educated enough to realize all but egegious errors in the music. In short, I suspect their cummulative quality needs are greater than mine but probably less than 90% of the people who find these forums.



Spot on, again, I think. I believe I've answered both your and my overall question in my last paragraph. The reality is that I don't need anything too fancy. And yet, when I could still bearly hear with natural hearing, I remember hearing garbage 128 bit MP3s. Blech!

The reality is that I can probably do as you say, (V5, V4) and that will be more than enough. I'm going to play with it a little bit to compare file sizes and also quality differences. I think I'll ask each of my kids and my wife to pick one CD they really like and I'll convert it to the best of my ability to .mp3. I'll need to learn more about LAME to do that, I suppose. Once I have that, I'm probably going to try to reincode to minimize size. Why not just convert to a lower bit rate at the beginning? Well, if I'm going to be downloading 256 Amazon songs, I like the idea of keping constant quality across the whole collection. I don't like size requirements of the 256 file on my wife's 2 GB Nano.

Thanks, Michael. Your experience help me think about my alternatives. To a degree, I've already over thought this. Then again, that is why we are all here, isn't it?

Bear in mind that when comparing different encodes you have to eliminate the placebo effect. For that you need to perform an ABX test to be sure you really hear a difference against the original or against a different MP3 encode (say -V2 against -V5 for instance).

It is fairly easy to set up and there are tools available that will help you with this (foobar2000 comes to my mind). It is pretty common to imagine that you hear a difference between encodes if you (or your wife and kids) don't perform a double blind test. Take 10 rounds at least at each test to ensure you get meaningful results.

You can read more about this in the FAQ.

Good Luck.