I want to create a music collection on my pc from my huge cd collection. I am a professional musician, so I do have a pretty good ear for sound quality, but file size is a major concern for me. I don't want to take up too much disk space, and I would like the convenience of 1 copy of each song that could work from my pc but still be small enough to transfer to a portable.

SO... I have definitely decided to go with mp3 or maybe even wma9.

My question is: Is there a significant difference in the quality of mp3 or wma files created with CoolEdit Pro and free encoders such as dbPowerAmp? It seems that for convenience dbPowerAmp is pretty good... it is decently fast and it can look up media info and tag the files. But will I get better audio results from CEP2?

Let me apologize in advance if this post is too newbieish or lowendish for this forum. And thanks in advance for any advice. I know a lot of this stuff is really subjective.

WMA is a nono.
If you want portable support go with mp3 though Ogg Vorbis, which is higher quality than mp3, is gonna get portable support in the future.

You seem to be new to the world of audio compression so I suggest you browse around this forum to gain knowledge before deciding.
For creating mp3's you would want to read these pages:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/act/...t/ST/f/15/t/478
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/act/...t/ST/f/15/t/203
and get a frontend to convert your wav files.

It is going to take you quite a while to convert all your CDs, and for any vaguely modern PC most of that time is spent physically ripping the CD, rather than encoding the result to mp3 or some other format.

So what I'd suggest is ripping your stuff to FLAC , which compresses to around 55-60% of the size of a WAV file without ANY loss in quality. Do this until you're starting to run out of space, then re-encode the FLAC file to your final destination. Why?:

1) Keeps high quality files around until you need to start sacrificing (some) quality.

2) Gives you time to understand what your target format should be

3) Gives time for mp3 and other encoders to become even more mature, i.e. better quality per byte (or for the next big thing to come along)

4) In the interim Hard Drive space gets cheaper, and you may decide you'll just keep the FLAC files

Hope this helps.
Cheers, Paul

It also depends on your likely choice of portable.

If you happened to go with Minidisc, you can store your music in any format, and then using foorbar, or some other decoding player, convert them to wavs and transfer them to MD. If that was going to be the case, but you still want excellent quality within reasonable storage space, MPC is hard to beat. Ogg is also very good, especially at lower bitrates.

With MD all of your music ends up in ATRAC3 format, but because the software converts wavs to ATRAC also, you can store your music however you like, and convert and transfer to MD in a simple operation from wavs using foobar. B) Even a lossless format if you like.

I go from MPC though, and the resulting quality is excellent for a portable.

You probably need to check out the various formats, and some portables yourself though to see if you are satisifed with the sound quality.

Den

Thanks for all the tips!

I'm not planning to record my whole collection. Maybe a few tracks from my favorite CD's. Probably about 15 hours worth of stuff.

Still don't know which software to use for converting though... You guys have anything to say about dbPowerAmp vs. CooleditPro?

How come WMA is a big no-no? I mean, I'm just as distrustful of microsoft as the next person, but they claim to get such better results than mp3...

I do have a portable minidisc, but I also have an mp3 player that plays only mp3 and wma. What I've been doing so far is ripping to 128kbps mp3 so that the files wouldn't be huge on my computer, and then playing them out to my minidisc (I only have analog transfer capabilities) or transferring to the audio player.

Well, like it was said above, I am obviously pretty new to all this, but I like doing things right if I'm going to do them... so I'll read up a little before asking more questions.

Thanks again!

Another link you'd want to take a look at is this:
http://www.ping.be/satcp/tutorials.htm
You find guides of how to set up the best ripper available (EAC) and how to set it up to rip with LAME (the best mp3 encoder).