Ask Slashdot: What's the Best MP3 Encoder? 371
syd asks: "I'm wanting to convert my CD collection to MP3, and I'm looking for the best MP3
encoder to do the job. The most important factor is the sound quality
of the encoded files. Other concerns are cost, platform, and speed of
the encoder. However, I'm only going to encode them once, and I'm
going to listen to them fairly often, so I'd rather have a slow
encoder that sounds good. I would prefer to use Linux, although I
would be willing to reboot into Windows if necessary. If anyone has
any pointers to some real numbers, that would be most helpful."
A fair enough question. What do you all think?
Bladeenc will do the job (Score:1)
xing mp3 encoder - WITHOUT A DOUBT. (Score:1)
This is the same encoder used in Audio Catalyst for Windows - it beats the snot out of everything else out there, hands down.
I'm sure you'd be able to write a shell script or something (or use one of the many frontends for rippers/encoders) to encode entire cds.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
Xing (Score:2)
---
What about CDDB integration? (Score:1)
If not, then what is the best open-source encoder and CDDB-compatible CD player application, so that I can make a FrankenCoder that will automatically place encoded CD files into the correct directory/filename layout for easy reference...
Re:It depends on the bit rate (Score:2)
The only disadvantage I see with it is that it messes up some crappy mp3 players, but that's a problem with the mp3 player, not the encoder.
ripper (cdrwin) (Score:2)
For rippers that work on IDE CD-ROM drives, I've personally found all the ones integrated with encoders to be crap. On my (fairly bad) CD-ROM drive, they almost always produce mp3s with skips in them. Worse yet, they don't do much of any error checking to let me know of this.
So I use CD-R-Win (for Windows). It's designed for CD-to-CD copying with a CD-R drive, but can also do CD-to-WAV ripping with any CD-ROM drive. It actually does extensive error checking, and NEVER produces a file with a skip, no matter how small, in it. You have an option of having it abort in an error, or having it retry reading the skipped area a certain number of times to correct the error. To the best of my knowledge, no other ripper has this option. With every other ripper I've tried, I've gotten at least one or two mp3s with skips in them, while cdrwin is 100% perfect.
That said, I'd prefer a ripper integrated with an encoder and CDDB lookup. However, the ripper must be 100% perfect, and NEVER produce a skip. Does anybody know of a ripper other than cdrwin that can do this? So far I've been unable to do so, though I'll continue looking.
Re:ripper (CDex) (Score:2)
Re:ripper (CDex) (Score:2)
Use (Score:1)
Re:How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
Re:Joung Stereo - I think your wrong (Score:1)
John
I use a Mac... (Score:1)
Here's a link to a Macintouch.com column w/ comparisons of different(Mac) encoders. Soundedit takes a long time, but it is the best.
http://www.raum.com/mpeg/reviews_quality.html (Score:1)
Why Adaptec? (Score:1)
Last time anybody tested, Adaptec cards were no faster than the competition (even a hair slower than some). Meanwhile, if you're reading Slashdot, there's no reason to pay almost double for an Adaptec--even if their phone tech support is better than, say, Tekram's, they still won't likely know enough to help you if you have a problem anyway, unless it's a simple mistake...
I like my 53c8xx-based SCSI boards, and my UltraPlex. My Mitsubishi CD-RW was cheap, and functions okay.
Another nice reason to go SCSI, though, is to get a 2-drive external case (plus a quieter fan than the one that came with it), and stick your CD-ROM and CD-RW on your desktop. Much smaller than a minitower, plus I have a full-sized case on the floor I don't have to lean down to...
Re:use Krabber, bladeenc, and cdparanoia (Score:2)
Grip + LAME is my choice. The auto rip and eject features are nice for bulk ripping.
I share my rip directory over NFS, and use a perl front end to lame to dispatch encode jobs over the network so it can encode several tracks in parallel. With enough boxes, it doesn't matter how slow encoding is.
syd asks: "I'm wanting to convert my CD collection (Score:1)
Shouldn't you use MP2? (Score:1)
Go with higher bitrates and LAME or bladenc (Score:1)
Re:How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
You must be proud!
Come back when you can keep that Mac up, under normal usage, for months at a time and you may have an argument.
Xing Encoder (Score:1)
Pros: Fast. Really fast. The audio quality (on a properly supported player) appears as good as l3enc.
Cons: Closed software. Only a few current players will play back files (other players 'warble', 'hiss' and do other wierd things from time to time) produced with it even if you don't go all the way to the bleeding edge and use Variable Bitrate Encoding. In their favor though, Xing has released a decoder which plays back their stuff under the GPL so it is hard to fault them. Freeamp seems to be the only one with a linux player based on the Xing code.
Re:I'm not trying to start flame wars, read carefu (Score:1)
I'm not trying to start flame wars, read carefully (Score:1)
Hope this helps ya,
MoOsEb0y (mooseboy@vqf.com)
Re:art of encoding (Score:1)
-MoOsEb0y (mooseboy@vqf.com)
Re:VQF by Microsoft (Score:1)
Re:VQF by Microsoft (Score:1)
Re:VQF may rock, but... (Score:1)
Re:But where to get a good acc encoder? (Score:1)
Bitrates vs Quality (Score:1)
This was from an article where they tested Diamond's Rio PMP300 and Macab's DAP32.
Among the tested encoders were bladeenc (linux and Windows), CDex (Windows), Electronic Cosmo's MPEG suite (Windows), Encoder-js (Linux) and MusicMatch (Windows, comes with the portable players).
Pioneer (36x) also excellent choice. (Score:1)
BEWARE other Pioneer drives, though -- Pioneer did a good job with the 36x firmware, but they have a reputation for not being consistent when it comes to DAE. The 32x Pioneer was getting great DAE reviews for a while, but then a few months later it was getting not-so-good reviews. It appeared that the only difference between the drives that worked and the drives that didn't was the version of the firmware. The newer firmware broke DAE. Then the 36x models were released and everything was okey-dokey again. Now the 40x Pioneers are out and DAE is broken yet again. (I've got a 40x Pioneer as well and the reports are true -- it does not do bitperfect DAE). At least we know that Pioneer has the ability to manufacture drives that can do good DAE.
So, if you can get a 36x Pioneer for cheap, go for it!
Re:Pioneer (36x) also excellent choice. (Score:1)
That, and Plextor doesn't make any CD-ROM drives that use a slot-in loader like my Pioneer has.
Re:ripper (cdrwin) (Score:1)
Re:CDex [windows] (Score:1)
Dual Rip/Encode (Score:1)
How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
Most modern computer platforms except MacOS. :op
J.
Re:A really good song for testing (Score:1)
I happen to already have that album encoded, so I played it and listened closely for any problems. I didn't hear any. The song is called 'Last Dance'.
I've been ripping tracks with cdparanoia (alpha prerelease 9.4) and encoding with bladenc (v0.76) at 128kbs from a 20x drive, though cdparanoia makes it clear that the data speed on the drive doesn't effect the rippping speed.
This is on a Pentium 200 Mhz machine with 128 megs of memory, an IDE cdrom drive and an IDE hard drive on seperate controller. I run X, play MP3s, act as a gateway for another box, a file server (including MP3s) for that box, a server for a couple NCDs, and I've been playing CivCTP. Idle CPU goes to distributed.net.
In spite of that load I manage to get 3 CDs encoded each day. I've now got about 150 CDs taking a little over 7 gigs.
The wav files tend to take about 10 megs per minute, and the MP3s take a bit over 1 meg per minute.
Yes, that means I've got more than 4 days of music available. And a lot of jewel cases collecting dust.
Re:VQF by Microsoft - NOT. (Score:1)
I can't comment on the review in c't directly, but personally don't plan on switching away from MP3 anytime soon -- it sounds good enough, and nobody 'owns' it. For me to buy into a proprietary standard, it would have to be A LOT better... and none of them, so far, are.
Whatever RIAA wants, SDMI is NOT going to happen. I guarantee it.
Re:20 Gb Server? (Score:1)
I have been told that that Maxtor owns Quantum. Drives from both come off the same assembly lines, but Quantum gets 'pick of the litter'. In other words, Maxtor builds drives from the platters that Quantum didn't want/need.
In general, apparently, you get better drives if you buy Quantum over Maxtor. But you will pay more for them, too.
Don't know about you folks, but I'm getting nervous about how cheap drives are getting. The damn things are spinning 120 times A SECOND in there. Quality is likely to take a nosedive with the incredible financial pressures that drive makers are under right now.
We've had a LOT of Western Digital 9GB SCSIs fail at work. We brought in about twenty of those drives about 18 months ago, and eight have died. And those weren't even cheap..... I think we paid $850 each or so. WD has been very nice about replacing them, but they still broke.
It worries me when I see drives of about the same size and speed rating (EIDE, admittedly) for $150 in just 18 months... that is waaay too much price pressure. Something has got to give, and I fear it will be our data.
Re:Xing Encoder (Score:1)
OTOH, the Xing encoder supports VBR encoding, which did seem to increase the perceived quality quite a bit. The feature is available under Linux; the files are a bit bigger with a mid-to-high quality settings, but the result sounds nice.
Somewhere there was an actual frequency-analysis report of a bunch of mp3 encoders, including all three of the above. Now I've forgotten the URL.
Re:Xing Encoder (Score:1)
My preference is Xing (Score:1)
For ripping, I use cd-paranoia III on my linux box. That sucker can rip from dirty discs, even with a few scratches. It's slow, but yields a very stable wave file. I built a perl front end that looks the cd up at cddb.com. After it rips, it sends the wav file over to my PPro w/ WinNT, which encodes, tags and renames the file. Am I the only one that uses a cluster for creating mp3s?
I like fraunhofer's codec, but v3.1 doesn't run on WinNT (documented bug...) and it takes an eternity to encode files. Besides, they seem to be concentrating on 128kbps and below, mainly for streaming music over the internet. On top of that, there's no possibility of VBR.
My perception of BladeEnc is that it plainly sucks. Maybe that's because I've heard horrid-sounding samples of music encoded with this encoder. I just recently read that there are bad versions floating around. It seems that if Blade is compiled with code optimizations, the mp3 output turns out *different* from what it should.
I can't be sure, but there are two artifacts I hear most often in mp3s in a.b.sounds.mp3. The first is a distinct background, garbled digital wooshing sound, accentuated most when treble is turned up. The other artifact I hear I call "spoons". That's where you hear a really high-pitched "ping", like two spoons being whacked together, on cymbals and other high-toned instruments. I attribute these to Blade, probably unfairly, but there seems to be a lot of crappy mp3s out there... and someone doesn't know s/he's making them.
The most promising encoder I have seen is LAME (LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder) (LAME) [sulaco.org]. They just put in VBR support, and they have a much improved psycho-acoustic model over the ISO code. And it's all open source. Neat-oh!
MP3 encoders are just another religious debate in computer land. What really matters is which one sounds best to *YOU*. Do some experimenting, make sure you're using headphones. Try a few different encoders on the same wav file, and do A-B comparisons. Try different kinds of music (I found picking-guitar and audience applause are difficult for some encoders). You're correct: you only want to encode your collection once, so you want to make sure it's done right!
The last thing I want to mention is Joint Stereo. Personally, I like it, as it gives the left and right a little more room to store data, but I have noticed a *very* slight reduction in channel separation. The left and right aren't as separated as the original. It's extremely hard to notice, and in my opionion, very much worth the increase in quality.
-dodja
BladeEnc... (Score:1)
1. It's slow. It takes the K6-2 300 in the other room about 2 times the length of the song being encoded to encode.
2. Avoid BladeEnc 0.80 and 0.81! They randomly produce fucked up MP3s when encoding in batch! I found this out the hard way. After encoding several CDs and listening to the MP3s on the Windoze machine in the other room, I tried listening to them on my machine using XMMS... some were okay, but some sounded like random noise, or were too slow/fast, etc. This is a bug that the author acknowledges was in 0.80 and was supposedly fixed in 0.81 (although it wasn't). I don't know if a new version is out that has fixed this, but it's safest to stick with 0.76.
Other than that, BladeEnc is a fine choice
My 0.02$ (Score:1)
Well, I hate to say it... (Score:1)
Cheers...
What about bitrate? (Score:1)
Re:The sound quality is _not_ great (Score:1)
Re:I would have to say bladeenc (Score:1)
I started using BladeEnc on windows and when I went full time to linux tried out a couple of encoders before going back to BladeEnc. It has consistently shown itself to be of exceptional speed and quality.
Recently I ripped my modest collection of 25 albums over a period of a few days using ripit [freshmeat.net], a perl script which does a cddb lookup of the tracks, rips them, and then encodes them with bladeenc or lame.
I wouldn't consider ripping a cd collection without cddb these days, after doing it the easy way it would be far too painful to do it manually.
Re:The sound quality is _not_ great (Score:1)
I've heard worse encoders it has to be said but they were unlistenable.
Don't use mp3 to encode at all - use something non-lossy if you are so concerned about audio quality...
The FHG-Radium codec should be ported to *nix. (Score:1)
I tried the latest downloadable releases of BladeEnc, LAME (.DLLs only, of course), and the FHG-Radium (== optimised) codecs. I ripped under Win98 using a Plextor UltraPlex 40max hooked to an Adaptec 2930B; my machine is a diehard overclocked Celeron 366 PPGA to 550 (384 MB RAM). My encoding settings are for 192 kbit/s at 44.1 kHz simple stereo (NOT joint-stereo) for track 01 from the 1995 Del Amitri CD, _Twisted_ (the song being "Food for Songs"). I have a Diamond MonsterSound MX300 hooked up to Cambridge SoundWorks (the SoundWorks model) speakers. In short, my system is pretty decent for personal testing.
The BladeEnc 0.82 Intel DLL took approximately 2 minutes and 5 seconds to encode. The LAME 3.14 codec (I can't find any mention of it on the LAME history page, however) included with CDex 1.20beta5 took 1 minute and 1 second. The FHG-Radium codec took 2 minutes and 18 seconds.
My take, from "best-sounding" to "worst-sounding" (note the subjectivity; I don't claim to be unbiased =): FHG-Radium-> LAME-> BladeEnc.
As much as I dislike rebooting just to encode mp3s, I have to admit that the FHG-Radium codec is hands-down the winner. The intro segment with the hi-hat is superb for testing high-frequency response in the encoded MPEG-1.0 layer 3 file, and while all three codecs produced top-notch quality high-frequency response, the FHG-Radium codec retained the "finesse"/crispness of the hi-hat; the remaining two did not retain such crispness. (Caveat: I am EXTREMELY picky about crispness in high-frequency response.
Interestingly enough, CDex's internal mp2 (MPEG-1.0 layer 2) encoder produced a file of equal if not better quality than the mp3 produced by the FHG-Radium codec. This may be due to the nature of the mp3 routines. Additionally, it took just fifty seconds to encode. =)
My recommendation? If you're looking for professional quality, then you may wish to invest in hardware encoding (no software solution will ever top those!). If you use Windows, then FHG-Radium is your best bet. If you use *nix, then LAME is your best bet. If you straddle the fence a bit (as I do), then choose whichever the sun shines on that day.
As a side note: the versions of the codecs, with the exception of the FHG-Radium one, that I tested were not the latest and greatest. I believe LAME is up to 3.24 (beta) and BladeEnc is up to 0.85 (beta). Next time I'll test in Slink.
Re:The FHG-Radium codec should be ported to *nix. (Score:1)
How is quality judged? (Score:1)
Re:BladeEnc (Score:1)
The higher frequencies doesn't sound anything like the original. Making the file useless and painfull to listen to.
mp3enc is maybe slow but produce far more better mp3 files at 128k.
V (Score:1)
Re:I would have to say bladeenc (Score:1)
Try them both for yourself, you will hear the difference.... Lame works better for me
Audiocatalyst for Windows. (Score:1)
It's so easy to use that you can plop a CD into the drive, hit the CDDB button, put check marks next to the songs you want to encode and then you can leave. Come back in a little while and the songs will be ripped, normalized, and encoded at the bitrate you specified in the directory you specified with the songnames downloaded off the Internet.
You can definitely hobble together several different programs (Xing makes an encoder for Linux last I checked) under Linux to do the same thing, but it's really worthwhile to reboot into Windows for this one...
LAME + Paloma (Score:1)
My preferred ripping/encoding frontend is Paloma [fsu.edu]. It does CDDB lookup, calls cdparanoia and an encoder, and stores your MP3s in a relational database. I really like the ability to generate playlists based on arbitrary queries of the database. It's very slick.
Paloma also supports division of the files into "buckets" of a fixed size. Say, 650MB. Useful if you want to burn your collection onto multiple CDRs, either for backup or to carry around with a laptop.
I only have about 10GB of MP3s so far, but I just bought a 27GB drive to store most of the rest of my collection, and I expect I'll fill it soon.
One suggestion for speeding the process of converting your collection, if you have several hundred CDs: Buy another CDROM drive! It only costs $30, and it speeds things up by a lot.
I would have to say bladeenc (Score:1)
Different times for different songs (Score:1)
My P2-233 easily encodes in realtime when encoding a Underworld disc, but it does a lot worse when encoding a Charlie Parker disc.
CDDB Integration (Score:1)
Get Lame (Score:1)
If you're a serious quality fiend, don't bother with 8hz, bladeenc or any of the other ISO derivitives. Typically, they only improve on the speed of the encoder, not the quality - and the standard ISO psycho acoustic model has a number of errors.
Go and download LAME [sulaco.org]. Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder, it's a patch against the distribution 10 ISO example source which replaces the psycho acoustic model with GPSYCHO, adds variable bit rate support, joint stereo and a host of other goodies. I tested it out the other day, and it was consistantly encoding as fast as bladeenc and at a much better quality - less 'brittle' sounding in general, and without the high pitched sound artifacts that other encoders produce in about 20% of the things I've encoded (at 128 kbit, admitedly).
VQF may rock, but... (Score:1)
--
Xing kicks major butt... (Score:1)
BladeEnc 0.76 - 12:00
LAME 2.1f - 8:17
Xing 1.5 Beta1 - 2:32
I haven't re-timed it with the production version, but it should be as fast or faster.
As far as speed goes, there is simply no comparison. Its quality is quite good, too - and VBR encoding can give you better quality for the same file size.
On the downside, it won't do stream encoding with pipes, so it's useless with liveice. In my opinion, that was intentional (they don't want to kill sales of StreamWorks). If you need pipes, use LAME.
--
The cluephone's ringing... and it's for you. (Score:1)
Specifically, with the production version 1.5 encoder, the -N option cuts out frequencies greather than 16 kHz. THAT IS NOT THE DEFAULT.
--
Re:Xing Encoder - file playback (Score:1)
--
Re:How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
in at least 3 days (while writing on a diss).
---> different people, different criteria.
Re:How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
admit to worship the great goddess of X86 (albeit
through AMD)
89 though. And yes, there is something wrong
with "lpr foo.ps": it's got to do with dead trees.
(I know, you didn't write this, but the AC after you)
Krabber for you KDE folks (Score:1)
Re: He's right about MP2 being higher-quality... (Score:1)
Time flies like an arrow;
Re:ripper (cdrwin) (Score:1)
linux: I follow the cdparanoia/bladeenc/cddb crowd with some homebrew shell scripts
either way, I use 160 kbits
Fraunhofer is the way to go (Score:1)
Now if someone would just make a portable "discman" for playing joliet CD-Rs, then I'd be a happy man.
WinTroll (Re:VQF by Microsoft - NOT.) (Score:1)
c't is the authoritative source for geeks and nerds (who understand German or Dutch) and way more independent and credible than that ZiffDavis crap like PCWeek.
From the c't article "As is the custom with Microsoft, the introduction of this new proprietary standard..." sounds like they didn't do their homework since this is an open standard, Nullsoft didn't seem to have any problem adding support for ASF to Winamp.
Garbage. Nullsoft has to license it like everybody else. Where's the source, where's the (OSS) encoder? ASF is absolutely proprietary.
MP3, while having some patent woes, can be encoded with an open source product like LAME.
PCWeek says that ASF sounds as good or better than MP3
There is no backup of that claim whatsoever, it's just a short note, so it's highly unlikely that they tested it properly (it wasn't even released by then).
The c't article [heise.de] OTOH presents an excellent test complete with audio samples and precise descriptions where ASF fails miserably in comparison to MP3 whith distortions and a lower signal resolution [heise.de]. It is, however, comparable to other pure streaming formats like Real Audio.
The number of trolling MS employees on
Re:Consider Carefully (Score:1)
cd-paranoia's slow? (Score:1)
No matter how fast your CD-ROM, if you just run cd-paranoia it'll rip at 1x. I was pissed for a long time when my new pioneer 36x SCSI wasn't any faster than my old 8x SCSI, until I was prompted to look at the man pages...
Try cdparanoia -Z on your CD's with no scratches, that disables all the paranoia checks and thus allows max speed ripping (I'm a lot happier now :)). If you've got scratches and stuff, look into the other options that'll fix the problems you have, but skip the problems you know arent on there.
Re:Consider Carefully (Score:2)
In general i suppose it isn't bad, but it's joint stereo I dislike. It's an imperfect way of doing things.
Some of the bands i listen to sometimes use weird qsound-alike spatial effects when they mix the album. fraunhoffer slaughters those and makes this swooping noise. it's irritating. Tracks of note are LPD's "10th Shade" and Japan's "Gentlemen Take Polaroids"
I wouldn't say bladeenc is perfect. But, well, nothing is. I use bladeenc and it isn't half bad.
From all reports, Xing's encoder uses a really cheezy approximation of the codec. That would be in keeping with Xing's history in the market - their mpeg video encoder creates mpeg videos that are comprised entirely of index frames.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
A slightly different question... (Score:1)
RealJukebox on Win98. (Score:1)
I've tried the others, and found them clumsy to use.
I listen with cheap headphones, so 96kbps is fine enough.
Re:Where's the info? (Score:1)
The question was about the best quality MP3 encoder. And that isn't even mentioned here. Why the score increase?
As for the Windows flaming, i do DAE in Windows ALL the time, and just play Quake II or so while doing so. My load hovers between 0.05 and 1.5...
My experience. (Score:1)
Good Poll Topic? (Score:1)
It may be a better one than some of the ones lately
Re:Audio Catalyst suck my nuts (Score:1)
First off, I can't complain about my SBlive. I wish that it had an external DAC, but I'll live. IMHO, it's great for the money.
Second, If you can go from DA to MP3 (with normalization) with a 3 minute song in about 15 seconds with any other encoder, please let me know. Until I know of one, Audio Catalyst will continue to be my choice ripper.
My choice-Audio Cayalyst+Plextor UltraPlex
I've seen DAE speeds in excess of 24x. Plain amazing to me.
Re:l3enc at 24k (Score:1)
Real Jukebox (Score:1)
Recommended - although it only runs under Windows, so you'll have to rip under that and then come back to Linux.
Re:What about mp3 to CD (opposite direction)? (Score:1)
why use MPEG-1 or 2, when you can use 4? (Score:1)
If you haven't figured it out already, I'm talking about quicktime.
Test for yourself... (Score:1)
the results.
Seriously, a lot of people seem to like the
$200 Fraunhofer encoder over LAME, but for the
music I've encoded, I think it sounds better.
(Fraunhofer's sounded muddy to me)
It all depends on your music... for example,
there's a certain synth used by a certain
group that sounds absolutely horrible under
any of the ISO based encoders I've tried...
yes, even Blade. LAME is the _only_ one that
could reproduce it, except the pricey one
mentioned above. (this is at 128kb/s)
The ones I would recommend trying are:
Fraunhofer (demo, capable of 30-second encodes)
LAME
Blade
8hz
Those are some of the ones I've tried... can't
remember the others (I already deleted them).
Anyways, use cdparanoia to rip a song or two that
you really like (and are _very_ familiar with) and
use each one to encode it. Listen carefully to
each one ( loud!
a difference.
If you decide to use something other than
cdparanoia to rip the CDs, be sure to rip the
same track several times (into different files)
and compare them with "diff". I tried one that
is supposed to be based on cdparanoia, and every
single rip was different! With cdparanoia, you'll
get the same data every time. (YMMV)
Good luck!
Re:How f***ing annoying is this? (Score:1)
Actually, macs can be really nice at times, like when I need a good clean print of a postscript file.
Re:What about bitrate? (Score:1)
Re:Lame, BladeEnc (Score:1)
Comparison of MP3 Encoders by David Bradbury (Score:1)
Check it out:
http://www.raum.com/mpeg/reviews_quality.html [raum.com]
Colin
LAME (Score:1)
I've checked out LAME, and although its not as fast as bladenc - it sounds alot better. Its a nice middle between the quality of l3enc and the speed of bladeenc. Its for this reason that I switched over to LAME.
Also, there are alot of nice console frontends that use LAME. So really, you're only being a zealous fan of bladeenc if you choose to keep using it.
Just my 2c.
AudioCatalyst 2.0 (Score:1)
AudioCatalyst uses Xing to encode. Compared to l3enc with -hq it sounds much better. BladeEnc introduces high pitched ringing artifacts.
On a PPro200 I can simultaneously rip and encode using variable bitrate at about 3.0x normal playback speed. This is CPU limited; I've seen it as high as 10x on a fast celeron.
While I realize these comparisons are pretty qualitative I feel I have some important tools to help me do the job right, such as my pair of Grado SR-125's plugged into a NAD 1300 series preamp.
AudioCatalyst has other important features when it comes to ripping+encoding a number of discs. For example, it can automatically name your mp3 files using info retrieved from CDDB (and gives you a pretty good degree of control over exactly how the names are formatted).
It also provides a variety of different ripping methods, from ASPI to analog, to help ensure that no matter how funky your disc is, you'll still be able to get mp3s out of it.
If you want to call my bluff on this, contact me and I might be able to provide you some 'demo' songs encoded with AC2.0.
mdm
Re:art of encoding (Score:1)
It does error correction when it can (but some
discs are beyond repair). That may help if I'm
correct in my understanding that you get those
errors in the WAV files. Also, I've seen a lot
of variety in CD players for ripping accuracy.
Using bladeenc to convert these WAVs to MP3s,
I don't get discontinuities or errors.
What about mp3 to CD (opposite direction)? (Score:1)
Re:What about mp3 to CD (opposite direction)? (Score:1)
Re:ripper (CDex) (Score:1)
A really good song for testing (Score:2)
Oh yeah, and (Score:2)
Encoders / rippers (Score:2)
Personally, the quality bugged me, and I used a program with the lastest Fraunhofer encoder in it (which does not have the frequency cap on it). There are a number available, but unfortunately they're all windows-based. It was *very* difficult for me to tell the difference between the original source file and the files encoded at 128 with the high quality setting turned on.
Of course, using this setting, Fraunhofer encodes at less than 1x, so it's pretty essential to set up some sort of batched mechanism where you can rip and fill your HD with unencoded wavs and let the encoder chew on them while you're sleeping. Otherwise, you'll be spending a LOT of time in front of the box switching out CD's. Actually, you will anyway, but you can get a lot more rips done in a short amount of time if you're not waiting for the encode.
As far as CD-ROMs go, I can't recommend the ASUS 40x drive more highly- it rips consistently at 5x-10x without a single error that I've heard so far in my 200+ CD collection. There are faster drives out there, but they don't come as cheap- about $50. Well worth the money, especially if you consider how much time you will spend encoding a collection of any size.
Consider Carefully (Score:2)
I encoded a large portion of my collection using Windows, specifically Audiocatalyst. It works really good most of the time. However, it did not work great with all my drives. My HP 8100i CD-R is the best drive I have to rip with. My DVD Drive and older CD-Rs would have too many skips. In going back and listening to my collection, I still run across songs that have blips in them, though this is rare. Audiocatalyst rips and encodes so fast, you don't have time to listen to all the songs prior to burning a CD, so I expected a bit of this. Of course, when you rip under windows, don't expect to be able to use it for anything else, unless you love reading hex on a blue background.
I am currently using Linux to rip and encode, and I have much better results. My CD-R is still the fastest drive to rip with, but I can rip with a 2nd gen DVD, and a 12x CD-R. My 4x4x NEC CdChanger is the only drive I can't rip with. I use CD Paranoia. It is currently for linux only, and has ripped flawlessly for me, even when using BOTH drives (CDR,DVD) to rip on a P200MMX 128 MB RAM. That's a pretty modest machine. I use it to rip, encode, WHILE using netscape, irc, several terminal sessions, and distributed.net. Sure, my load hovers between 3 and 4, but the machine is usable and doesn't crash.
I currently am encoding with bladeenc, which is much slower than the Xing encoder. It is better at higher bitrates - 160 and above - than the Frauenhauffer(sp) encoder. However, I've been using it at 128 because I find that I still get great sound. I haven't tried the Xing encoder under linux, but perhaps I will today.
You will run across many sites that analyze the quality of mp3s encoded at different bitrates by different encoders. The gist of those sites is this: The higher the bitrate, the better the sound. Nothing beats the Fruenhauffer encoder at 128, but most other encoders aren't noticebly different.
My personal experience is this - if you are encoding so your machine can serve up thousands of mp3s to listen in the background as you work, 128 is fine, and choose the encoder you like.
A great X frontend is gRip - which uses cdparanoia and bladeenc and has cddb capabilities built in. It has debs and rpms if you are looking for ease of installation.
email me with any other questions. miracle@procyon.com