what codecs do you encode your audios in? at what bitrate?

CyberGhost

hey!

I have couple of cds to rip,

so I was wondering what codec/bitrate do I encode my music in?

what do you use at what bitrates? why do you use it?

I'm thinking of going either with MP3(Can't decide with method ABR,CBR or VBR - but IMO will go with VBR) or OGG(Quality - 8)

Khannie

I use ogg, quality 6 (192Kbps). It's great stuff. The only downside is if you intend listening to your music on a portable device....ogg support is sparse.

I use cdex to rip and oggdrop to encode (You can rip and encode with cdex, but one time when I did that, the quality came out a bit bogey).

http://www.vorbis.com/
and
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

Lump

I use Cdex, its free and easy to use, I encode in Variable Bit rate, ie when not alot of musical stuff is happening it lowers the bitrate, Highest quality to file size ratio.


John

Sherifu

I use cdex, nice little program.
I normally encode at 64k
If its a band i really like i would encode at 128 or higher.

RKM.

neGev

Does 64k not sound awful?
Or even 128k for that matter.

Minimum I would use is 160 but generally I'd go with VBR

Sherifu

neGev wrote:

Does 64k not sound awful?
Or even 128k for that matter.

In a word: no.

Stark

I use OGG Vorbis. There's a 1.1 version of it which offers even higher quality (especially at low bitrates) at http://rarewares.org/ogg.html . For listening on my portable MP3 player I find even 64kpbs sounds fine, though obviously if you're archiving CDs so you can burn them back later, you should choose higher.

Lump

128 is CD quality, why would anyone encode lower then that?


John

neGev

I'm not 100% sure here, but I think CD quality is either 160 or 192.
Using speakers, 64k sounds woeful to my delicate aural anatomy.

pickarooney

Bad ears? I've fairly dodgy hearing and can't tell the difference between 64 and 196kbps

chump

64k doesn't sound that bad... but minimum I'd do is 128k

Sites like allmp3 call 192(or is it 256) cd-quality

but back in the good old days 128k was regarded as cd quality...
I think you'd need some seriously quality sound gear to notice any quality above 128... altho I'll probably be told otherwise

Sherifu

Lump wrote:

128 is CD quality, why would anyone encode lower then that?
John

Because they choose to.

neGev

Not taking the piss here, but are you guys using speakers ?

Khannie

Lump wrote:

128 is CD quality, why would anyone encode lower then that?


John

People might encode lower than that to get a smaller file size (for their mp3 player that only has 128MB of memory or whatever).

Personally, I'd never go below 128. I can definitely notice the difference. Especially on songs with a lot of bass.

I listen to most of my music on a quality pair of headphones. It's easier to notice quality difference with decent headphones v's speakers IMO.

Oh, 128Kbps defo is cd quality like you said. (someone else suggested 160). The thing is that most sound compression algorithms are "lossy". That means that even at 128Kbps, they're losing some sound quality. Ogg claims to lose less sound quality at 128Kbps than MP3, but I don't think that I could tell the difference.

Lump

Ok I actually know the reasons! It was a comment, as in why would some one vote for Bush. Anyway I don't think you'd notice the difference between 128 and 192, unless you had a pair of £8000 speakers like they use in studios.

John

ZENER

I don't think any self respecting audiophile would insult his €8000 speakers or amp by using a compressed format on them !!

That said my iPod prefers MP3 at 160Kbps - I've tried OGG and am impressed with it but the pod doesn't support it yeat so . .

ZEN

Zombienosh

192

Khannie

Lump wrote:

Ok I actually know the reasons! It was a comment, as in why would some one vote for Bush. Anyway I don't think you'd notice the difference between 128 and 192, unless you had a pair of £8000 speakers like they use in studios.

John

Hahaha. Ok. Fair enough. Hard to get tone from text.

You're probably right on the 128 V's 192 for most people. I think I'd be really hard pushed to notice the difference and my hearing is excellent. I do it to try to preserve the original as closely as possible, without knowing if I'm benefiting. Space isn't an issue for me. My music collection only takes around 10% of my drive.

Stark

In a study done a few years back, 256kpbs MP3 was found to be CD quality even to the snobbiest of fussy **** with the most expensive hardware so people who claim to only be satisfied with 320kpbs or whatever are just dickheads and might even be listening to reencodes of lower bitrate songs (I find those a lot on the file sharing networks so I avoid anything with a 320kpbs bitrate). Of course, MP3 encoders have had signifigant advancement since then what with VBR and joint stereo and vastly improved psychoacoustic models so I reckon 160kpbs ABR should offer CD quality to anyone's ears these days (preferably use VBR but you won't be able to choose your exact output bitrate).

Of course Vorbis is better than MP3 still but there's been no agreement on what's CD quality thanks to audiophiles who actually encode Vorbis at rediculous bitrates like 450kpbs !!!! (go use a lossless compressor like FLAC you snobs). Current Vorbis tunings anyway are biased towards lower bitrates (<160kpbs) and especially so now with version 1.1 (which makes sense as 160kpbs should easily be CD quality with Vorbis) so if you're encoding at high bitrates and want the best quality for your bits then you should use a high bitrate tuned version like GT3b1.

Edit: By the way, even with modern MP3 encoders like the fantastic LAME, I still notice the sounds a bit off when I encode using 128kpbs and CBR(constant bitrate, the default). The songs sound fine when using 128kpbs ABR though.

LAME also comes with a setting --alt-preset standard (--preset standard in very new versions) which configures LAME with loads of settings chosen by experts to give you fanastic sounding songs at reasonable bitrate.

Mec-a-nic

I don't pick a bitrate, I let my encoder do it!
When I started noticing strange noises on quiet parts (start of Pink Floyd tracks, etc) I switched encoder to:
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with a lame plugin. (It's free and HQ. Info: http://www.chrismyden.com/DAE/ )</a>
Filesizes are equivilent to 192kb encoding, but with HDs & players getting cheaper and bigger all the times, no point in saving space...

sceptre

mp3, always using lame & VBR, usually preset standard, sometimes extreme.

Korg

lame's "--preset standard" is good enough for me though i use "--preset extreme" just for the sake of overkill as i don't have a colossal amount of mp3's. Once it's 192VBR+ i cant really tell the difference.

One way you can try it for yourself is say to download a sample like this & convert it to varying bitrates (convert the flac to a wav if you have to) & listen to bits of it of a time, switching between the uncompressed original & the compressed version. E.g., if you use lame on this with no parameters (i tried with lame 3.93.1 just now) initially you may not notice anything, but then if you listen to where the singer sings "for this" a second or 2 in you'll notice his voice is different. Then you'll notice that imperfection anywhere he sings. Try it with the higher bitrates, use the --presets & the imperfection disappears. Try it at 64 & the sample just sounds crap.

You may need headphones to notice some of these artifacts. There's a few sites out there that point out these artifacts, & once pointed out you can hear them all over the place at low bitrates.

Edit: Just occurred to me to try a more recent version of lame, it's default mode appears a little better now, point still stands tho!, try it yourself on bits of your tracks.

Creamy Goodness

use EAC with LAME encoder

encode all cd's at 192kbps no more no less

M@lice

I use EAC and rip to OGG at quality 7.

pickarooney

We were all grand and happy with our tapes until they started telling us what was wrong with them so we had to buy CDs.

sceptre

pickarooney wrote:

We were all grand and happy with our tapes until they started telling us what was wrong with them so we had to buy CDs.

I always hated tapes for the same main reason I hate videotape - lack of fast proper random access. The quality, while not totally insignificant came a very distant second for me. For most people you'd be right though.

"Buy CDs, they're better! And they last FOREVER (quick blob of jam and a screwdriver (or just too much sunshine) will toss that argument out the window). No really - in a few years you won't be able to play your old elpees. Buy CDs or the cute little puppy gets it"

Mr E

I use LAME, and rip to 192kbps (for desktop and car MP3 player).
I use DBPowerAmp to convert favourite tracks to 96kbps WMA for my portable MP3 player.

Ste-

sceptre wrote:

"Buy CDs, they're better! And they last FOREVER (quick blob of jam and a screwdriver (or just too much sunshine) will toss that argument out the window). No really - in a few years you won't be able to play your old elpees. Buy CDs or the cute little puppy gets it"

Everybody knows the ware and tear of CD's and how easily they are scratched and broken.
LP's will go out as they are too heavy and bulky.
And it's only a matter of time before CD's are made redundant. I remember a while back reading they already have something that is newer and better* than CD's. When or if it will go ahead is a different matter.
It's the age old technology basis. Things get old and out of fashion and something new and better* comes along.

*Is it really better if you have to spend loads of money on getting the new remastered or whatever version of your old albums.

What if I don't like puppies ?

CyberGhost

Thanks for the all feedback guys!

ok so do I go with MP3 VBR alt-preset-standard or OGG 6 or 8?

I tried Robbie williams' radio with extreme and insane but couldn't tell the difference! I have pretty good audio, Grado SR225 and Echo Indigo!

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Bri

Don't see why you'd record @ 128 if you could push it a bit higher and have VBR for those bits that need it most. I think going over 192 is a bit of a joke IMO. I find anything at 192 is generally well ripped and 128 can often be discernibly worse - i.e. it's ripped with minimum care and probably aimed at file-sharing networks.

Exact Audio Copy is a great program...and can really help with older CDs with a bit of damage!

ZENER

I always hated tapes for the same main reason I hate videotape - lack of fast proper random access. The quality, while not totally insignificant came a very distant second for me. For most people you'd be right though.

We were all grand and happy with our tapes until they started telling us what was wrong with them so we had to buy CDs.

The irony is that in our quest to improve audio quality we have gone backwards in a search for convenience. We spent time and money inventing better methods of recording sound only to undo it with digital recording and then totally destroy it with compression! Let's get something straight here the only CD quality format is CD! The compression formats you are discussing here are LOSSY methods of making the file size smaller for convenience. Once something is lost in a lossy compression scheme there is no way to get it back. The correct term to use would be NEAR CD quality but even that is a stretch.

Don't get me wrong, I too welcome these formats and the devices they have spawned in the name of convenience but it has to be remembered that in the long run we are losing out !

In my opinion MP3 is fine for what it was invented for originally and for broadcast quality audio on the move from players that make use of the high compression rates to squeeze more music into smaller spaces.

Future technological advances may well come up with the perfect loss-less compression codec but until then I won't be ditching my Vinyl and CD's in favor of MP3 or OGG or the likes.

By the way this site does a good job of explaing the way music is compressed and ways of applying loss-less compression.

This one explains how it's done.

ZEN

Inspector Gadget

Hmm...

If no-one minds me throwing my tuppence ha'penny into the ring, I tend to use MP3 (by virtue of the fact that it's as universally supported as compressed digital audio gets)

My preferred tool to rip is EAC, in secure mode. I'd guesstimate the average bitrate I get off my rips at about 210. I used to use iTunes (on my Mac) to rip, but I've developed an avid distrust of its CD extraction/MP3 encoder engine as I've discovered too many sync errors in tracks ripped by it (yes, I have Error Correction turned on, and yes, I've tried more than one drive - six, all different models, by my count).

To compress these files, I use with LAME with --alt-preset extreme; when I used iTunes, it was set to 192VBR Highest Quality. I find Joint Stereo good enough in both cases.

Personally, I have a collection of MP3s for two reasons:

1) CDs get destroyed gradually through excessive use, and anyway they're relatively bulky to carry around in the absence of a car or similar self-propelled storage
2) I listen to music at work, often through headphones. I just want to whack a big jukebox on random play and let it off.

Having said what I did in the second point above, I'm reasonably snobby when it comes to my sound. A good friend of mine was kind enough to loan me some Bose QuietComfort II noise-cancelling headphones (which are suctioned to my lugholes as I type), and while they're not the best sound reproduction I've heard, they drown out the 15 or so PCs in this room a treat, while still sounding very good - good enough that I can tell the (rare) 128's from the 192+'s without too much difficulty - quite a treat in this kind of noisy environment, and reminds me how good what I've ripped actually does sounds compared to what some people term "CD Quality".

I have to agree with Zener's assessment; to my mind, the best recorded fidelity you can hope to achieve (as a home user) is probably pristine vinyl, considering the fact that analogue recording has a theoretically infinite frequency response (I'd be interested to see what difference a laser pickup makes here, and whether it's still fully analogue). What we get on CDs has a theoretical frequency response that tops out at 22050Hz, but the truth is that as you creep closer to that limit, the fidelity of reproduction of the original sampled waveform goes decidedly downhill. Okay, we've got SACD; that roughly doubles the sampling rate, and it sounds fantastic, assuming the guys mixing it don't make a complete haims of it (Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" on SACD is criminal, for example), but the range of audio available on SACD is a pale shadow of that available on regular CDs, and it's looking like it'll be superseded by DVD audio anyway (you can read about this stuff here, for example), further diluting the pool of available discs.

However, the truth of the matter is that most of us (much though we'd love to be able to) can't afford high-end audio gear. More than that, however, the "iPod revolution" proves what many of us have suspected for a long time: most people can't tell the difference, just don't listen as we should, or don't even appreciate or realise that digital audio formats such as MP3, AAC, etc. are lossy (or that there are settings that can be adjusted!)

Just goes to show that everyone's different...
Gadget

soiaf

I rip/store all my CDs in FLAC, for music to my portable (iriver) I tend to go with 192kbit mp3, using LAME.