best way to encode music

stuey

Ok I like my music. I have a lot of it on my pc which I basically got of a friend(s) some 40,000 songs worth. So I have never really had to encode music and basically if I like a song I download it. But I went to download the Killers Hot Stuff whole album. Haven’t downloaded a whole album in ages. Anywhoo I was amazed that all the copy I downloaded were just crap. I downloaded about 5 albums in total and they were all ****e. WMA seemed over bassy. most of the mp3s were encoded with vbr(variable bit rate) and just sounded bad and the ones that I downloaded that were at 128 kbps cbr(constant bit rate) sounded like they had been encoded from a 96kbps file. And sounded terrible.

I got the original cd anyway and wondering what the best way to encode it is. I normally use nero to encode cds at 128kbps cbr. I have a number of sound systems and I’m very keen on quality. My hi-fi will show up a badly encoded file very easily and I have a very good set of headphones and a good sound card.

I like mp3 for its simplicity and the fact that I have an mp3 player and I don’t want to have to re-encode tracks from lets say ogg to mp3 every time I want to update my mp3 player

What is the best way in your opinion to encode music? What’s the best software? What the best format?

cormie

MP3 Creating Guide:)

NotMe

I use FreeRip (http://www.mgshareware.com/frmmain.shtml) and usually encode to 256kbps MP3.

cormie

I don't mean to argue or anything but I would go with the link I posted. It's what I went with after seeing endless suggestions to go for it. hydrogenaudio(.com or .net or similar) is full of audiophiles. They will tell you to go for lame encoder through EAC. It can also do .ogg. Follow the guide. it takes about 10 mins from step one till you rip a track fully:)

duridian

Audiograbber is what I use mainly. Totally free and easy to use. Also get the Lame encoder or the Blade encoder .dll files from the download page as these are needed for mp3 encoding. Ogg and other formats can also be used with the right plugins.

cormie

I've heard audiograbber does a terrible job compared to EAC. Personally I don't notice the difference with my ears. But EAC is proven to be better and the guys who suggest it are obsessed with this kind of thing. I would still be using audiograbber if I didn't hear so many votes for EAC. I can't tell the difference but I like the way it encodes to VBR and just knowing that I'm getting the best out of my music keeps me happy.

Mutant_Fruit

EAC's advantage over Audiograbber (and all other rippers) is purely in the ripping stage, NOT in the encoding stage. When EAC rips, it reads each sector twice, and if they do not match, it re-reads that sector either 8/16/24 or 32 more times until it gets a good match. Ok, its a bit slower, but much better for scratched cd's. Other rippers will have a "click" or "pop" noise for these "bad" sectors, EAC stops this from happening in all but the worst of cases.

As for actually encoding to mp3, Lame is the best. Find yourself a copy of lame, and set EAC up to encode to it using the "External Compression Options". Quality-wise, VBR is best, and you should use the commandline parameter "--alt-preset standard". Thats generally considared the best quality/size balance.

If you have a good soundsystem you should EASILY be able to tell the difference between CD and mp3@128kbps, i know i can on my cheap 7eur earphones

Any questions on setup, of lame/EAC check the older threads, i ran through it before, (or for stuey: beep me on MSN).

duridian

If you're using Lame codec with either, the end result should be the same as all the rest of the program does is to extract the audio from the cd and get tracknames from a CD database. The variable bitrate stuff which you like is a feature of the Lame codec not EAC. Any program working with Lame can do the same, but fine if EAC floats your boat then use it.

Edit: Just seen Mutant's Fruit's post. It might make a difference with a really scratchy cd but for good discs it should be all the one.

Zaph

I don't know anything about the technicalities, I use EAC with Lame for encoding simply because it's really easy to use and I've been very happy with the results I've got. There's more information about it and you can download both EAC and Lame from here. After that you can make your own mind up.

snappieT

You absolutely cannot beat the freeware CDex (http://www.download.com/CDex/3000-2140_4-10226370.html?tag=lst-0-1)

You can alter a lot of options for mp3 and wma encoding / decoding / recoding

Very Good Indeed

snappieT

Just realised that this thread was posted twice. See the other one here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=213197

Sparky

I use windows Media player 10 to encode my music to WMA 192 kbps and i hardly notice a difference in music when listening on my Hi-Fi.

radiospan

Use LAME for encoding (with either CDex or EAC for ripping)

vibe666

LAME with Audiograbber, or freerip at 160-192kbps depending on what type of music it is.

been downsampling for the 256mb mp3 player, but that's for quantity rather than quality.

managed to get down to 32kbps mono wma and still have listenable music. 200 tracks isn't bad. quality isn't great as i said, but it's okay for walking down the street with traffic in the background. hardly even notice tbh.

Giblet

I would only use lame with -aps. I wouldn't recommend anything lower, and I don't recommend WMA either.

Mutant_Fruit

vibe666 wrote:

managed to get down to 32kbps mono wma and still have listenable music.

32kbps mono gives the same quality as 64kbps stereo wma (except you only have one audio channel which is duplicated ). And that is classified as "cd-quality", but in all fairness, it is generally easy enough to distinguish the difference between 64kbps stereo WMA (or 128kbps stereo mp3) and a cd.

You definately wouldn't want to go that low if you're archiving your music, but if its for a portable with limited capacity, feel free.

Civilian_Target

I use OGG and Exact Audio Copy, it delivers perfect rips. See here on how to do it:

http://www.ogghelp.com/ogg/articles.cfm?AID=2

stuey

ok there is a lot to go through here. Im about to give EAC with lame a shot first cause mopst people seem to be backing that option. I think i will try a good few of ur suggestions tho and come to my on conclusions and see what suits me best. but EAC does seem to be the way forward

nadir

im an ogg fanboy too, awesome quality

voxpop

ogg is ok - oss and all but generally ogg = good quality at low kps. There are some mods to make it work better at higher kps but generally if your encoding at 160/192 or higher ogg isnt the best, plus on my iriver ogg sometimes sounds dodgy. I would echo the posts about eac and lame. with lame try --alt-preset standard or at least 160 vbr. This should give you something extremely close to the original cd version unless you have v good ears and a v good system.

If space is not a problem there is always the lossless path (monkey audio, i think was one or FLAC)- you lose none of the sound quality and get something smaller than a wav but usually its not worth it plus not alot of portable mp3 players support this.

nadir

Angry_Penguin wrote:

ogg is ok - oss and all but generally ogg = good quality at low kps. There are some mods to make it work better at higher kps but generally if your encoding at 160/192 or higher ogg isnt the best.

how do you justify this ?
i find

oggenc infile.wav -m 128 -a 192  out.ogg

works quite well when im ripping cds.

Mutant_Fruit

The best lossless codec is MPC, and it becomes transparent (i.e. perfect quality, no audible loss) at a bitrate of around 230kbps or so. But that has no hardware support, and is unlikely to ever get hardware support.

Ogg is good, definately among the top 3, and at low bitrates (from 4kbps stereo to about 112kbps stereo) it has no equal, it is the best. But at higher bitrates mp3 and mpc generally are better, if you use the standard build of ogg.

There are other builds of ogg specifically tuned for higher quality, i think they're teh "AuTov" builds, or something like that. They provide much better quality at quality-5 and better, and are recommended over standard build.

EDIT: This is what i remember from my browsing in hydrogen-audio.

Khannie

So, I have to say, you'd want to have pretty sensetive ears to notice the difference in quality between, say, ogg at 192kbps and mp3 at the same (anyone care to comment on that? I have heard that there are "codec killers": songs that sound terrible with one type of codec.)

I use cdex to rip to wav, then oggdrop (standard vorbis.org tool) to compress to ogg at 192kbps and 48KHz and the quality is great with good compression. I must admit that I haven't looked into lame.

File size was an issue for me with lossless codecs.

Giblet

Using lame with aps or even ape is the way to go. File sizes are decent enough.

Everyone should definatly get lame and a gui for it and try aps (alt preset standard)

Mutant_Fruit

I use cdex to rip to wav, then oggdrop (standard vorbis.org tool) to compress to ogg at 192kbps and 48KHz and the quality is great with good compression

Just out of interest, why are you re-encoding to 48kHz? You do realise that music is encoded at 44.1kHZ, and you reencoding it to 48kHz will not increase the quality one bit, just the filesize...