Am thinking of embarcking on a major rerip of my CDs to a higher quality and wonder what Itunes is like and if crappy should i either get something better for a mac or go and use the desktop which is windows 2000

Desktop is probably a better idea since it has more space but am growing very fond of these macs

iTunes encoder isn't bad as long as you go into the custom settings and select a higher quality than the defaults (I was happy with the VBR "High" setting). Also, if you are worried about its encoder you can get it to use lame instead.

I always worried about the ripping component though. It doesn't seem to encorporate any of the error detection/correction that you get with cdparanoia (or that windows secure ripping program the name of which I can't think of at the moment). Anyway, I have used iTunes occasionally for convenience but most of the time I use cdparanoia and lame on my FreeBSD box for the extra piece of mind.

-Mike

I think you are refering to Exact Audio Copy.

That's cool that i-Tunes allows the LAME encoder however!

You should use the desktop for the simple reason that a new CD drive for it is cheap, and new one for the laptop is expensive. EAC on a PC at least can spend hours trying to get it right, putting a significant amount of wear on a drive for a scractched CD.

Matthew

When I do mine again I will probably rip to flac, store the flac files on my computer and convert to mp3 from those. Then if I ever want to change the format again I don't have to re-rip all the cd's again.

I've been using iTunes with VBR high and I'm reasonably happy with the quality. It's good enough that I don't hear any of the usual artifacts that can be really annoying (cymbals seem to get mauled by bad MP3 encoders). I tried the setup to use lame (you need some 3rd party scripts) and it does work, but it's an order of magnitude slower than the builtin encoder, where Apple has clearly done serious performance tuning.

Reripping sounds intriguing, but it's just not a high priority item right now. I still have hundreds of older CDs that I haven't ripped for the first time...

Don't know about flac i think 3.0 plays flac but another train of thought is that the empeg plays MP3s and i don't see the empeg being beaten for a long time it still wipes the floor with anything i have seen so far. So Mp3 is possibly the way to go.

But on the other hand i could probably upgrade my empeg to hold all my cds in Flac (maybe) dependant on its compression level.

Is there any pointers on using Flac with the cd paranoia ripper as i am not a techy type person like most of those on the board but more knowledge than average joe mainly due to this board too.

The idea behind useing flac is not to play them on your empeg at the moment. If you use flac now, there is never going to be a need to rerip your CDs again, as the copy on your PC will be the exact digital information on the CD (assuming a good rip). You can then encode them all to mp3 now, but when you want to change encoding formats you just reencode everything from the flac files.

Matthew

Okay am going down a rerip slow and steady

Decided on going for EAC then into flac and MP3 via lame

now i have discover this MAREO http://mareo.netfirms.com/ but can i get it working not a chance this scripting stuff is beyond my experience

Now i have EAC,FLAC and Lame in the same directory on the C drive

I would like to get it so that produced files are set out as follows

On the F drive inside a directroy called Newrip then inside that two directorys Flac and MP3 Then inside those directorys have everything set out Artist/CDtitle/trackno - track_title - artist - genre - year

flac compression i would want to be the norm and Mp3 compression to be about 256 Cbr or maybe 356 Cbr

Hopefully that should be enough for you guys to show us what i need to put down with an explanation as well so i can start to understand this stuff.

Not that i ain't smart enough just not enough experience got to remember i work with oil spinny things and most of this BBS is computing guys.

An alternative however would be to compress everything to FLAC and then convert to MP3 but is there anything out there that does it in one fell swope.

Thanks

Help

Bump

Sorry

Paul,
I believe that MP3 Tag Studio will do what you want with the 'Auto Rename (from tags)' tab. It would look (something) like this: <Artist><\><Album><\><Track> - <Title> - <Artist> - <Genre> - <year>.mp3 . You'll have to move the .mp3's to the proper location on the F drive first tho.

If you've used EAC to only rip to .WAV then you'll need all this info saved in the file name - no tags in .WAV files. If you've set EAC to spawn LAME processes to turn your .WAV files into .mp3 files (and perhaps delete the .wav files automatically), you need to be sure the tag info has gone into the .mp3's. If it hasn't (but is in the file name) then Tag Studio can pull this info into the tags (with the 'Autotag (from filenames)' tab) and you can then do the rename procedure I described.

As for FLAC, I haven't done anything whatsoever w/FLAC's so I'm afraid I'm of no use on that front. Anyone?

Hope this helps some.

-Zeke

I always worried about the ripping component though. It doesn't seem to encorporate any of the error detection/correction that you get with cdparanoia

Upgrade to the just released iTunes 4.1 (Windows or Mac), and check the importing settings again. It now had error detection.