Following up on the ripping issue (i.e., extracting the digital bits from the CD), I'm going to have to go back and start over because I've been noticing ripping artifacts from my setup. I'm using Linux, grip (with built-in cdparanoia), and lame. The problem, after hours of experimentation, turns out to be my CD-ROM drive, a no-name "40X" drive. No matter how you tweak the cdparanoia options, it's really impossible to get a truly perfect rip. From one particularly scratched CD I have, the rips were comically bad. (It was techno music, so for a while I thought maybe it was just a strange remix...)

My current plan (once my EMPEG shows up) is to go out and buy...

- a Plextor PlexWriter (available SCSI or ATAPI -- the new ATAPI one is $305 at CDW)
- an IBM 75GB drive (enough space to eventually rip all 1000 of my CDs, $620 at CDW)

Some people I've talked to seem to think that SCSI is better than ATAPI, but I have yet to hear anything definitive. However, there seems to be a consensus that the Plextor drives are the ones to get. You can safely turn off all the "paranoia" features and count on getting the bits right every time (or so I'm told).

I've also played with various setting of Lame for encoding the same tracks over and over. 128kb/sec is an absolute minimum. Below that, all kinds of things start sounding funky if you listen closely enough. Above that, it's harder to say. With my weak sound card, and expensive Grado Labs headphones, I can't tell the difference between original WAV files and MP3s coded above 128kb/sec. Part of why I can't wait to get my EMPEG is to see for myself just exactly what settings on Lame give the best quality.


Why not go out and buy all this hardware today? Every month I wait, the hardware gets cheaper and/or faster. And, until I have the EMPEG, I won't really know what encoder settings I want to use. I want to rip my music once and be done with it.

Dan