Anybody out there have experience with the Rhapsody website. It allows for the legal downloading of songs, at a cost, by letting the user burn them onto a CD, not to the hard drive. I would like to know if if after burning the tunes to a cd, can they in fact be converted into mp3's and uploaded to the Empeg?

Thanks

Ed

Not tried it personally but there shouldn't be any problems with ripping the tracks and then encoding them.
In theory they could make you use a special CD burner application which applied copy protection stuff onto the CD but that's highly unreliable and most burners wouldn't be able to recreate it.
Quality of the music will probably suffer as you're downloading an encoded version, decompressing it and burning into CD and then ripping it again and encoding...

...actually i did download/burn one song....played fine on my car cd player...but won't play via Winamp or WMP...also, tried to encode it but didn't work.....hoping somebody had already done it.....

Weird. It is possible to do TOC and corrupt data tricks but I didn't think all burners supported them.
What happens when you put the CD into your computer? Does it get recognised or does it have funky times?

If you're not worried about the quality loss issue, it's easy enough to download music from www.buymusic.com, burn it to CD with the windows media player, and then rip it back to your hard drive. Don't know how much Rhapsody costs though. Most of the music on buymusic is $.99.

There's always AllOfMP3.com. No idea how legal it in the US though.

Rhapsody is $9.99 per month...which give u access to their entire music data base to listen to...then 79 cents a song to burn......

i cannot seem to play songs i burned on my pc...but works fine on my sony HU in the car......

in fact...when ripping from cd in WMP there are no tags...just a bunch of boxes!!!!!....after trying to rip it the PC just spits the disc out....

plays fine and sound is great in car though

I have actually spend a lot of time playing around with Rhaposdy. I have had an account for a few months now, and i'm very happy with it. The way it works is that it streams the audio to your computer, allowing you to play it... it caches the stream to a encrypted file on your hard drive, allowing you to come back and play the same song agin without having to download stream it again.

I got a promo deal through real.com or where I could get 2 weeks for free, then it was $4.95 for the first 3 months, then $9.99 for the months after that, with $0.79 downloads. I think it’s a great deal, I have a fast connection and the music never skips, and always starts playing within a 1 to 3 seconds of clicking the play button. I’m impressed with the concept. I just wish you could download the actual wma file.

Getting the tracks to your empeg is hard if you care a lot about sound quality. You see, when you burn a CD, you are not buring a bit for bit copy of the CD that you get in the store. You are burning the compressed streams used to play the tracks. the streams are in the latest media player format, and in my opinion, sounds a LOT better then mp3. There is no “woshing” sounds that you sometimes get with mp3, and it sounds much cleaner, a noticeable difference in my opinion.

The problem is that now you have a compressed file, windows media, and then you burn it to CD, you have to then re-encode that file into mp3 to play on the empeg. I can tell that there was a re-encoding process done to the file because its really like encoding and mp3 that was already encoded.

The only way to get around this, would be to somehow grab the bit stream of the data coming over the network, into your computer, and save that directly as a wmf file. That would give you best sound quality. But you can't. They wont let you download the files like that (yet). So you have to burn the CD and RE ENCODE to mp3. Its not BAD, in fact, its pretty good, but its a step below where my ears would like to be. The only improvement i can see, is downloading the files directly as wmf and putting thoes directly on your empeg.

I've also played the streams from my digital sound card into my DAT recorder, and the playback is amazing. It sounds really good... because i'm using a professional sound card, that gives me direct WAVE output SPDIF right to the DAT. There is no extra noise that you get in the sound, like you would with a sound blaster using digital out. (sound blasters are not truly bit for bit digital out, they have a mixer that will allow you to change the volume of the digital out, but that's not the true signal, you can get a lot of distortion from that, esp if you turn the gain up and get digital clipping). Just because your card says, Digital SPDIF, that just means there is a SPDIF “connector” on the back of the card, you don’t know where that signal is coming from… in MOST cases, I’ve found, unless you’re using a professional sound card, like the ones found in a recording studio, for recording to pro tools or something, you will be getting a noisy feed from a virtual mixer in your software, and not a true wave output from the audio program. Anyway, like I was saying, If i wanted to, i could play the DAT back into the computer and record to WAVE files directly from the DAT, bit for bit, with this pro digital board. (its the Gina Card 20 bit by Echo Audio) but that's a pain in the butt, you have to go through a lot of steps to get the finished wave or mp3, plus you dont always know where to cut the tracks, esp listening to a live album.

So for now, I just burn the CD and rip to mp3, and i live with that. I wish they would let you download the wmf, so i can put that file directly onto the empeg. It would sound better then re-encoding back to mp3 again.

By the way, does anyone know how to extract the wm file from the temp file that is stored on your computer? I would be willing to pay the 79 cents if I could download that file, instead of burning a CD. I don’t even play CDs anymore.

I love talking about this stuff, so dont hesitate to ask me stuff about it.

Does anyone have any experience with this (AllofMP3) site? It looks far too good to be true. However, as I understand copyright law in the former USSR, it may be perfectly legal there (equivalent to radio station license).

I signed up for an account, just to try it out. I figured if I deposit a few bucks via paypal and DL an album or two I could judge quality.

Read the (poorly translated) FAQ and tell me what you all think.

My biggest concern would be that when they are doing their "online encodes" what are they encoding FROM? Did they rip the actual albums to WAV and store those? Or do these guys just have a big library of MP3's they downloaded from Kazaa that they re-encode (YUK).

I guess one way to tell is to try it out...

Honestly, I think their model is the ONLY one that will work in the real world. Have the songs the way YOU want them (format, bitrate) and pay by the size. I'm sure such a venture in the US would cost far more, as the RIAA and publishing companies would want something grotesque per song.

IMHO $.99 per song is highway robbery. For 320Kbs MP3 I'd consider paying an average of maybe $.10-.25 per song. I know this is a whole other philosophical debate, but there is NO WAY I will bother paying for an online service unless I can do what I please with the file. That means saving it, using it on my portable devices, or buring a CD from it, or moving it to a new PC.

Anyway, anyone have opinions about allofmp3?

I had the same idea really. I did a paypal account with a few $ and figured that if it did disappear then I wouldn't have lost much and that they wouldn't have any credit card details anyway.

I've used it a few times and it seems to be okay for me. They don't usually have the latest stuff but all of the stuff that's been out a while is usually there. The ones I've bought haven't had any problems with ripping or encoding.

Some of the files on the site are ripped by the users. They insist that you rip at 320kbps and then upload the files. So you are getting reencoding but it shouldn't be that many artifacts. I've not idea what they're doing now as they've added more features to the reencoding so you can go above 320kbps.

Yeah... Now that I read further into it, it does look pretty fishy. It seems they get their "Stock" from member's uploads. They request you rip using EAC and encode to 320kbs. They offer nothing more than that. No mention of required encoder, proper settings, etc. Maybe if they offered a pre'configured ripper/encoder I'd believe their quality was what they claim.

How they can claim to offer 380kbs when they are operating from 320kbs source boggles my mind. I know why, they charge by the kilobit... Makes them more money, and most ppl are silly enough to not understand. I suppose if all their songs really are ripped and encoded at 320kbs/lame it would be a good deal. Problem is, I can see that it's easy to go out to Kazaa, download some album they want (from many different ppl) upload it, and they give you credit. Now that album is sold as if it was all virgin encoded. NOT.

I'd certainly have far more respect/belief in this if they asked your to upload WAV or FLAC or something lossless (even if they credited you 1/10th as much). Then at least I know theironline encodes are not just re-encodes.

Seems like if you are gonna use this, you'd want to always dl 320kbs mp3, so that at least you are getting what they started with. If you wanna re-encode do it yourself. (Only reason I can think of to do that would be to use on a flash player)

Anyone else check it out? I'm gonna take a dive in and dl an album or two for a couple bucks to check it out. If it IS decent quality it is a better alternative to Kazaa etc. However it still seems slimy to me. God, I wish the US record companies/RIAA would get their heads out of their asses and simply COPY this site, using high-quality source material. I think they would quickly realize that people will PAY for what is basically a store-front Napster. Just not $.99 for a song they can't use how they want to.

_jeff

I tried to rip the cd using Windows Media Player but it just spit the disc out!!

How did u manage to rip it to MP3? what encoder did u use?

..actually th eone song i did burn..a Dylan tune...sounded great in my car..i have the Sony cd receiver running into the aux of the Rio....it was not a very demanding song musically, but was very clean with no artifacts....

btw...did anybody notice when doing an A/B test (cd vs Rio) that the CD's sound better...even when playing the same song (i.e. cd burned with the mp3's on the rio??)

Thanks,,


Ed

Copy the disc following our rules (give full information about the album; to encode .wav files in .mp3, use bitrate 384 kbit/sec; scan the disc cover, if possible)

They do tell you to use 384kbps for encoding now but their older stuff would still be at 320kbps. I don't think their entire catalogue is user provided so they may be ripping some of them at a higher bitrate.

I use AudioCatalyst 2.1 (old program, from a few years ago). once the files are on CD, they can be riped. I dont see why there would be any copy protection or anything that would make it spit it out.

Oh man. You don't use the built in Xing encoder do you? It's been proven to be terrible for encoding as it just chops off all high frequencies.

The ripper is okay if you don't mind it being a perfect rip and want something fast. EAC is much better but usually slower.

It's been proven to be terrible for encoding as it just chops off all high frequencies.


Ummm... proven by whom?

I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that this was an urban legend, spread by people who didn't set the proper parameters when encoding. (See the .jpg file attached to this post.)

Admittedly I am a big fish in a small pond here in Alaska, not a lot of basis for comparison, but the great majority of people who have heard music played in my car (all encoded with the Xing encoder in Audio Catalyst) have said unreservedly it was the best they had ever heard. In particular, about 80% of them, with no prompting from me, use the word "clear" or "clean" within the first 40-60 seconds of listening. This would suggest that my high frequencies are coming through intact.

It's possible I may be suffereing from delusions of grandeur about the quality of my stereo, and if there is credible information demonstrating poor sound quality from AudioCatalyst/Xing when properly configured, I would seriously consider re-encoding my music. (I would not re-encode to get rid of the occasional artifact, but a sweeping improvement in frequency response and overall sound presence might be persuasive.)

tanstaafl.

Umm. Attachment too big

Umm. Attachment too big


No, it's only 41K or thereabouts. But when I tried to re-save the post with the attachment, the progress bar went very slowly, eventually timing out to a "Server Not Found" error.

I'll edit the post and try it again.

tanstaafl.

edit:

Aargh... I can't figure out how to go back and try to re-save that post with the attachment. Doesn't matter -- it was just a picture of the Audio Catalyst advanced options screen with a crudely drawn red arrow pointing to the "High Frequency Mode" check box.

db

From I remember it used to be on the r3mix site but that's since been taken over by a domain squatter.

There's a big comparison page here though. The results for AudioCatalyst 1.5 and 2.0 (non VBR) are missing for some reason but 2.0 VBR is still there.

General consensus is that 1.5 sucked and 2.x was a lot better but still had a couple of minor issues.

General consensus is that 1.5 sucked and 2.x was a lot better but still had a couple of minor issues.


That makes me feel better... I am using AudioCatalyst/Xing 2.1 and have been happy with it. Sound quality is (to my ears, at least) quite good, and it is so simple to operate that even I can figure out how to do it.

Hey, I know -- I'll try and attach that picture to this post and see if I can break it again.

tanstaafl.

Yeah. Works now I've been having occasional trouble with the BBS recently. I get SQL errors every so often which disappear when I try it again.

Sorry, I should have been more specific about my Xing comment earlier. I did actually have AudioCatalyst 1.5 but changed to EAC + LAME after a while.

I get SQL errors every so often which disappear when I try it again.

If you get these, send me a copy. It would help with the new server tweaking.

General consensus is that 1.5 sucked and 2.x was a lot better but still had a couple of minor issues.

Right, exactly. Most of the complaints leveled at Xing were for the older version which didn't have the high-frequency mode and which was too harsh about its high frequency filter.

For what it's worth, there's a good reason that encoders filter the highest frequencies. Because it's better to gently filter the highest inaudible frequencies and spend the encoding bits where they can do the most good.

Only when you're throwing lots of bitrate at a file can you expect to properly get away with trying to encode the highest frequencies, too.

Any sound you can hear coming out of your computer is being converted from digital to analog before it reaches the speakers. There is going to be an audio device driver of some kind that is receiving that digital stream, UN-ENCRYPTED, for it to work. Any such data can be intercepted and a copy saved to the hard drive as a WAVE file.

A program, for which I cannot remember the name, that does this very thing, has been discussed here a number of times. Just search around. It can also be used to save streaming internet radio audio. Pretty much anything that is going to produce a sound.

If someone is looking for a similar tool for their Macintosh, Rogue Amoeba make a program called Audio Hijack (www.rogueamoeba.com). There is also at least one other program that can save streaming content from iTunes to a file.

Bruno

Oh! I think it's called Total Recorder. Don't have time to check right now though.

Yes. Total Recorder.

A program, for which I cannot remember the name, that does this very thing, has been discussed here a number of times.

Total Recorder.

Ah, grasshopper, you have snatched the pebble from my hand. Boo-yeah, par-tay!