I just ordered an Empeg player and am pretty excited about it. I'm new to the world of MP3 Files and have a few questions. I apologize if some of these have been asked and answered previously, if so just send me the pertinent link to a faq, or earlier message thread.

1) What are some reccomendations for software to use for ripping CD's and converting them to MP3 files? Is some software faster than others? I don't really feel like spending days sitting in front of my computer ripping CD's.

2) Any suggestions on setting up the directory structure and organizing the files. In other words, what have been some common errors that have been made or if you had to do it all over again what would you do differently?

3) I know that there are different compression rates for the MP3 file format that result in different levels of quality. What is the best rate to use for the best size vs quality compromise? What is most commonly used?

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

Bam!

I will stick my neck out and say that music match is not too bad i does for me If you want a better quality one you can play with different ones later Music match is quite fast and does most things for you.

Set it up properly first

I have it one 160Kbps and i have the way it set up to record tracks with track number and track name ticked in the tracks directory panal in the recorder options.

One tip that isn't well advertised is you can drag and drop entire directorys into emplode.

Essential addtional software is Tonys logo editor if only for it's kernal upload facility, Hijack for it,s wonderful little features and display server 1.1 once you feel a bit braver

One more thing it takes a minnum of a month before you realise most of the features of the empeg.

One more thing welcome to the best place to learn about empegs as this is where alot of very knowledgeable people post as well as empeg people like altman (hugo bloke that started it all rolling) Rob (rob organiser of things) Roger (software empeg bloke and many others)

Ask you what you want here someone will always help or trail off to talk about something entirly different.

I was new to the thing too up until about a month ago.

I use AudioGrabber (15 quid to license it) and VBR 1 setting. This works very well for me. You can also use different settings for the CD Ripping which will slow it down to get a better read.

Directory Structures ...
Some Genre with Artists within .... and some Albums within that.
Some Era
Some my GF likes ...

I'm still getting used to the thing, and operating in the car is different to at home, so live with it for a while ...
So

Bam!

Heh, was that our first Emeril reference on the BBS?

Incidentally, for the newbie (in case you don't recognize the formatting), the word "Bam" in that post was actually a link to the FAQ. Click on the bold-orange words, they are links.

And congratulations, welcome to the club.

1) What are some reccomendations for software to use for ripping CD's and converting them to MP3 files? Is some software faster than others? I don't really feel like spending days sitting in front of my computer ripping CD's

If there is any way you can adjust your viewpoint on this, you will be much happier in the long run. I know, the temptation is absolutely overwhelming to get the music ripped and encoded and dump it into the player Right Now... but this is a mistake. Take your time, ration it out to just two or three CDs per night, check the work frequently to be sure quality is what you want. And most important of all: spend a huge amount of time getting your tag information (which is where the database information in the empeg comes from) absolutely, fanatically, past the point of diminishing returns, complete and correct. You will be everlastingly thankful you did this.

2) Any suggestions on setting up the directory structure and organizing the files. In other words, what have been some common errors that have been made or if you had to do it all over again what would you do differently?

Most common method is genre; then within genre, Artist; within Artist, Album; within Album, Song. But there are any number of different methods you can use. My music is mostly classical, so I use a different scheme. This is an entirely personal choice. If I had it to do all over again? I'd keep my directory structure the same, but I would spend, conservatively, five times as much time and effort on my tags as I did.

3) I know that there are different compression rates for the MP3 file format that result in different levels of quality. What is the best rate to use for the best size vs quality compromise? What is most commonly used?

Again, that is a personal choice... but keep in mind that hard drive space is now so cheap that limiting your quality based on file size may be a false economy. Audiobooks can record at 128 or even 64 KBPS without any noticeable loss of quality. Symphonic music would go at 160 KBPS minimum. I would guess the majority of people use Variable Bit Rate, on either the highest or next-to-highest quality level. Pick a CD you like that is representative of your music collection, and put it in the empeg at different rates and see which you can live with -- then use the next higher rate for the rest of your encoding. Using a higher-than-necessary bit rate for your encoding will never make you unhappy.

Take your time, do it right, and enjoy your new toy!

tanstaafl.

2 or 3 discs a night would leave me hanging for a long time, and I've only got 450 CDs. Imagine the people with 1500.

With Audiograbber and a good CD-ROM drive (Plextor UltraMax being the best drive on the planet, bar none) you can rip an entire CD in a couple of minute. Yes, literally a "couple" = 2. :)

You set it to save tag info into the ripped WAV and do NOT do any encoding to MP3. Rip as many discs as you can stand to do and then batch encode them when you're not going to use your computer. When ripping to WAV, you shouldn't be doing anything else that is going to degrade the performance of your system or disks. When encoding, it doesn't matter what you're doing - except that good encoders suck up a lot of CPU time.

Audiograbber uses FreeDB for its track info. You may have to edit a bit to correct some mistakes or add things like the YEAR and GENRE which a lot of people haven't originally submit.

For batch encoding, Audiograbber supports direct use of the LAME dll. You can set parameters within Audiograbber. Note that the dll does not allow all the same properties as the executable. That is not Audiograbber's fault. You can modify the Audiograbber ini to allow for the r3mix VBR setting to be used with the dll option.

Or the best bet is to set Audiograbber up to use an external encoder and then use the LAME exe. Do some reading over in any forum that discusses LAME (and you shouldn't be using any other encoder if you care about quality) for tips on settings. Worth a read is also www.r3mix.net but don't take each and every word as gospel. I use most of his settings, but pass on the normalization and set a VBR quality of 0, fwiw. There are other people with some very good presets that are built into current builds of LAME 3.90. One of them is Dan something or other - can't remember his name. Check the Audiograbber forum for some pointers, as people were just discussint his topic a little while ago.

Starting a batch encode is as easy as just dropping a bunch of WAV files onto the Auidiograbber window. It will pop up a message box asking you to confirm.

BTW, when I batched encoded, I'd do 40GB or so of WAV files at once. This saves huge amounts of time.

Oh, and sorting? I never use GENRE as a sort criteria. Only for creating sort of mood lists. Why? Because genre is meaningless to classify the majority of music out there unless you lump everything into a couple of very different genres. Most of the stuff I listen to falls into multiple genres - and then there's the fact that someone else might not agree with the genre selection. I keep a master list of everything alphabetically by artist. And in each artist folder/list I keep all their albums chronologically. This way I have something very easy to pick from and that anyone else can use. Then I make specialty lists to suit whatever tastes. (Actually this is something I still have to do on the empeg - once I decide what types of lists I want :)

Bruno

Oh that reminds me you don't have to have one way of sorting out your playlistsi have two (when i remember to update them) i have them intlly sorted out genre/artist/album but i also have them sorted AtoZ then under that then abc/def/ etc

If you put something onto the empeg and then copy it to another playlist it only takes up one space on the empeg but it appears in two places also if you set up lets say U2 in a rock genre and have it under U as well when you add something to the U2 under rock it appears in the one under U as well.

i will agree that doing it too quick can be a problem i did 200 in about 3 days as i got the empeg just before going away for four months and still finding bad rips

As I've been putting more and more songs on my empeg, I'm quickly noticing the advantage of sorting everything alphabetically. Currently, I have three top level directories (Artists, Albums, and Genres). The Artists directory contains Artist Playlists, which then contain the Albums by that artist. The Albums playlist contains albums with multiple artists. The Genre playlist contains my compilation playlists, like 80s, Alternative, Comedy, etc.

Like I said, though, I plan on sorting everything by Alphabetical order, since it's a pain to skip down to an M artist. With the sorting into alphabetical directories, I'd have to skip at most 12 artists (to get to 'm' or 'n'), and then maybe a few inside the particular letter directory. But, it's a lot better than having to skip every artist between 'a' and 'm'.

However, I'll probably still stick with the same top-level structure.

With Audiograbber and a good CD-ROM drive (Plextor UltraMax being the best drive on the planet, bar none) you can rip an entire CD in a couple of minute. Yes, literally a "couple" = 2. :)



Although I agree with most everything else you have written, I've got to express a differing opinion here.

EAC for Windows is the second best ripper out there. CDParanoia, for the Unix platform being the first.

EVERYTHING you do after the rip, be it tagging, encoding at 320kps or 128, is going to be effected by the quality of your rip. IMNSHO, you should take the extra time to ensure that the rip is the best possible, even if that means that it takes twice as long.

I'm using both a Plextor, as well as a yamaha drive here, and while they are both VERY good, the disks they scan are not always. Without Paranoia or EAC, you'll get errors. With paranoia, it takes me about 4 minutes to do the rip on a good disk. On a bad disk, it takes significantly longer, but I've gotten perfect results out of disks that skip like crazy on a cd-player.

Speed is not everything when it comes to the rip. I'd rather KNOW that it was correct than have to do it again.

Personally, I'm using a hacked copy of ABCDE for Debian. It uses CDparanoia to rip all the songs, drops them into a folder, and starts the encoding in the background. Tags them from CDDB, and pushs them into my upload folder to the empeg. It's hacked in that I have it multi-threaded to use multiple drives and have it push the encoding into a forked process, so I can rip disks like crazy, and let the encoding catch up when it can. Plus, I use DISTMP3, which pushes the wav files over the network to other machines here to do the encoding to mp3. I had a 'ripping festival' about a month ago, with 8 dual p3 machines and a couple of athlons doing the encoding, and ripping from 4 scsi drives at the same time. Things did NOT take long.

EAC is very good. It would be my second choice over Audiograbber - if I needed to deal with a problem disc. I can assure you that I have a couple of discs that EAC would not be able to deal with. In fact, no program s likely to get far without changing drives. The Plextor is light-years ahead of Yamaha for DAE (I also have a Yamaha burner) but unfortunately there is one Ministry CD that I can ONLY rip with a crap Toshiba drive I have in another machine. If you look at the bottom of the disc, you can see a somewhat differing track spacing, but the disc is not damaged or scratched in any way.

Given a good drive and suitable software, you can get perfect rips without resorting to a "safe" or "secure" rip. However, YMMV and you have no proof of the quality unless you involve some additional manual steps - including the possibility of listening.

I can do 10 rips of one given track in AG and have it come up identical each time. This removes the doubts of a good copy due to random error in the read. AG's interface is too good to pass up for Windows. The next major rev will feature secure ripping.

Any problems that have been introduced into my wavs have been due to me messing with the computer at the same time as the ripping. I am keeping a list of possible problem tracks to re-rip, but so far it's only three items long. And one of them I'm pretty sure has nothing wrong with it (I have to verify with the actual disc when I get the chance). Otherwise I can't really tell the difference between the CD tracks, the ripped WAVs and the encoded LAME VBRs.

Most people are satisfied with far inferior rips and encodes than we are. This can be seen by how many people use XING just because it's super fast. Or how many people use brand-X all-in-one program just because it was free with something else they bought or downloaded. Let alone people who encode at 128Kbit or less (especially without using Joint Stereo at those low rates). Of course most people also don't have gigabytes of portable space to store their music. They're primarily using CDR and small flash-media.

Bruno

You're right in that the initial rip is a very important part, and that often the ripping software is a critical component.

But something that Hybrid8 began his statment with is that he was using a Plextor drive for his rips. The Plextor drives are known for being reliable rippers regardless of what software you use. They have additional circuitry that can do block-accurate addressing on audio CDs, making the error-correction routines in EAC unnecessary.

But something that Hybrid8 began his statment with is that he was using a Plextor drive for his rips. The Plextor drives are known for being reliable rippers regardless of what software you use. They have additional circuitry that can do block-accurate addressing on audio CDs, making the error-correction routines in EAC unnecessary.



No, I noticed that he was using a plextor. I also noted that I have a plextor. They are VERY GOOD.

But perhaps mine are faulty. Because I DO have issues with some discs on plextors when not using a secured rip.

Maybe it's me. But given the speed of todays drives, I'd rather spend an extra minute or two and be sure.

At the same time, I do NOT know that everyone else here has a plextor, and as such, I think it only fair to mention the alternatives.

From that standpoint, I'll still stick with my recommendation of EAC over audiograbber on Windows.

EAC is very good. It would be my second choice over Audiograbber - if I needed to deal with a problem disc. I can assure you that I have a couple of discs that EAC would not be able to deal with. In fact, no program s likely to get far without changing drives. The Plextor is light-years ahead of Yamaha for DAE (I also have a Yamaha burner) but unfortunately there is one Ministry CD that I can ONLY rip with a crap Toshiba drive I have in another machine. If you look at the bottom of the disc, you can see a somewhat differing track spacing, but the disc is not damaged or scratched in any way.


I've also got a plextor, in fact, I have 8 of them available to me. Maybe it's a problem on mine, or possibly I have a better Yamaha, but my mileage HAS varied. Some discs rip better on the plextors, some on the Yamaha. But, I've to run into one that I can't rip on either using cdparanoia. From that standpoint, I'll still recommend EAC or paranoia.


Given a good drive and suitable software, you can get perfect rips without resorting to a "safe" or "secure" rip. However, YMMV and you have no proof of the quality unless you involve some additional manual steps - including the possibility of listening.


Yup. and I'd rather listen later, when it's on the empeg.



Any problems that have been introduced into my wavs have been due to me messing with the computer at the same time as the ripping. I am keeping a list of possible problem tracks to re-rip, but so far it's only three items long. And one of them I'm pretty sure has nothing wrong with it (I have to verify with the actual disc when I get the chance). Otherwise I can't really tell the difference between the CD tracks, the ripped WAVs and the encoded LAME VBRs.



That's all the more reason to use a secured rip. I'll admit, I beat the crap out of my PC's when I'm ripping, as I have multiple lame processes going in the background when I'm doing it. It's quicker on high level hardware. For me, the ability to be able to rip and encode at the same time, without worring about the quality is the plus.



Most people are satisfied with far inferior rips and encodes than we are. This can be seen by how many people use XING just because it's super fast. Or how many people use brand-X all-in-one program just because it was free with something else they bought or downloaded. Let alone people who encode at 128Kbit or less (especially without using Joint Stereo at those low rates).



Yeah, I think that's apparent, when we are discussing the best possible rip, using plextor drives. I spent a considerable amount of money installing my car stereo system in the 'teg. I want it to be as perfect as possible. Therefore, I'm not willing to shave two minutes off of my rip time, hoping that the hardware will catch it. 95% of the time, the plextors will. 85% of the time, the yamaha will. 99.9% of the time, paranoia gets it. That .1% that I have encountered were from discs that... well, looked like they were used for sandpaper demonstrations. Even with the paranoia time, overall it's faster in the long run to do both at the same time. And I don't worry about the rip anymore.

My plextor 12/10/32A finally died last night. I never ripped a single CD using it. Light use basically. The spindle seems to be dead, the tray doesn't articulate fully any more. It is 3 months over warranty. Argh. It costs $100 to repair it, since it is 3 months out of warranty. Argh.

Calvin

My Plextor died just after the year's warranty was up too - to say I was pissed was an understatement. I'd actually had some problems writing stuff for some time but I just put it down to something screwing up the ASPI drivers (the usual reason for writing problems). I've got a Yamaha now & everything's Rosy again (touch wood).

It was a slow death. Sometimes it will gronk and grind and not read a disc and sometimes it will. I also attributed it to some configuration issue. When the Plextor runs through error blink codes, it spits out interrupts like crazy, causing havok throughout the system. Everything slows to crawl. The CPU time and resources are not affected, but everything is crawling along because the Plextor is running interrupts like crazy. But the problem comes and goes and wasn't duplicable. Right after the warranty ended, the Plextor refuses to do a darn thing. :-( I'm awaiting an RMA number.

Calvin