Can I get some info as to what ripping softwear I can buy that will give me the highest quality sound.I no it's in the faq's somewear just cant find it.

Apparantly, a lot of people use LAME, and most of the people i've talked to use the variable bit-rate setting. I think most ripping software will give you the option of encoding at 384 kbps.

So does that mean that as long as you rip at a high kbps all softwear is about the same.The reason I ask is I used the free version of musicmatch and ripped at 328kpbs the highest it would go.I thought if I went and bought somthing better it might make my sound quailty better.

No i don't believe it would, but i might be wrong. Anyhow, IMHO, it would be terribly difficult to tell the difference between 324 and anything up. Hell, i have an excruciatingly difficult time trying to listen for differences between 256 and 324.

thanks for your thoughts you just saved me alot of time and money.

So does that mean that as long as you rip at a high kbps all softwear is about the same.The reason I ask is I used the free version of musicmatch and ripped at 328kpbs the highest it would go.

There is one other distinction. The high frequency rolloff. If musicmatch rolls of the high frequencies, then there are other products which don't (or at least have an option to roll them off higher than other packages), and you might want to use one of those.

The important thing is that some of the best software is free or very cheap (Audiograbber, EAC, LAME).

Anyone know where the free version of Musicmatch rolls off the highs?

what do you mean by high frequency roll off.

By high frequency, I mean any sound in the upper teens of the frequency range, say 14k and up. For instance, the highest components of the sound of a cymbal crash will fall into that range. Or the sound of a very sibilant "S" being sung by a singer will fall into that range.

By rolloff, I mean that the encoder will use a filter to remove those high frequencies completely from the music before it encodes it.

Some encoders will roll of the high frequencies in such a way that it's painfully obvious when you play back the MP3 on good equipment. Others will do it better, by choosing a higher cutoff point (for instance, by doing it at 19k instead of at 16k).

I see maybe thats why im not getting a real high quailty sound from my mp3's what softwear do you use.

Lately, I've been using the HSX-109, but that kind of goes against your "low cost" criteria.

Most people recommend Audiograbber with LAME, or EAC with LAME. AudioCatalyst is OK, too, if you make sure to turn off the high frequency rolloff.

Can i get hsx-109 at stapels or do I have to get it off the net.and what do you consider to be alot of money. LOL

The HSX-109 retails for about $1500.00 if I recall.

(WOW) That is alot.IT must do some amazing things,I think all try your other suggestion.

It must do some amazing things

Well, it doesn't do much more than what you can already do with a PC. However, it does them all automatically, with a very simple idiot-proof user interface, and it does them in a package that fits in your home stereo system.

For instance, the act of adding a new CD to my MP3 collection involves a total of two button presses on the HSX-109. One to open the CD drawer, and one to confirm that I want to record that CD instead of just playing it.

It has some other advantages over a PC, for instance, optical outputs, nearly-silent operation, stable "no-crash" functionality, and no tricky software to install and configure.

That sounds like somthing I really need.maybe someone will trade me one for my spare empeg lol.

IMO I would steer clear of Audiocatalyst. I used to be a big believer in it - but no longer.

Pros:
1) Very Fast - even on an average Pentium ~333 it would do better than real time.
2) Very easy to setup and use.

Cons:
1) Sound quality isn't that crash hot I have discovered since getting my empeg. It seems to show up bad mp3s better than anything else - I don't know if that's good or not
2) Under XP I have found sometimes it doesn't rip the begining of a track correctly and I get a sharp noise for a fraction of a second - very annoying. Even under Win2k it seems to have produced some dodgy clicks and pops. This could be ripping or encoding.
3) CDDB -> ID3 tag support isn't fantastic. Bad filename characters (? * / etc) aren't used in the ID3, Years weren't used and lately I haven't been able to get it to make ID3v2 tags automatically, which meant I had to reprocess them later in DrTag when songnames were longer than 31-odd characters.

I have evaluated both CDex and EAC. I would recommend either but I have better success with ripping with CDex. For encoding I am now using LAME (-alt-preset standard) and I am quite happy with it. Best of all, the 3 are all free.

They are a bit harder to setup initially, but once you have that done, you're ready to roll.

I am now re-ripping my CDs gradually.

Regarding your "cons" list for AudioCatalyst...

1) As long as I make sure it isn't rolling off the high frequencies (it's an option), and I use a high VBR setting, I can't tell the difference between something encoded with Audiocatalyst or with LAME. And that's with intense listening tests on my car system playing through the empeg (which is the highest quality audio system I own).

2) I haven't used XP, so I can't comment on that. But there are options in AudioCatalyst to do things such as spin up the drive before ripping, which is supposed to prevent that kind of error. As with any ripping software, you have to experiment with the drive and the software settings to prevent noise and pops. I don't think that's dependent on the operating system.

3) Regarding tagging: I never had any problems with its tagging features, but even when you can use a ripper (any ripper) to get all of that data working correctly, you still have to fix up the tags by hand because the CDDB is full of errors and omissions.

Tony, in reponse....

1) I was using the highest VBR setting and the high freq enable bit turned on. I couldn't hear any badness with my old SB16+embedded PC setup but changing to the higher quality and I can hear the difference. If I have a friend in the car and I hear a bad one they think I'm making it up.... And ditto to the fact that my car is highest quality audio system I own.

2) I played around a lot with the settings but certain CDs (definitely not every one) always seem to give some problems. Generally they were older ones though (read this as "had more scratches" )

3) What I do for my tagging is I save the CDDB entries in my cdplayer.ini and fix them there. Then even if I rip again they will be right. Also CDex supports the year and genre from cdplayer.ini - if they aren't filled out I simply fix them up in CDex and select save to cdplayer.ini. It also correctly puts bad filename characters (like ? etc) in the ID3 and replaces them with underscores in the filename. It makes it a one step process.

I was also finding that audiocatalyst didn't seem to do the VBR headers correctly which also meant a pass through MP3TagStudio turning it into a 3 step process - I just don't like the way it works for ID3 tags (call me stubborn).

I can rip and not have to retag anything. At the moment Audiocatalyst requires me to rip the ID3 back from the filename, fix up bad characters etc and then write back. I find it very annoying...

As a whole I think Audiocatalyst is a very good product, it's just that I think you can do better with the completely free software available.

I am using Musicmatch 7.0. The roll off above 16Khz can be adjusted from rolling off anywhere from 16Khz up to 22Khz. I have mine set to roll off over 20Khz while encoding at 256. I was definitely able to tell the difference when I listen to a song encoded at the default roll off compared to my custom roll off of 20Khz. This is not to say that I now have the "best set up for ripping and encoding" but it sounds good to me. I am curious, has anyone done a comparison of Musicmatch with LAME? I am not talking default set ups though. I am talkng about tweaking the settings on both using say bitrate, error correction and such to see how two of the same tracks sound head to head. I have no experience with LAME and I know many on this board have tried alot of different software.

Dave

If I have a friend in the car and I hear a bad one they think I'm making it up....

Define "bad one"? If you're referring to rip errors, that's different than poor quality by the encoder, and the VBR slider has nothing to do with it.

Bad as in encoder quality. I then check through the info page that it is a Audiocatalyst rip by the comment field.

Pretty much everyone can hear rip errors no problem and I definitely know the difference between a rip error and a bad encoding.

So tell me what you hear at the highest AudioCatalyst settings with the rolloff deactivated?

There have been occasions where I thought I was hearing an encoder artifact, but I wasn't, the sound was on the original CD that way.

Hard to explain. Not as crisp sounding basically. My term when I try to explain the artifacts to someone is "wishy washy". I don't know if that makes sense. Like a low bit rate encode of say 96-128kbps CBR but much less pronounced. Comparing against a true .WAV file and it disappears.

Now this can happen on any encoder and I think LAME is probably using a higher average bit rate than Xing, but since Xing won't go any higher I am SOOL. I don't mind a slightly higher file size for better quality so I can't hear any artifacts. Bad sounding (whether recorded, encoded or ripped) music really s**ts me off.

I definitely have some recordings though that are bad. "The Who" comes to mind immediately. I went back to the CD and had the same sort of static type sound. In the car it actually sounded like one of my RCAs had a slightly dodgy wire that was making and breaking.

I understand the "wishy washy" sound to which you refer. It's just that the only time I can ever hear it is when my encoder is set to very low bit rates. I've heard it from just about every encoder, if they are cranked down. I've never heard it on any encoder once the bit rate got up above 160-192.

Just going through now and it seems my Xing songs average around 200-220kbps. The new ones I have encoded with LAME are around 230-250 according to emplode. That extra 10% or so seems to make the difference for me it seems.