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Sunday, February 22, 2004

46 down, 2 to go

Well it's been a week now since getting my new hard drive installed. In my free time I've been ripping my music collection to mp3s. With the new hard drive I have so much space I figured I might as well just rip my entire collection to mp3s. Ok it's not a lot by any comparison since I only have 48 cds. I had 51 at one point but managed to loose three of them. Actually, I'm pretty sure my roommate from my second year at college "barrowed" them and never put them back because I have the jewel cases but the discs are missing.

I had ripped about half the collection up to now. Originally, I ripped my music using CDex. I used the blade encoder and set it to 192kbps constant bit rate. While better than tv or radio it was still no where near CD quality music. I blame it half on the blade encoder because honestly folks it's just plain junk. MP3s can be created from 32kbps to 320kbps, so the real problem is the fact that the music is only created at 192kbps, which is nowhere near max quality.

This time around I'm making sure to rip all my music in high quality. I'm still using the CDex program just because it's works fine. However, I've switched over to using the LAME encoder. Specifically I'm using version 3.90.3, as after doing some researches it appears to be the best version out there. LAME includes several preset settings that automatically adjust to provide the best quality music possible. The settings are --alt-preset standard, --alt-preset extreme and --alt-preset insane.

--alt-preset standard
This preset should generally be transparent to most people on most music and is already quite high in quality. The resulting bitrate should be in the 170-210kbps range, according to music complexity.

--alt-preset extreme
If you have extremely good hearing and similar equipment, this preset will provide slightly higher quality than the "standard" mode. The resulting bitrate should be in the 200-240kbps range, according to music complexity.

--alt-preset insane
This preset will usually be overkill for most people and most situations, but if you must have the absolute highest quality with no regard to file size, this is the way to go. This preset is the highest preset quality available and creates mp3s with a constant bitrate of 320kbps.

The standard and extreme presets use what is called VBR (Variable Bitrate). With VBR the program looks at each part of the song and adjusts the quality level. For quiet parts or even silent sections of a song it's silly to waste space so it turns the quality down. When the music is loud and complex it turns the quality up. The insane preset uses CBR (Constant bitrate). With CBR it just uses the same quality regardless. So you waste space on the quiet sections and you loose quality on the loud sections. The benefit of CBR is that you always know the file size for a song where as VBR you won't know till it's done being created.

So for my collection I decided to go with the --alt-preset extreme setting. If I was making archive quality rips I might go with the insane setting but I'd rather not waste the space. A MP3 in the 200-240kbps range is going to be pretty darn hard to distinguish from a CD on anything but the highest quality stereo equipment. For my computer speakers I think it will be perfect.

So to summarize, I'm using CDex, with the LAME version 3.90.3 encoder and setting it to --alt-preset extreme for the quality.

It's late though and I don't feel like starting another disc so, Genesis's "We Can't Dance" and Local H's "Pack up the Cats" will just have to wait to get done tomorrow morning.

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