(Maybe OT): Audio format recommendations?

[Grasshopper]

I'm considering entering the 21st century and ripping my music collection to my PC. So I've been searching the web for recommended audio formats, and I've found surprisingly little in the way of understandable, simple recommendations of good formats to use. I'd appreciate any recommendations from more experienced users with seasoned ears. I'll be playing back mostly on PC, though I do have an RCA Flash player that does mp3/wma/mp3pro. I don't need to be able to play back through Sage, as I can always invoke an external player. The compression contenders:

wma lossless: I like the idea of bit-perfect playback, but 20MB for a 3 minute song seems, well, extravagant.

aac: It's the latest thing, but will it become the Betamax of audio formats? Also, my flash player won't play these, so I'd have to transcode. Not a huge deal, if this gives me an excellent size/quality tradeoff.

wma: I'm not afraid of the evil empire. If they give me the best tradeoff between quality and size, I'll take it.

mp3pro: ?

mp3: It's been around a while. But does that mean it's good, or that it's obsolete?

[Lester Jacobs]

Personally, I rip all my music in the mp3 format, variable bit rate(VBR), 320kbps. The music sounds great on playback to me and on average it only takes about 6-8 MB per song. wma can give you the same playback quality using a bit less space.

My advice is to use one of the above formats since they are the most widely used and supported. Neither format is going away in the foreseable future.

There are audiophiles that insist that nothing short of lossless encoding is acceptable. Of course those same people probably spend the equivalent of the cost of a medium sized car on their home theatre systems. ?that's great, but its overkill for me and probably most average users.

My $0.02

Lester

[sleonard]

MP3 is somewhat outdated but it is the most widely supported format. If you want your music to be playable in Sage then this is what you need to choose. 320kbps sounds great to most people except high-falootin audiophiles. Heck, 192kbps sounds fine to me.
Still, I rip to WMA lossless since I am not only ripping for playback but also to back up my CD collection. With todays drive sizes the space is inconsequential. Other lossless formats such as flac are just as good but WMA has the added advantages of being built into Windows (and as such free and easy). WMA also has fully automatic tagging and album art, wide and growing support in both consumer electronics and 3rd party SW apps (except Sage *) and its guaranteed to be around for a long time to come.

* There may be a JRMC based plugin for Sage in the future.

[Grasshopper]

Sleonard, suppose you didn't want to spend the hard drive space on wma lossless. What would be your second choice -- aac, wma, mp3, or mp3pro?

[sleonard]

I would probably go w/ mp3 for the wide support.

[rich_l]

To me, 128kbps aac sounds slighty better than 192 vbr mp3, but i also have an ipod which can play aac. Other people find this different. then there are those who use the spectrographs to prove the superiority of the format. I think it really depends on the type of music that you prefer.

I would pick lame-encoded vbr-mp3s at 192kbps if aac is not an option. (Dont transcode them to put on your player, it will get annoying each time). If you dont have that many, space really shouldnt be an issue. If you have thousands, then it might be of concern.

If you want the best format, you are going to have to try them all out. Using the same song, create 2-3 samples in each format at different bit rates. Granted it will take awhile to do that, but it will help you pick the best one for your ear.

[stanger89]

IMO,

Lossless is the only way to rip music, even if only for the fact that you never have to rip it again. You can always convert to another lossless format, or can convert to a lossy format (for portables). With lossy formats you can't convert them without loss.

I use Monkey's Audio, mostly for it's native support in J River Media Center. FLAC is another great format, although with less robust support in Windows.

* There may be a JRMC based plugin for Sage in the future.

It would be sooner if we didn't have real jobs (not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing )

[sleonard]

It would be sooner if we didn't have real jobs (not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing )

Good for you, bad for us poor impatient slobs

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally Posted by stanger89

IMO,

Lossless is the only way to rip music, ...

I appreciate your opinion, but that's what it is, strictly an opinion. I think it is a bit grandiose to assert that lossless is the *only* way. It is one way, and an excellent way. However it is certainly not the only way. It is merely the way that satisfies the set of personal parameters that you have established based on your circumstances. For my circumstances, and based on my personal parameters, 320kbps mp3 works and works very well. I see no reason for me (personally) to go to lossless. Others may differ. As with wma lossless, 320kbps mp3 support is likely to be around a very long time and is widely supported across a plethora of devices and platforms.

(Bear in mind that I am certainly not suggesting that 320 kbps mp3 is equivalent to wma lossless, au contraire. However, to my ears, 320 kbps sounds great and is all I need. If 320 kbps doesn't sound great to some ears, then by all means encode lossless, but don't denigrate those of us who choose not to go this route).

Cheers
Lester

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Lester Jacobs

I think it is a bit grandiose to assert that lossless is the *only* way.

Hence the big "IMO" to start off the post

But there are some things that can't be argued with:

It's lossless so...
There is no sound quality degridation
You can transcode to any other format and still have a first generation copy
You can convert to and from various Lossless formats without loosing anything
Given the above, you never have to re-rip your CDs (can be a lot of time)

The Only downside to lossless is the space requirement, and even then it's not a big deal (IMO again). 100CDs stored losslessly takes about 30GB, at that rate you could fit about 1000CDs losslessly on a 300GB HDD.

Whether or not lossless SOUNDS good enough for you is something only you can decide, and I won't argue on that front since everyone has different equipment and hears things differently. What I will argue is that there are tangible, practical advantages to lossless compression, especially if you're just starting, or for things you haven't already ripped.

FWIW, for me, lame at 320kbps isn't good enough But that's an un-winable discussion.

[korben_dallas]

Ah, Grasshoppa, you seek wisdom.. the most important search in life.



From my experience, converting music once from CD and then again to be playable on a portable was too time consuming and took too many steps. Hence, I was faced with 3 formats compatible on my portable: wav, mp3, and wma. So I spent hours and hours converting a number of different kinds of musical pieces with dBpowerAMP (Lame) and Windows Media Player and Creative Mediasource and Nero. WMA's came out the best for space, but not by much.. about 1 - 2MB savings on an entire album. And there was something "hollow" in the WMA's, though I'm not sure if I was just imagining it. Various VBR mp3's took up a little more space, 320kbps being the biggest.

I ended up settling on 160kbps average bit rate mp3, which is a more narrow form of VBR. Honestly, on my PC speakers and on my portable, 160kbps ABR sounds awesome. And it uses about 1.25MB per minute (give or take). I can fit 6-8 full albums on my 512MB Muvo, or a whole bunch of individual songs depending on my mood.

[nielm]

bear in mind that although VBR/ABR Mp3s play in Sage, there will be a few seconds of silence between tracks due to the Windows DirectShow MP3 decoder not detecting the length correctly

[Scott5]

I researched it a bit before taking the jump to burn everything. I choose AAC.

To my ear (I'm a trained violinist) it did what I needed it to do; I was interested in quality.

I record at 224kbps (or somewhere in that neighborhood). Some solid reseach showed that "golden ears" (concert masters, audio studio engineers) concider AAC at 196kbps to be the threshhold at which an origional recording and the encoded version sound the same. - so I bumped it up a notch so I wouldn't have to worry about it not being good enough.

Losseless is nice, but it just takes up way too much space, IMO. It wasn't an option for me when picking AAC, but I've tested it since and I don't think it's worth all the extra space.

To about everyone I imagine is reading this board, the bottle necks will be the other components in the audio line-up - the quality of the speakers, etc. I think you have to start getting pretty good equipment to be able to decern the difference between the better recording formats.

Here's an interesting sidenote: I've been very happy running my "itunes" computer through my stereo system. A few days ago, I upgraded to a new motorboard - SOYO's free after rebate deal mentioned on this board. Before installing my PCI soundcard, I booted up using just the onboard sound jack. Wow - I heard detail on my reference tracks that I've never even heard playing the origional CD! Alot of different factors determine the quality of your listening experience...

ps - when I get Sage, I'll be running both Itunes and sage from the same box - I like Itunes and the AAC format enough that it won't be a big deal for me to swap windows when I want...

[FidgetyRat]

I personally prever 160 kbps AAC

I mostly use on my iPod. I noticed that the sound is MUCH better then 192kbps MP3 and the file size can be up to 1Mb smaller. My ears are very sensitive to digital music and this is one of the few formats that doesnt piss me off.

I used to use VBR mp3, but even then i can still hear the tinny audio.

[olyar15]

Well, I have to 2nd Stanger's opinion. Having ripped several CDs in various lossy formats, I have now seen the light and rip only with lossless formats. As already mentioned, HD space is cheap. If you have so many CDs that you would overflow a 250GB drive, then you can afford to buy another drive. Lossless formats are the most flexible in the sense that you can easily convert to another lossy format and not worry about that particular format being obsolete or orphaned.

[briands]

Alright... I have my music as lossless WMA ripped with WMP. There are alot of tracks that have problems with the tags that WMP assigns. Is there a way to correct these during the rip process? It seems WMP pulls certain tags from some db and applies them without really letting you confirm. I actually have a christmas music CD that is labels as a completely different disc.

I want to stay with WMA since I got my wife a Phillips 30Gb gogear.

How do you rip/tag?

[Jesse]

Hi,

Well, I guess I am a bit extravagant. I am keeping three seperate copies of my music. I rip to ape (lossless) for playback throughout the house. I then backup all the ape files to an external drive. No way am I ripping and tagging all that music again. I then copy the ape files to a seperate machine and transcode to mp3 for the ipod. IMO the space to do all this (@ 160gb and counting) is cheap.

I know that WMP is free, but if you have not settled on a program yet I would highly recommend that you give JRMC a try. There is a 30 trial so you have nothing to loose. IMO it is way better than wmp.

No matter what you end up using you will be enjoying alot more of your music alot more often after you rip. It gives you such better/faster access to your library.

HTH. Have fun.

Jesse

[aperry]

If you're considering lossless, you might also look into FLAC (I think it stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec). Winamp needs a plug-in to play it, but other than that, it works great, plus did I mention it's free?

[briands]

Originally Posted by aperry

If you're considering lossless, you might also look into FLAC (I think it stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec). Winamp needs a plug-in to play it, but other than that, it works great, plus did I mention it's free?

How does Sage handle it?

[aperry]

I don't know, I haven't tried it in Sage.