What do you compress music files to?

[calvintang]

i cannot /dont like mp3 at 128.. when you listen to a 192 one.. you can hear a notable diffrence like higher sound and more 'excess sound'

custom lame settings for mp3

i want to 'upgrade' to flac when i have a bigger hard drive.

flac take about 400mb per cd..

can any of you guys diffrentiate between mp3 and flac?

mp3 settings is for lame is -V0 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 19.7 -b96

i heard some 'changes' but its very minor....

[Branjo]

If its just for playing through my PC headphones then 128 is fine but if its for blasting through a decent speaker system then 256 sounds good enough for me, but if im putting some tracks on my little old mp3 player then I will make them MP3 Pro which makes most songs 1 Mb and its great for low capacity players.

[fst h2o]

I believe you can force WMP to update by going to Help>Find Updates, or something like that.

 

I just reinstalled windows xp today, and I dont have all the latest updates. is there a way that I can force the automatic update?

 

I just found out that I have 35GB of music... It is all ashambles too. I suppose that it's time to find a good tagging/renaming program.

[Donski]

I guess that makes me the music junkie here. I've got 3700+ cds taking up 293 gb right now. :eek:

I've been collecting them for 6 years now, and no I didn't get them off the internet because that takes too long and I can't trust the quality. Let me just say that used cd stores can be your friend. But this is just for the ultimate jukebox because I can only fit 500 into my two cd changers.

 

I use Cdex for my ripping at 192kbps CBR MP3, but I also respect EAC. It's respectable quality without taking up too much space. Yes, I can hear the difference between 160 and 192 even with my cheap Soundblaster Live. When you're having a party, no one really cares about the greatest sound quality possible, they just like any song on demand. If I want to hear good quality, I play the CD. If I want to hear the best quality, I play the vinyl.

 

I've got them all on one drive by themselves, with artist folders and album subfolders. All the tracks are named with Artist - Album - Track - Title, except the various artists discs which are named with Album - Track - Artist - Title. If you need a good tagging and renaming program then use The Godfather, it can look them up on freedb and apply the info for you. But if you want an easier to use tag editing program then use Taggin' MP3, I just wish it had the freedb lookup feature.

 

If you scan your covers, scan them at 300 dpi. When you scan your discs, use a sheet of Visqueen (almost clear sheet of plastic) to scan them through to remove the rainbow effect then edit the brightness and contract to look better.

[michaelzhao]

I have about 9500 or 9600 songs. I compress music to 192kpbs MP3 or in some cases, Apple Lossless. It works great for the timeless classics like "Bohemian Rhapsody". You really hear every nuance in his voice.

[ReelFiles]

With all due respect, vinyl is not the best quality, while it has a rich and warm sound to it, it is inferior quality to Audio DVD or even Audio CD.

 

I also prefer the sound of vinyl, since it gives you a nice warm sound. Especially when listening to some classics like Fats Domino or Jimi Hendrix. Using my old homebrew mono stage tube amplifier and a nice set of head phones, I get that nostalgic sound and feeling, I miss using digital media.

 

But newer music is optimized for digital playback and vinyl just can't cut it anymore (no pun intended). When I want to listen to say Pink Floyd or other music with a lot of synthesized beats and melodies, I prefer listenig to my Audio DVDs over my Marantz SR7300 and my 11 speaker MTS system, using direct input (bypassing any equalization or matrixing), so that I can hear the music exactly as the artist intended it to sound.

[General Septem]

When ripping CDs, I use APE. It's an e-peen thing. However, the vast majority of my music files are not from CDs I own; they were downloaded, and therefore 99% of the time in mp3.

 

If I need it in mp3 format, such as for an mp3 player or to burn it to another audio CD, I always go with the highest quality mp3 possible, which in the program I'm using is 320k, although I've seen 512k mp3s I don't know how to encode them. Usually if I need it for an mp3 player, I might even go a little lower, because those things aren't as expansive as my drive.

 

But if I intend to send the mp3 out or if it's not a good piece of music (i.e., if it's an audio presentation or if the music's sh!t but the lyrics are funny), then I'll go as low as I feel necessary.

 

It also depends on how much sound is there. A single sine wave beep isn't going to utilize nearly as much bitrate as a 100-piece string orchestra, and if you want to know what I mean, listen to a pop song at 56k and then listen to a string orchestral piece at 56k. The pop song sounds halfway decent but the strings are heavily artifacted.

 

A good example would be if you were to rip a soundtrack that had orchestral BGM music and a pop theme song. You can rip them all exactly the same but the theme song will sound a lot less affected by the decrease in bitrate.

 

I remember one time someone asked me to find them a copy of "Daddy's Little Girl" and send it over email. I reencoded it in CDex using the LAME encoder. I had everything set to minimum and the quality still didn't sound half bad - that's how you know when a song is really shallow sounding.

[likewhoa]

I prefer listenig to my Audio DVDs over my Marantz SR7300 and my 11 speaker MTS system, using direct input (bypassing any equalization or matrixing), so that I can hear the music exactly as the artist intended it to sound.

 

sweet I wanna party at your house I'll bring the boobs and beer

JimmyHendrix+PinkFloyd+TheDoors+LedZeppelin = good sounds at high quality

[old_geekster]

I am using 128 kbps/wma. My favorite music is 50's oldies. Many of them have been captured from the original 45's (For you younguns, those are the other little disk with grooves and the big hole in the middle. Ha,ha), thus the qualiity is not the greatest. I even leave the little pops and hisses in just for old time sake.

[Donski]

With all due respect, vinyl is not the best quality, while it has a rich and warm sound to it, it is inferior quality to Audio DVD or even Audio CD.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion.

 

If you were to look at a snap shot of the wave form on an oscilloscope, you would see that your standard audio CD has steps while vinyl has information within that space. It's like comparing TV to film. If you adjust the brightness, constast and tint on your TV then stand back, it might just look better than film. It's all an illusion. But if you get up close, then you can see the scanning lines. HDTV is an improvement. Audio DVD (LPCM) format is closer to the capabilities of vinyl, and has twice the quality of CD. With todays computers, it's now possible to produce digital sound better than vinyl, but the format they chose for CD 25 years ago wasn't.

 

The final result really all depends on a number of things, the quality during recording, mixing, pressing the vinyl, your stylus & cartridge, stereo and speakers. Since 99.9% of the stereos today aren't even as quality as your standard CD, there's no way you could hear the difference. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

 

If you listen to old music from the early 60's, or even a 10th pressing of your favorite vinyl, then it'll sound like crap compared to a remastered CD. I have albums like The Doors L.A. Woman and Eric Clapton Slowhand where you can clearly hear that it sounds better than the CD, while with my Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the CD sounds better. It's just that the Pink Floyd wasn't an early pressing. If you don't start with a clean source, you won't get clean sound.

 

I've been dealing with this controversy for the past 25 years, and I'm sad to say that CD audio isn't as great as everyone is led to believe. The state of the art in music quality in 1980 was far superior to the audio CD standard they chose, they chose it because that was the state of the art in computers at that time. And once it's become a format standard with a set bit rate, it takes decades to change and improve. If you look at the improvements they've made in just DVD audio, you can see that CD's are crap. And those top quality vinyl recordings played on a high quality stereo sounded as good as the DVD sound they brag about today. And to think, it took 20 years to get back to where they had gotten with vinyl.

 

 

Sorry about the rant, I could fill pages on this subject. I'll gonna stop now, it's just . me off.

[old_geekster]

Everyone has a right to their own opinion.

 

If you were to look at a snap shot of the wave form on an oscilloscope, you would see that your standard audio CD has steps while vinyl has information within that space. It's like comparing TV to film. If you adjust the brightness, constast and tint on your TV then stand back, it might just look better than film. It's all an illusion. But if you get up close, then you can see the scanning lines. HDTV is an improvement. Audio DVD (LPCM) format is closer to the capabilities of vinyl, and has twice the quality of CD. With todays computers, it's now possible to produce digital sound better than vinyl, but the format they chose for CD 25 years ago wasn't.

 

The final result really all depends on a number of things, the quality during recording, mixing, pressing the vinyl, your stylus & cartridge, stereo and speakers. Since 99.9% of the stereos today aren't even as quality as your standard CD, there's no way you could hear the difference. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

 

If you listen to old music from the early 60's, or even a 10th pressing of your favorite vinyl, then it'll sound like crap compared to a remastered CD. I have albums like The Doors L.A. Woman and Eric Clapton Slowhand where you can clearly hear that it sounds better than the CD, while with my Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the CD sounds better. It's just that the Pink Floyd wasn't an early pressing. If you don't start with a clean source, you won't get clean sound.

 

I've been dealing with this controversy for the past 25 years, and I'm sad to say that CD audio isn't as great as everyone is led to believe. The state of the art in music quality in 1980 was far superior to the audio CD standard they chose, they chose it because that was the state of the art in computers at that time. And once it's become a format standard with a set bit rate, it takes decades to change and improve. If you look at the improvements they've made in just DVD audio, you can see that CD's are crap. And those top quality vinyl recordings played on a high quality stereo sounded as good as the DVD sound they brag about today. And to think, it took 20 years to get back to where they had gotten with vinyl.

 

 

Sorry about the rant, I could fill pages on this subject. I'll gonna stop now, it's just . me off.

As a 50's musician, I have been listening to music for many years. Let's face it, live music is still the best with all of its ambient sounds.

 

There is no feeling like hearing your favorite artist in concert. My two favorites were/are Roy Orbison and Juice Newton. I have seen both in concert and can't express the difference in the feeling.

 

Audiophiles argue about vinyl and turntables all of the time. The argument will never be solved by any amount of rant -- that is just the way it is!

[Donski]

Audiophiles argue about vinyl and turntables all of the time. The argument will never be solved by any amount of rant -- that is just the way it is!

Truer words have never been spoken.