I just bought a boombox that plays MP3's to take camping and I need to copy my library of CDs down to MP3 format and burn them to a disk. Also, about 30% of the MP3's I have DLed from Kazza won't play and I'm sure they are the wrong bitrate or something. My player recommends "44.1kHz, 128kbs, Constant Bitrate" and (MP3, MPEG1 Audio Layer-3). I need some kind of way to 'filter' these songs to the right setting and batch-process my regular store-bought CD's so I can get a hundred songs on one CD. I see some promising programs in the DL section but I need a little instruction please. Thanks Soja
If you have mp3s that play with your PC audio player but not with that boombox, the boombox is crappy = not matching mp3 specs - You can interprete this as a defect, so you might want to return it to the shop and get your money back. If not ...: For CD -> mp3 use ExactAudioCopy (download and guide available on this site), lame (version 3.90.2 or 3.92) as external (=user defined) encoder. If your boombox' decoder is that crappy, --alt-preset standard (%s %d) which gives you amazing quality and is small enough to make 100 songs fit on a CD, probably won't work. There are a few possibilities where the problem lies, for details you can do a search on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org forum about mp3 hardware players or similar. To get rid of all these possible (I know of) problems at once, you can use as commandline something like --alt-preset <xxx> [-B 256 --strictly-enforce-ISO -F] (%s %d) <xxx> is the average bitrate you want, e.g. 160 or 192 [-B 256 ...] are commandline options that are used as workaround for possible problems of your encoder. If it works you can try to leave them away (one after the other, especially --strictly-enforce-ISO is could lower quality). If it works without them don't use them. (%s %d) without brackets is needed if you use Lame as "User defined Encoder" in EAC. The downloaded mp3s that dont work can be decoded to wav and encoded again, but it's not recommended as it degrades quality. AFAIK you can use lame.exe for this in DOS window/from commandline (read the documentation, there's some switch like --mp3input IIRC).
Hi Tigre... Thanks for getting back with me. I got Exactaudiocopy but could find no directions and I'm afraid it's a little above my level of knowledge. I did, however, cure one problem. (I think) I took the offending tracks to a friend that has: "Audioactive production studio" And I 'filtered' them thru the program setting the parameters the boombox documentation suggested and all the songs now play but some of them degraded in quality. These are 60's and 70's artists like Janis Joplin, Joan Biaz, Linda Ronstadt, etc. So I'm wondering if the track is poor quality to begin with. Can you make any other suggestions on how to copy/convert my collection? Appreciate your time... Thank you. Soja
A "EAC Guide" search on this forum gives results like this. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/27115 There are some guides mentioned. If you want to rip+encode your entire collection and not 1 or 2 CDs ocasionally, it's worth while for sure to invest some time and work through one of these guides. About "filtering" / transcoding: If I really like a song and only have a corrupted copy of it I just get another version of it - So I won't be a big help on this issue.
Back again... This time with good news! I got ExactAudioCopy, installed per directions, got on the instruction page and got piles of good advice. I'm now starting to convert my CD collection to MP3's and burning them for camping. The only problem is those few older MP3's I got off the net that I don't think E.A.C. will 'filter' since they are on my HD and not on a CD. But I'll look and see if there isn't some other audio program this board suggests that can 'sharpen' up the file. You know... take the hiss out and improve the range. You have been very helpful and my boombox now plays anything I burn for it. If you have any other suggestions, I am certianly open to them. Thank you very much. I'll recommend this board to anyone. Soja
One more thing if you don't mind... I've been looking for a program here that will clean up those pesky, old MP3's and I can't really say that I have found one that will do what I need. I'm not sure if there even IS a program that will do it. I need to get rid of background 'Hiss' and pep up the range. (sound quality?) Is there anything here that will do it or some trick you can tell me about? Thanks again. Soja
