I have been doing some research on this subject. I have contemplating using media player 10 with the wma lossless. I used it for one cd and it seemed very easy. I have 300 to 500 cds to digitize, so I want some thing that is easy but also gives me excellent sound quality. I hear a lot of people talk about this "locking you into microsoft". Once I digitize all music, cant I change it to a wave or a mp3 format if I need to???? I am really interested in ripping the music into a format that is high in sound quality, yet versatile enough that I could burn it to a CD and play it in your average cd player. I am building a music server to integrate into my home theater. SO if you can suggest a good sound card to output quality sound to my receiver. I think I am leaning towards a Sound Blaster Audigy. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to help me out
Hi Hunter 69 Hope this helps. I have a fairly big MP3 collection on my hdd, almost all of which was recorded using Windows Media Player. I simply insert a CD, select 'Copy music using WMP' or whatever, then WMP copies the CD to my hdd. When I go to the 'My Music' folder I find my CD there in compressed format, ready to be burned to CD, emailed, file-shared (not that I would!), played in Winamp, transferred to my MP3 player, etc. I have never encountered any Microsoft-related proprietary problems, even when taking advantage of their Find Album Info button. In fact, the only similar problem I have is trying to get my Sony MiniDisc & its software to drop its over-zealous approach to music copying, but that's another story... Good luck.
DB Power amp is a great tool for cross conversions from WMA to MP3. MP3 is more universally accepted, however i believe WMA has better compression meaning that you can store more songs per GB of equal quality. The Audigy 2 rules.
Would recommend using standard WMA encoding not lossless technique as resulting filesizes are enormous. If you convert from MP3 to WMA, anyway. Unless of course HD space is not an issue for you.
I ripped all my CDs to mp3 about 5 years ago, so I have no interest to going through the trouble of converting to WMA now. You should rip one CD and see how much space that takes on your HD, then muliply that by the 500 CDs you have. It would suck if you had to do it over again in a lower bitrate because it takes too much space. I know they say WMA has a better compression ratio with the same sound as mp3, but I don't believe it. I can hear a big difference, especially anything ripped below 160 kps. Supposedly, OGG and AAC have good compression and sound better than mp3, but I don't know if it's standard yet in portables, etc. I use Easy CD-DA Extractor. With that program, you can convert from practically any format (including SHN and FLAC) to another and have great control over the exact bitrate or standard. But remember, you will lose quality everytime you convert unless it's from one lossless (WAV) to another.
I am constantly checking this thread. I would like to check my math. What equals 1 gig, is it 1 billion bytes?? So lets a say large album ripped off at 500 mb and I multiplied that time 500= 250000. That is equal to 250 gigabyte if they were all that size correct?? I ripped Aerosmith "Big Ones", 14 songs, wma lossless=537 mb I also ripped ACDC "Back in Black, 10 songs, wma lossless=280 mb I have 120 gig to play with. The amount of albums will range 300-500. I can always add another drive but for now I am in the build stage for this music server. I have only a 120 gig because I planned to do this a while back and saw a good deal on a HD. So with that amount of space I want to rip these cd's at the highest quality, yet leave room on the Hard drive for future CD's. WHat do you think??? Can this amount of space provide great sounding music or should I look into buying more Hard drive space??
Personally, i think that using 537 MB for one album is a tad unnnecessary. I don't know the album, but that equates to about, what, 30-50 MB per song? Even if you saved to wave you would get smaller filesizes. And with wave the sound quality is pretty much as good as it gets.
That seems like a lot of disk space to me to, so this is where I am looking for suggestions. What would be my best bet for quality sound and efficient use of disk space?????
If you your music source is a CD then it makes no since to back-up all you music using a lossless format. CD quality is diffent for every format but at constant bit rate (CBR) MP3 peaks in sound quality around 192 kbps while WMA (mathematically) meats up with MP3 around 96 kbps. It’s been my experience that when using any audio format it is most wise to use a variable bit rate (VBR) scheme when it’s available. VBR allows for the most compression and the best quality. The only draw back to VBR is that its compatibility with MP3 players is low (but any software media player worth an install can play them). Finally, I too use dbpower amp (Audio File Converter and the bundled CD-Ripper) to convert my CDs to different file formats (as a windows alternative). CDex is also a good CD ripper with many options. The web site to dbpower amp is http://www.dbpoweramp.com/
