I built a music server. This is for a mothers dance studio. It is going to integrate with the sound system, here is the hardware setup Athlon XP 1700+ MSI K7N2 Delta2 Platinum 512 PC3200 Ultra Memory (single stick) 200 gig WD IDE 5200fx 128 Nvidia Audiophile 2496 soundcard Silverstone case. 52X cd burner Now I am looking for software suggestions. The teachers in this studio cut there own music in order to create there dances. This is what I am going to install so far: 1. Polderbits (great and easy to use music editing software) Although it is very plain and straight forward, not such a bad thing 2. Windows Media Player 10 3. EAC w the lame encoder 4. The burner came with easy cd creator but I would much rather use Nero ultra edition. 5. dbpoweramp 6. Any suggestions???????????????? Now I decided to rip all music (300-500 cd's) to MP3 following the using EAC at 192 kps. I did it for some of my personal music and to me they sound great. So please tell me of any other must have programs that I should install on this server.
Everything sounds great Hunter69. I wish I had a media server All I can offer you is the contents of The List: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/127334 What are you using your server for mothers dance studio? I hope you encoded to Mp3 using the Variable bit rate (VBR) scheme. Personally I think that as far as lossy codecs go MusePack (MPC) sounds much better that Mp3 and that Ogg Vorbis is easilly equivalent to Mp3. But depending on how you use your server MPC probibly wouldn't be the way to go (right now). Ced
"What are you using your server for mothers dance studio?" This statement sounds confusing??? I have not encoded the music yet. I will have to check my settings as far as VBR goes. I had decided on MP3 but I am open to suggestions. I want the rips to sound great yet be compatible to burn on to a disk and take somewhere. SO if this isn't possible, than the quality of the rip is the most important. Than an easy way to change it to a compatible format, when needed to burn and take to play on another sound system. Any suggestions
I'm sorry about that. It was a joke. I found your reason for building a music server to be A-typical (in a good way). Anyway, how much do you know about the whole encoding thing? Do you know the differnce between a lossy and a lossless codec? Encoding to lossy will always cause some loss of sound quality. Variable Bit-rate schemes are desingned to give you maximum compression and maximun sound quality. There is no better way to encode (unless your an expert and can tweak ever part of the encoder to your advantage). Ogg Vorbis and Mp3 both have VBR encoding schemes. MusePack is always encoded using a VBR scheme. On top of that MPC is transparent meaning that it tries to sound as much like the source file as possible. The only software I know of that can burn MPC to an audio CD though is [bold]dBPowerAMp CD Writer (dCW)[/bold]. Lossless codecs don't loose any sound quality after compression. Examples are Flac and Monkeys Audio (and anything that says lossless on the end of it: WMA lossless, AAC lossless, ect.). The quality comes at a price though. The files normally 5 to 6 times that of a lossy audio file size (Although about 100 MB smaller than a Wave file!). Ced
Ok, So I understand the lossy/lossless. I did mess with encoding the music to WMA lossless but the files were [bold]HUGE[/bold]. This is definitely something I want to do right the first time. I am going to encode 300-500 music cd's. I have a 200 gig Hard drive. In my opinion the perfect music server would be: Great Sounding tracks Compatible with all CD players (so when they burn off their edited songs and take them to competitions it will play). The alternative would be an easy way to convert the track to a wave format I guess. I know dbpoweramp will do that. Don't take up a lot of HD space This might be dreaming, but there seems to be such a rangeof choices. So would you help me decide.
So what do you think: 1. MP3 constant (CBR) 192 kbps 2. MP3 VBR 3. WMA CBR 192 kbps 4. WMA VBR Then when it is burnt to play at a dance competition the format is changed to wave and burned to disc using DBpoweramp. How does this sound???? Which of the above formats would give me the best sound?????
Mp3 at 256 kbps VBR would. In most cases it will compress the file more than Mp3 while maintaining the same quality of sound as Mp3. Atleast thats what Micro$oft says. Personally, Mp3 at 256 kbps VBR sounds better to me than WMA at its highest VBR setting! When you encode to VBR you should never limit the maximum bit rate! WMA at quality setting 90 (44.1 KHz, stereo) is about the same as Mp3 matimaticaly. Its files are more compressed and the sound quality is about the same. I told you before though that my favorite audio format (right now) is MusePack. I also place Ogg Vorbis and AAC over Mp3. When you burn a CD are you burning Audio-CDs or Data-CDs? If your burning audio CD's then the format you choose will depend on what your burning software supports. Audio-CDs will always be compatible with any CD-Rom you have to use. If a Data-CD is what you want then make sure you go with a format that everyone knows about like Mp3. Ced
Ok let me see if I understand you corrctly. I rip all the music to musepack format (I will have to compare the sound to decide I guess). The say a teacher has a dance comp. Uses Nero ultra (if it supports musepack) to create a audo cd from the digitized musepack format audio files. This newly created audio cd will be compatible with any cd player on the market today, is this true??? It wouldn't be compatible if the cd was created as a data cd, am I correct in my understanding??? Thanks again for your time
Compact Disks 101, Absolutely! An Audio-CD can play in any player wiether it be a CD only player or a CD-Rom drive (just like the ones you buy in the store). You see, Audio-CDs are like Vynal Records. They contain analog audio information about how the sound should be played. Thats why you must rip a CD not just copy the file. In Windows when you look at the contents of a CD with windows explorer you will notice that the files have a .cda file extention. The .cda file extenion is not an audio format it is a pointer that tells the computer where the analog track stops and starts. If you notice, the files are only one KB large, much smaller than a typical audio file. A Data-CD has digital audio information. This info is formated (example: .mp3, .WAV, .wma). Any CD-Rom would be able to read the disk but only a media player with the correct CODECs installed would be able to use the files. If you had all your media ripped to MPC and your burnning software supports MPC. Then, nothing would stop you from creating an Audio-CD (80 minutes max.). If you burn the MPCs (as data, .MPC; many hours of music) to a disk when ever you take that disk somewhere you will have to make sure that the computer being used has a [bold]MusePack Direct Show filter[/bold] (codec) installed. Now, these things are only true in the case of CD-Rs not CD-RWs! Ced
Ok, I took your advice. I am ripping all the albums to musepack. Alot of people have nice things to say about it, it also sounds nice with good compression. This is what I decided to use for this function. Ripper=Easy CD-DA, ever used it?? It seems to work quite well, fast and easy. To listen to the MPC= Jetaudio, seems to sound nice, I like the functions of it. Had any good/bad experiences with either??? Thanks for sharing your valuable time
Excellent! I havn't had any problems with either of those programs. I love Jet Audio (its one of my recommended peices of software) and Easy CD-DA is probably the best CD ripper you can buy. Did you know that you can listen to MPC files using Windows Media Player 10 if you want? All you have to do is install a MusePack Direct Show Filter (link): http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1068295881/1 I'm glad you have decided to use MusePack. I wish more people would. My time is your time, Ced
Well I have to take some back. I really like mpc but for what the dance studio is doing (I purchased polderbits already for editing the audio, and some of the teachers have plans to install other proggys to play with the tracks), MPC is not compatible enough. So I guess I will rip with easy CD-DA to VBR MP3. Play the music with WMP10 for the dance studio. My home music I think I will RIP it with easy CD-DA to MPC. I will either use Jetaudio or WMP10 with the MPC filter (once I figure that out. [bold]I really liked the sound output by Jetaudio[/bold] but I really don't like the use of their playlists. It doesn't seem very easy to remove a song from a play list. When a person is finished using Jetaudio, and then open it to use it again, it wants to automatically play the same playlist it was playing B4. For a dance stuidio this would not be good. I will have to with it to get more familiar. Maybe I am just a beginner with the Proggy and don't quite understand the program fully
Yea, the only advantages MPC has over Mp3 is sound quality. If I knew you where going to be doing allot of editting I would have told you to just go with Mp3 or Ogg Vorbis. The MPC DS filter is easy to use. All you have to do is run the installer and it does the rest (The MPC file won't be associated with WMP 10 but WMP 10 will play the .MPC files if you open them with it). Everything sounds good, Ced
