Ripping Music CDs

[Kirby]

I know this is a bit OT, but since we are talking music here... Whats the best way to get songs ripped from all my music cd's? I downloaded a program called FLAC frontend, thinking FLAC would be the way to go, but then I downloaded a few flac songs from the net, and they wont play. Should I bother with flac or just go 192k mp3's? Or something else?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by Kirby

I know this is a bit OT, but since we are talking music here... Whats the best way to get songs ripped from all my music cd's? I downloaded a program called FLAC frontend, thinking FLAC would be the way to go, but then I downloaded a few flac songs from the net, and they wont play. Should I bother with flac or just go 192k mp3's? Or something else?

I know Dirk uses FLAC, so he is probably the authority. I've been toying with the idea myself, but I haven't jumped in yet.

Mike

[mickp]

Originally Posted by Kirby

I know this is a bit OT, but since we are talking music here... Whats the best way to get songs ripped from all my music cd's? I downloaded a program called FLAC frontend, thinking FLAC would be the way to go, but then I downloaded a few flac songs from the net, and they wont play. Should I bother with flac or just go 192k mp3's? Or something else?

I figure that if you're going to bother ripping your cd collection you may as well do it in a lossless format such as FLAC. Disk space is only getting cheaper and lossy codecs can damage some material pretty badly. It'd be a pain to have to rip a large collection a second time.

I use wma lossless so can't comment on how well flac's work in sage(mc). FLAC is an excellent format and afaik is what apple based their apple lossless codec on. Maybe you should try ripping some of your own music so that you know the files are okay.

192k mp3? That's quite a step back from a lossless codec which will tend to hover at around the ~800k mark.


Mick.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Kirby

I know this is a bit OT, but since we are talking music here... Whats the best way to get songs ripped from all my music cd's? I downloaded a program called FLAC frontend, thinking FLAC would be the way to go, but then I downloaded a few flac songs from the net, and they wont play. Should I bother with flac or just go 192k mp3's? Or something else?

If you are an audiophile purist like me then FLAC (or any other losless format) is the way to go. I have all my CDs ripped to FLAC, EAC is the best program to do this if you want to rip the CDs as accurate as possible. I also noticed that the internal Sage player won't play them, but I am using the Winamp plugin for this purpose anyway so that I can play my CDs in bitperfect mode to my receiver (and of course for Milkdrop ). And in addition, I can be rest assured that I have a 1:1 copy of all my CDs on harddrive, in case anything happens to the originals.

Dirk

[Kirby]

Guess I need to look into WinAmp again, and figure out how to use it with sage.. And get EAC too (we are talking Exact Audio Copy right?).

Originally Posted by mickp

192k mp3? That's quite a step back from a lossless codec which will tend to hover at around the ~800k mark.

Yeah, I was just thinking it might be a better solution, so I would only have to rip stuff once, instead of ripping 2x everything so I have a lossy copy for my iPod.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Guess I need to look into WinAmp again, and figure out how to use it with sage.. And get EAC too (we are talking Exact Audio Copy right?).

Yep, I was talking about Exact Audio Copy

Yeah, I was just thinking it might be a better solution, so I would only have to rip stuff once, instead of ripping 2x everything so I have a lossy copy for my iPod.

I am planning on running Rockbox to play my FLAC files on the iPod which I hopefully find in my Christmas stockings ...

Dirk

[Opus4]

Note: This discussion of how to rip music CDs was moved out of the SageMC thread.

- Andy

[mickp]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Guess I need to look into WinAmp again, and figure out how to use it with sage.. And get EAC too (we are talking Exact Audio Copy right?).



Yeah, I was just thinking it might be a better solution, so I would only have to rip stuff once, instead of ripping 2x everything so I have a lossy copy for my iPod.

DBpowerAmp music converter is a brilliant free tool which can convert entire music collections between formats. I recently converted ~300 lossless albums down to 384k wma for use on a ms based player that couldn't handle lossless. I've also used it to convert my collection from wma lossless to apple lossless for use on the ipod. It also has tools for flac conversion. Just remember to download all of the codecs that you need from the site.

Mick.

[briands]

Ah... a discussion close to my heart since I was about ready to re-rip the Holiday collection. I have used WMA lossless in the past because it is easy to sinc with my 20GB phillips "Not iPod" using WMP. However, I've noticed that these files do not play on the MVP so I was looking for an alternative to migrate to. Soooo... is there a lossless format that:
Plays in Sage
Plays on MVP
Plays on portables

[geogecko]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Note: This discussion of how to rip music CDs was moved out of the SageMC thread.

- Andy

Ah...took me a while to find it again!

Anyway, how do you get EAC to produce FLAC files? I don't see a setting for this in the external compressions menu.

Edit. Oh, guess one needs to download FLAC first...LOL.

Edit 2. http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/EAC/index.html