[chrisk]

thanks breez, now i can start encoding some more so that i have something to feed my ipod with on christmas eve

 

[titaniumx3]

Lamr APS or APX depending on the complexity of the music. I use Exact Audio Copy because everyone says its supposed to be the best (don't know why though!). Sometimes if the songs sound rubbish anyway, I just use cbr 192k, a bit faster to encode.

 

[titaniumx3]

Lame APS or APX depending on the complexity of the music. I use Exact Audio Copy because everyone says its supposed to be the best (don't know why though!). Sometimes if the songs sound rubbish anyway, I just use cbr 192k, a bit faster to encode.

 

[justanotheruser]

I wish I had enough disk space to do exact copies. My brother used to encode everything in mp3, first using a bitrate of 128 (cringe) but later migrating to 160 and 192. I've convinced him that aac is better so now I think he's using 192 aac. Of course I inherited much of his collection and I've been trying to improve as much of it as I can. I re-reripped 1462 songs using the lossless encoder built into iTunes...but much of the stuff (the other 1500 songs) doesn't have a hard copy (or never had). Whenever I download stuff now I make it 320 aac...and of course I've been using lossless for CDs...I only wish I'd worried about the quality sooner...or saved the source.

 

[scottder]

Most modern codecs sound pretty transparent beyond 192kbs, 320 is kind of a waste of space, since you're so close to lossless sizes anyway. These days most people who work on codecs are trying to get lower bitrates to sound better, vorbis has been making big strides here.

Scott

 

[justanotheruser]

What I really want is for CDs to be replaced with DVDs...and for iTunes and the iPod to support DVD audio (i.e. much larger HDs in their computers and iPod in the future and software support). I really can hear the difference between a 192 bitrate aac file and DVD. You can pretty much hear everything with aac, but it won't have the same smoothness, fullness, and sparkle. And this is with pretty horrible computer speakers, mind you...HK soundsticks.

 

[Super King]

192 kbps VBR Mp3.

 

[GokieKS]

LAME 3.90.3, CBR 320kbps.

~KS

 

[jefemeister]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx A semi-recent test (which newer iTunes/QT AAC encoder dropped and newer LAME MP3 rose from the previous test), with a decent amount of clout in the encoding world, can be seen here- http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multifo...8/results.html

I've been looking at this for awhile now. I'm getting an ipod for xmas (I have to pretend to be surprised) so I'll probably wind up converting all my wavs to AAC. I wish this test you posted included trials with straight WAV as a control/reference.

 

[dmoffitt]

AIFF w/ error correction enabled (stereo 16 bit 44.1 aka raw CD) for home listening, and then i transcode that to AAC320 for the iPod, and i keep 192mp3 copies transcoded from the original AIFFs kicking around for listening in my roommate's car's head unit on long trips.

 

[steel102]

APS

 

[scottder]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dmoffitt AIFF w/ error correction enabled (stereo 16 bit 44.1 aka raw CD) for home listening, and then i transcode that to AAC320 for the iPod, and i keep 192mp3 copies transcoded from the original AIFFs kicking around for listening in my roommate's car's head unit on long trips.

Apple Lossless would save some room, but if you' already done them to AIFF...

 

[dmoffitt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by scottder Apple Lossless would save some room

I've considered transcoding ALL of them to apple lossless but the 30-45% space savings vs. the time to convert 2453 songs isn't worth it. plus, the processor overhead with APL vs AIFF would outweight the slight network overhead and storage benefits, considering I keep these on a 1.2TB (yes, Terabyte) raid5 array in a closet down the hall... I take my media / servers seriously lol, ~120gb of music that would become ~90-100gb isn't such a big savings, esp. since I have those multiple versions of stuff sitting around lol.

now, if the iPod was JUST a little bigger to fit all of the music as lossless, I'd do it (but with the 60gb it's still not enough, plus battery life would REALLY suffer).

of course, transcoding it to lossless might really help someone with a slower machine and an Airport Express, since iirc that natively uses apple lossless for everything... i know my friend was using a g3 as a server and found that it eliminated drop-outs by doing so.

 

[MD1032]

320 kbps using EAC and EasyLAME, the lame settings being as high quality as possible (alt preset insane).

 

[Super-Gonzo]

I rip with EAC to FLAC for my home system.

For my Karma, I transcode from FLAC to Ogg Vorbis, using the aoTuV beta3 Encoder: http://www.geocities.jp/aoyoume/aotuv/

I just switched to aoTuV beta 3, last night. I've got about 6500-ish FLAC files to re-transcode. I'm doing the encoding on 3 machines and it'll probably take ~24 hrs to finish. Last time I had to redo the entire library, I did it on a single machine and it took nearly 4 days to complete

On a related note, I had a hard time finding anything that would work through a large set of files, and preserve my directory structure. I ended up writing a little utility to aid in this process. Basically, you specify a src and dest directory, and it runs through the specified src directory, finds all the FLAC files, and then runs a .bat script against each of those files, with the filename, source dir and a final dest dir (based off the specified destination dir plus the relative path to the src file from the specified src dir) as parameters to that .bat file. I then use that .bat file and parameters to decode the flac to a temp wav, encode the temp wav to ogg, delete the temp wav file and then copy the tags from the flac file to the new ogg files.

I only spent about an hour on it, so it's not pretty, but if anyone would like to try it out I can make it available. With some modification, it could be used for all sorts of library maintenance and transcoding.