[iriverdrownsipod]

Ok. I have an H120 and thought it was plenty for my music and my file storage. Well, having nearly filled 12 of its 20 gigs with old, poorly encoded files (not archival quality), I want to fill the rest with data files (about 2 gigs) and some good quality audio.

A lot of people have pointed me to this website which seems to conclude that WMA is the best so far, but I have been recently listening to 192 kb/s VBR MP3. Another person just said rip it to WAV and don't worry about it. Alas, space concerns plague me.

What do I do? I would go to OGG since my hardware supports it, but I am 1) perplexed as to what I do to convert 2) worried about future hardware compatibility and 3) not sure about tag support.

This has been nearly a 2 month struggle, so please shed some light on this situation

 

[jmb]

I assume for the 192 VBR MP3's you are using EAC with LAME. I think that is probably the best compromise between sound quality (i.e. for portable set-ups you probably won't tell the difference) and storage concerns. I would encode all your CD's into 192 VBR MP3's if you want great sounding, but relatively small, files.

Be sure to use EAC with LAME when encoding VBR MP3s.

For really high quality your only option is the WAV format. I don't think the iRiver supports lossless compression formats like FLAC, APE, or SHN.

 

[waffenschmidt]

To avoid future anxiety, I would suggest LAME MP3s at the --alt -preset standard (APS) quality level. See Chris Myden's guide for detailed instructions on how to rip and encode quality audio in this format. The --alt-preset settings (renamed just --preset in more recent versions of LAME) have been extensively tested and tuned to give the best quality for the file size at the encoding level selected (Standard, Extreme or Insane, joined by Medium in recent builds).

Personally, kicked it up one notch to --alt -preset extreme (APX) just to make sure I didn't look back some day and regret what I had done. To me, the little bit of extra space taken up by APX over APS or 192 VBRs is worth it for the peace of mind. I'd also suggest buying a large hard drive for your computer and keeping the WAVs, or losslessly compressing them to FLAC or Monkey's Audio APE. Hard drives are so cheap now, and ripping is time-consuming. Additional peace of mind that you can always mass re-encode into any other format you want without having to re-rip everything.

I don't have a lot of experience with WMA, but everything I've read says that any advantages it might have (or might have had) over LAME MP3s disappear when you get to higher levels of encoding (about 192 VBR and above). A recent multiformat listening test even placed LAME above WMA at 128kbit/s with the specific settings chosen for the test. But again, if you're anxious about quality you really shouldn't be considering 128k encoding.

Edit:

By the way, once you start listening to high quality MP3s, assuming you have decent headphones, I guarantee you'll eventually trash those old MP3s you now have on your player. You won't have any desire to listen to poorly encoded music anymore. Problem solved!

 

[Big D]

I would advise anyone who is ripping to encode to FLAC first and back these up to DVD-R media or an external USB hard drive. These will be tagged and the files can then be used to transcode to a lossy format at any time as a batch job.

 

[Oddball]

Am in the middle of ripping everything to FLAC and I'm curious (and sorry for the threadjack) as to what kind of software I can use to do a mass transcoding? Or burn FLAC to a CD for that matter. Thanks!

 

[Big D]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oddball Am in the middle of ripping everything to FLAC and I'm curious (and sorry for the threadjack) as to what kind of software I can use to do a mass transcoding? Or burn FLAC to a CD for that matter. Thanks!

This is still relevant to the original post.

I transcode my FLACs to Ogg to use with my iHP-140 so I use OggDrop 1.7.11 (aoTuV b2) version. It will transcode to Ogg straight from FLAC, keep the tags, and delete the original FLAC from your computer if you want.

I just used Windows Explorer search to find all my *.flac files, selected them all and dragged them onto OggDrop. Took about 19 hours to encode 3900 tracks.

For transcoding to other formats I think Foobar 2000 has been recommended a lot, but I've never use it.

EDIT - Sorry, about recording to CD (I use DVD-R) I use Nero.

 

[waffenschmidt]

dBpowerAMP can transcode between most formats. According to the website "just about every audio type is supported: mp3, mp4, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Monkeys Audio, FLAC and many others, whilst preserving ID Tags." It's free and easy to use.

Just a reminder to those new to compressed audio: you never want to transcode between lossy formats, even though dBpowerAMP and other encoders may support it. Always use the original WAVs, or losslessly encoded FLACs or Monkeys Audio files as your source.

 

[halcyon]

I also agree that a lossless compression for archival (e.g. FLAC) and then LAME mp3 (preset standard or even 128kbps) for portable is the best option in many ways: better quality than WMA9, less battery hit than OGG (decoding ogg on IHP consumes more batteries than mp3) and very good sound quality. You'll be hard pressed distinguishing "preset standard" from the original cd. Even 128 kbps can be difficult to distinguish on most music.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oddball Am in the middle of ripping everything to FLAC and I'm curious (and sorry for the threadjack) as to what kind of software I can use to do a mass transcoding? Or burn FLAC to a CD for that matter. Thanks!

Transcoding as in after ripping, convert all your FLAC files to MP3 or the like? If so, Foobar2000 has a batch process you can use. Another option is to use a frontend, drop everything into it, and click Go. Of course, it won't give you full tags (methinks it can generate some tags from the filename, though), but they'll be converted. Out of curiousity, what lossy codec are you planning to use?

As for burning FLAC to CD, you can use the above frontend to convert back to WAV, or, even easier, use the Nero FLAC plugin, which lets you just drag 'n drop a FLAC file, and Nero will do the conversion for you on the fly. I've used it frequently, and it's never let me down. There's also plugins for pretty much every other codec you can imagine, if you needed one.

(-:Stephonovich

 

[RunsWithScissors]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oddball Am in the middle of ripping everything to FLAC and I'm curious (and sorry for the threadjack) as to what kind of software I can use to do a mass transcoding? Or burn FLAC to a CD for that matter. Thanks!

Another vote for Foobar for transcoding FLAC to MP3 or other lossy compressed formats.

A great little program for transcoding and then burning direct to CD is Burrrn:
http://www.burrrn.net/

For example, drag and drop an album encoded in FLAC directly to Burrrn and it will transcode the FLAC files to WAV (using a temp directory on your HDD) and burn them directly to CDR and then delete the tempory WAV files on your hard drive after the process completes.

This is an excerpt from Burrrn web site:
Burrrn is a little tool for burrrning audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files. Supported formats are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets. You can also burrrn EAC's noncompliant image + cue sheets! Burrrn can read all types of tags from all these formats (including ape tags in mp3). Burrrn uses cdrdao.exe for burrrning.

Best of all, Burrrn is FREE!

Enjoy!