Ooztuncer
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2006
- Posts
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- 17
OK, It's been so many hours to figure out what way to follow and HOW to follow. I believe I need some help.
For last 2 days I have been reading, trying, and more reading. I have a 30gb creative zen xtra and decided to put my small music archive into it - around 100 cd's + some mp3's from net.
My journey started with windows media player, converted 15 cd's from wav to wma lossless and figured out that zen xtra doesnt support flac or wma lossless formats - first bumper with a direct complaint to creative in their forums.
Then found out that EAC + lame mp3 conversion offers best conversion to mp3. At this point, I decided to use "b320 vbr new..." comment and I believe that this would give me better results than WMA.
I actually tried 5 versions and listened them in my zen with PA2V2 amp and SR-80 / Senn HD201:
1) v0 vbrnew
2) v2 vbrnew
3) v0 (default vbr)
4) v2 (default vbr)
5) b320
Test music was 5th song from Jaco Pastorius's debut album from 1976 (digitally re-mastered) - just a bass guitar and piano. To be honest, other than HD201's inferior quality against sr80, music sounded almost same to my ears, but decided to go with b320.
Under EAC:
F10 settings: extraction mode: secure (clicked cached and C2 - after it tested my lite-on dvd writer), selected speed 40x, allow speed reduction during extracting, gap detection B, detection accuracy=accurate.
F11 settings: -b 320 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d, bit rate 320 bits, high quality, uncheck "addID3 tag"
F9 settings: error recovery = high, external compression queue = 1
Problems:
1) Speed never exceeds 4x or 5x, it takes up to 25-30 minutes to rip one cd. (see edit at the below, it is actually 2.5X)
2) If it finds error, speed becomes x0.1 and sometimes it cannot finish ripping. Whereas if I use dbpoweramp for that same track dbpamp converts within minutes.
3) Dbpoweramp is using LAME 3.96r, but EAC is using 3.97 beta. If I use dbpoweramp, it converts a complete cd much less time than EAC. BUT, It doesnt give any tag which is soooo annoying. Any settings that I am missing in dbpwramp's conversion menu? That's why I decided to use mp3tag. Also, am I losing some quality by using dbpoweramp rather than EAC+lame3.97?
4) I am planning to use MP3gain after I convert around 1,500 tracks. Within this time I also read that "mp3gain" software can adjust the peaks more "scientifically" (whatever that means) than creative's normalization function. One question here: is 89 decibel a standard, what do you use for your personal taste?
EDIT: Speed is 2.5X - killing me!!
For last 2 days I have been reading, trying, and more reading. I have a 30gb creative zen xtra and decided to put my small music archive into it - around 100 cd's + some mp3's from net.
My journey started with windows media player, converted 15 cd's from wav to wma lossless and figured out that zen xtra doesnt support flac or wma lossless formats - first bumper with a direct complaint to creative in their forums.
Then found out that EAC + lame mp3 conversion offers best conversion to mp3. At this point, I decided to use "b320 vbr new..." comment and I believe that this would give me better results than WMA.
I actually tried 5 versions and listened them in my zen with PA2V2 amp and SR-80 / Senn HD201:
1) v0 vbrnew
2) v2 vbrnew
3) v0 (default vbr)
4) v2 (default vbr)
5) b320
Test music was 5th song from Jaco Pastorius's debut album from 1976 (digitally re-mastered) - just a bass guitar and piano. To be honest, other than HD201's inferior quality against sr80, music sounded almost same to my ears, but decided to go with b320.
Under EAC:
F10 settings: extraction mode: secure (clicked cached and C2 - after it tested my lite-on dvd writer), selected speed 40x, allow speed reduction during extracting, gap detection B, detection accuracy=accurate.
F11 settings: -b 320 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d, bit rate 320 bits, high quality, uncheck "addID3 tag"
F9 settings: error recovery = high, external compression queue = 1
Problems:
1) Speed never exceeds 4x or 5x, it takes up to 25-30 minutes to rip one cd. (see edit at the below, it is actually 2.5X)
2) If it finds error, speed becomes x0.1 and sometimes it cannot finish ripping. Whereas if I use dbpoweramp for that same track dbpamp converts within minutes.
3) Dbpoweramp is using LAME 3.96r, but EAC is using 3.97 beta. If I use dbpoweramp, it converts a complete cd much less time than EAC. BUT, It doesnt give any tag which is soooo annoying. Any settings that I am missing in dbpwramp's conversion menu? That's why I decided to use mp3tag. Also, am I losing some quality by using dbpoweramp rather than EAC+lame3.97?
4) I am planning to use MP3gain after I convert around 1,500 tracks. Within this time I also read that "mp3gain" software can adjust the peaks more "scientifically" (whatever that means) than creative's normalization function. One question here: is 89 decibel a standard, what do you use for your personal taste?
EDIT: Speed is 2.5X - killing me!!