Making MP3s
My recent acquisition, has meant that I need to reassess my music collection.
The ideal solution would be to rip each CD and save the tracks with lossless compression (thanks for that one Andy). Then as and when I want to I can encode these to MP3s, or whatever comes along in future. This requires that I have enough space on my HDDs. I don't have enough spare HDD space to do this. I have just about enough disk space to store my collection on MP3s. Now the next step is determining at what quality I will encode at.
I took a look at iTunes, and their ripping/encoding is fast. iTunes is hooked up to the Gracenote CDDB, which I guess means they have cleaner data than FreeDB. iTunes can be configured to automatically rip and encode a CD on insert. iTunes can encode in AAC.
So why did I choose to use grip? Because I can use lame as the encoder. It also means I don't have to spend unnecessary time in Windows XP. Some FreeDB entries are a little messy - please learn to spell rhythm people - but the title of a song is secondary to the quality of the encoding. That was the clincher. Despite the niceness of the iTunes interface, it ultimately comes down to the music.
Hopefully I'll get my music re-ripped and encoded in a few weeks.
How do you maintain your music collection?
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I just downloaded EZ CD-DA Extractor (www.poikosoft.com). The guys at work tell me it works better than iTunes' ripper, and it keeps all the pertinant data about each song so I don't have to go back and type it in manually. I think this is because the default setting is ID3 format or something like that.
Stumbled upon here through AntiPixel, somehow.... I use EAC (www.exactaudiocopy.de) while on my Windows machine. I've heard that it works fine in *nix via WINE, but I have yet to test it through that or VMWare for Linux. It's a very nice and secure ripper - it does C2 error correction and stuff. Works fine with LAME [although I don't use it - I prefer to pass the commands off to Nero 6's MP4 encoder]. Very nice for my Avex [Japanese] discs which have horrible copy-protection on them.