Audiophiles: CD Ripping and MP3 Bitrates

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am going to perform The Great CD Rip of 2010 to convert 15 years of CDs to high quality MP3’s for portability. I am trying to “look forward” as best as I can with respect to file types and bit rates so that I will never have do this again (or at least 10-15 years or so).

With my research done so far, I have settled on 224 kbps variable bit rate (VBR) MP3s using the latest LAME codec. I am using MP3s because they will always have greater support than AAC or any other format, and from what little I have read, higher bit rate VBR mp3’s sound about equal to AACs.

Considering that it is going to take me a long time to implement this, I am still a little uncertain about this file type/bitrate decision. I am an amateur audiophile so I want near indistinguishable from CD quality, but I don’t want to wantonly waste space on my future MP3 player so that I don’t have as much song selection.

Should I up it to 256 kbps? 360 kbps?

What have you all done and are happy/ not happy with?

2

Even hardcore audiophiles cannot reliably tell the difference between a 256k mp3 and a CD.

And that’s on a real high-end system - so I think the choice you’ve made is spot on. On most systems you won’t see any benefit in going any higher, but you start to lose some of the portability.

I tend to rip at 192k but that’s because I only listen to bog standard PC speakers or in the car, so there’s no benefit to going any higher.

3

How many CDs do you have? If you have the hard drive space, you could rip them losslessly and then make mp3 copies for your portable player. If you ever want to change formats, you could convert the lossless files again without having to bother with the CDs.

4

Probably about 200.

Hmm. That is a thought.

5

You can buy a 2tb hard drive for about $130.00 or even cheaper if look. Use Google Shopping

The Hitachi one on that list is great. I have it.

I would recommend you rip the CDs losslessly. Then you can easily convert them to whatever format and bitrate you want. I have about a tb of music and I have dbPoweramp. I just right click on the lossless file and convert it. Unfortunately dbPoweramp isn’t free, but it does have a limited free version. There are also other free converters, but for pure convenience, nothing beats dbPoweramp. A close second to dbPoweramp is called Foobar and it IS free

Major lossless formats are FLAC, WMA-Lossless, WavPack, APE, ALAC. TAK is a great new lossless codec but is very new.

Lossless is lossless so it doesn’t matter which one you choose. The difference is how much they compress and how fast they do it.

APE compresses the best, but it decompresses slowly. But if you’re solely worried about disc space, APE is a good choice. WavPack is the best compromise between fast encoding and fast decoding. FLAC is your choice for peer2peer, if you’re into that.

For lossy codecs (meaning you lose some quality in music) it is a personal choice. And it depends on a lot of things. If you use your music through headphones only,
like I do, the bit rate can be a lot lower.

Lossy codecs include mp3, aac (mp4, a4a), wma, Ogg Vorbis.

The most widely used format is mp3, followed by wma, then mp4. (Note: the file extension WMA is use for BOTH WMA-Lossless and WMA-Lossy. The only way to tell if a WMA file is compressed or lossless is by looking at the file size)

Lossy codecs will compress the CD track to about 8% - 15% of the original file size. Whereas lossless codecs compress between 45% and 60% of the original file size.

If you’re going to use mp3, you need to use LAME. Lame makes an mp3 codec that is regarded as the best. There are many different manufacturers of mp3 codecs but Lame comes out the best.

If you go with aac (mp4), NERO makes the best mp4 codec with Apple’s mp4 codec coming in a close second.

So which bit rate? It depends on a lot of things. First of all HOW you compress it. Are you using ABR (average bit rate), CBR (constant bit rate) or VBR (Variable Bit rate)

CBR means that throughout the song, the codec will compress at the same rate regardless.

ABR means the codec will produce the bit rate specified as a sum total average.

VBR means the codec will TRY to produce the specified bitrate but will go above and lower if needed.

For instance, with VBR if you specifiy a bitrate of 200, if part of the song only needs to go as low as 150bitrate to get the result, it will. If it needs 320bitrate to get a part of the song it will go higher.

You see different parts of the song usually need different bitrates. So it’s usually best to use VBR for quality levels and space maximization

What bitrate to use? This is up to you. If you can’t hear the difference it’s your call.

A bit rate of 320 is considered the best quality. You can go higher but you won’t get any more fidelity so it’s a waste of file space. Anything below 128bitrate and you will definately notice problems. For the average listener a bitrate of 192 is sufficent.

Remember a bitrate depends on the type of songs. For the average pop song of today 128 is fine. But if you listen to classical music, you’re gonna have to go much higher. Heavy Metal music is the hardest to shrink. For heavy metal you pretty much have to use 320 because the variations in the music need the entire range.

So you can see it’s not only the bitrate, but the TYPE OF MUSIC and the bitrate.

I love old music from the 40s and since most of it is mono, you can get bitrates as low as 90 and it sounds great. For spoken records (audiobooks for example) a bit rate of 32 is the recommended but anything between 16 and 64 is the usual range)

As a broad general rule a VBR of 192 made with an mp3 encoder made by LAME, is the best overall way to go.

I would also go to HydrogenAudio and look around. They are very nice as long as you don’t mention pirated music. They hate that :slight_smile: These people are hardcore audiophiles though. But you can find listening tests made with the various codecs.

I woud also use EAC to rip your CDs. Hydrogenaudio has a setup guide for EAC which is easy to follow. The nice thing about EAC is if you get a good rip, you can be assured it IS good. If it is a rip with issues, you can tell exactly where the problem is.

For file tagging, I recommend mp3Tag

BTW all the programs I used and noted above (with the exception of dbPoweramp) are free

6

I just bought a collection of 330 CDs on Craigslist very cheap. I decided to just rip them all and delete what I don’t want instead of ripping them piecemeal and then having to check and see what I’ve already ripped later. They came out to about 110GB in Apple Lossless. (I will need some more space for lossy versions.) I set iTunes to automatically rip them and then eject when it was done. That made it easy. I did it in the background while I was doing other stuff on the computer.

7

are most of you using Burst mode in dbpoweramp?

my big wtf moment is when dbpoweramp says a song didn’t verify.

I always reclean the cd and rip again. Usually I get the same didn’t verify warning.
Then I try the slower secure mode. Once in awhile that gives a better rip.

If it doesn’t, I play the song. If it sounds ok then I say screw it and move on.

The OP said he has a 15 year old cd collection. There will be errors on old cds that have been used a lot. Scratches and surface wear build up over time.

A lot of my cd’s were bought in the early 1990’s. I’ve ripped most of them.

8

I think your specs are just fine. Years ago I used to rip at 128k, most of them are still fine but some are a little tinny.

9

I rip everything at 320 (or higher if the software supports it.) My son the musician tells me that no one can hear the difference above 256. We have agreed to disagree.

10

I can hear a great deal of difference between pure CD format and 192K and it matters which engine I use to rip the music. Haven’t tried 256 yet. When I get time I’ll try that bit rate on the songs that are most noticeable.

11

There’s a lot of confirmation bias involved with CD vs MP3 comparisons… people expect to hear a difference so they do. A blind trial is the only reliable measure :slight_smile:

The original article I referenced is now behind a paywall, and the English translation is sadly defunct, but if you can track it down it’s an illuminating read.

Basic conclusion was that on a top-spec system it’s not possible to reliably distinguish between 256k mp3s and CDs - bear in mind that this was back in 2000 and the encoding technology has improved since then.

A lot of people will intuitively psuh back against this conclusion, but I’ve seen other surveys that support it.

12

I did this last year. I own about 1000 CDs. I ripped them all at 320k. It all fits on a 500GB Western Digital external drive that’s not much bigger than an iPhone.

13

Burst mode is the last way you want to rip a CD, whether it is EAC or dbPoweramp.

Burst mode provides for no error correction.

Sometimes burst mode is the only way to go on old CDs with scratches. You may be able to get an acceptable rip with Burst mode and not in other modes.

If your CD has errors you may be able to buff the scratches off. If your CDs have scratches on the label side, forget it. The data is stored under the label. So while you can buff off a scratch on the shiny side, once the label is scratched, you lose the actual data and can’t recover it.

When dbPoweramp says the song didn’t verify it’s saying that your rip has errors. Whether these are audible or not is an open question. You must listen to the track and see. Often you can’t hear the error, but the rip is not a copy of the CD in the sense of “perfect.” (I put that in quotes 'cause there is always an arguement among audiophiles of whether or not anyone can truly copy a CD perfectly)

What a secure mode does is read the data, then it rereads it. If the two rereads are the same, it moves to the next sector. If they do not it rereads the same sector again and again (the person ripping the CD specifies the number of rereads). As soon as the ripping program gets the same data from two of the rereads it moves on to the next sector. So let’s say the program rereads the data 5 times and the 2nd read and the 5th read match. Then it takes those rereads as the accurate read.

Bitrates is really a personal thing. If YOU can’t hear the difference it doesn’t matter.

Bitrates are most important when you have limited space to store music. A 128 bitrate may sound find with headphones but bad with speakers.

And again the type of music you are ripping. A heavy metal or classic music piece requires a high bit rate to get a decent sounding rip

It’s really all up to you.

14

This is consistent with a few studies I’ve read that, in double-blind ABX testing, few people can distinguish between 192 and CD and the results for 256k were indistinguishable from pure guesswork.

I’m glad people recommended Hydrogenaudio as a resource. They may be hardcore digital audiophiles, but they’re not the woo-woo types who buy into the $100 cables, magic pebble, conditioned network cable nonsense. Those few who do wander in get ridiculed pretty mercilessly. I believe some members have posted some pretty extensive comparative codec ABX tests so that may be interesting to the OP.

Personally, I’ve ripped my +1500 CD collection to lossless FLAC files onto their own separate harddrive, which I’ve then backed up onto another external USB drive. I used FLAC, not because I can tell the difference between lossless and lossy compression (I can’t), but because it’s open-source, widely supported by both sofware and hardware companies and it gives me the flexibility to transcode to a number of different lossy formats without having to dig the original CD back out of storage.

I can transcode to 128k AAC to upload to my ipod, burn an MP3 CD to play in my car or just a standard audio CD to bring over to my parents to play on their system without having to worry about the very audible loss in quality when you transcode from one lossy codec to another.