If I wish to copy a music CD to my computer and then later make a copy of that music on another CD to play in my car or other CD player, what copy quality is best?
The defalt is low on the size/quality scale. 28 MB, 64Kbps.
As cheap as the blank CD’s are I will give it a try at both ends of the scale - still interested in opinions/experiences.
Thanks,
Steve
I’ve been ripping the tracks as .wav files.
WAV of course is one way to go, as it has no compression whatsoever. I find that using a variable bit rate of 0 (best VBR rate) gives the best sound with a good compression. They take up more room than a flat rate of 128, for example, but less than ripping a whole cd just to WAV.
A bit of elaboration please.
To me WAV. is something I do when parting company 
I’ll be checking out the options and reading the help files on the windows media player that I am using - but understanding is not always as good as experience.
B&I, a .wav is one way of saving a sound file exactly as the original. No compression, no loss of quality. Hence the CD you make from it will be (nearly) identical to the original. (If the original is somewhat scratchy, the error correction in reading the original may not be a 100% copy of what was on the CD when it was new.) Note that the wavs files (1 per song is better than 1 per CD) will be large. A 74 minute CD will be about 640MB. If you want to permanently save them, then convert to MP3s. I recommend variable bit rate 256k encodings.
Let’s assume you own the music, but if you have a cd program that writes Audio cds, it should handle anything for you. Mine comes with an audio extraction program.
Try some blank music cd’s. I bought some where I work, they are labeled for any speed. weird.
I disagree, don’t use blank MUSIC CDs, they cost more. Use regular blank non-music CDs and save a little cash. They’ll play on your car CD player just as well.
256K seems a bit overkill to me. At that point, why bother with MP3 format? Might as well make a WAV. I find that 128 is perfectly acceptible, 160 is nice, and 196 (or whatever it is) is as high as you really need to go. 128 is the standard, more-or-less. Below 128, you can hear the difference, that’s for sure. I have difficulty discerning the difference between 160 and anything much higher than that. I would imagine that would show up in the very very low and very very high frequencies, probably in the inaudible range. At least that’s how I understand the MP3 algorithm to work. Honestly, though, as somebody who occassionally spends time in the studio listening to music through expensive monitors, I’d be hard pressed to tell a 160 MP3 from a 256 MP3. Maybe y’all can, but I certainly can’t. Then again, in terms of preserving as much of the actual information that is contained on the CD, then certainly 256 will do it better than 160.
thanks for the replies, seems like the default (64K) is a bit low.
As I recall (and I can’t find my references at the moment of course), 128 BPS is considered the minimum for “CD Quality” sound. YMMV.
I meant 128 KBPS, of course. :doh:
The quality depends greatly on what CD ripping program and MP3 encoder you use. A 128kbps MP3 from a good encoder like LAME will sound as good or better than a 192kbps MP3 from a crappy encoder like Xing or MusicMatch. You’ll get MUCH better quality using a dedicated ripping program (like CDex) and a good MP3 encoder (like the LAME MP3 encoder, which comes with CDex). If you use a program like MusicMatch, Audiocatalyst, or Microsoft or Real’s tools, you will get much reduced audio quality.
In general, 128kbps is considered basic, listenable quality for MP3s. 192kbps is considered a good balance of quality and filesize. 256kbps, from a good encoder application, can be considered CD quality. For comparison, the uncompressed bitrate of CD audio is about 1400kbps. Below 128kbps, quality is generally not acceptable for any purpose.
It also depends on what you’re listening to it on. On headphones or a decent car stereo, 128 sounds pretty good. At low volume on $20 computer speakers (like what you have at most jobs), you can go down a bit lower, say 96 and still sound pretty good (this is assuming you’re using LAME or a similar quality encoder). If you are feeding it to a more high end stereo system, I’d consider 160 kbps a bare minimum. I do most of my encoding at 256 kbps.
Wav is mostly a waste of space if you don’t plan on reburning it to a music cd. Play around with an mp3 encoder and find a bit rate you’re happy with.
If you’re really demanding about sound quality, you can always choose a lossless format like Monkey’s Audio (*.ape). Like an MP3 it can be decompressed on the fly and play in Winamp (with the appropriate plugin), but retains all of the original sound quality of the WAV. They aren’t for the faint of storage space, though. APE files tend to be about 3/5 the size of the original WAVs.
The only real disadvantage is that you can’t play them as-is on a car stero that supports MP3. Of course, you can extract them back to their original
What about for .WMA files? According to my Windows Media Player, 64 Kpbs is “CD quality.” Is this accurate? And does it mean that there’s nothing to be gained by setting the quality higher when copying from a CD?
I can’t speak from experience, but I’ve heard from several sources that a 64kbps WMA is about the same quality as a 128k MP3.