Disclaimer 1: Yes, I know there are already 2 other MP3 threads going on, but those are sales threads and not technical.
Disclaimer 2: I’m new to this stuff, be gentle.
Question 1: For the time being, I’m not downloading music, I’m ripping CDs. But the playback has a lot of pops in the sound. What causes these?
Question 2: The way I get ripped songs from my computer to the MP3 player is to copy the files from my hard drive to the removeable media. But no matter how I rename the files, I can’t seem to change the order in which they play. In fact, from a fully ripped CD, I always get the last song first. Is there a way to change this?
Just a few thoughts based on my own experience with some MP3 players.
For pops, it’s probably worth trying some slightly higher encoding rates. I had one player which refused to nicely play anything below 160 bitrate, which has since become my bottom-end standard.
For playing order… see if the player manufacturer has a ‘firmware update’ or flash update, that’s the operating system of the MP3 player itself. A lot of the time the original firmware doesn’t have good control over things like playing order, and later versions fix that.
The program is called FreeRIP, or RIPFree, or something like that. As you can see, I’m an audiophile snob who will only settle for the very best of the high-end stuff.
If you are using windows I suggest ripping with either augio grabber or cdex. both free.
I am not familiar at all with the program you are using. I suspect that the ordering has to do with file names. I would suggest that you have the CD ripper program name the files something like 01-first song.mp3 02-another song.mp3
If the songs are just named first song.mp3 and another sone.mp3 then the ordering can be alphabetical which is usually not what you want.
Looking at free rip online it looks like it will work fine and you should be able to specify the file name as <track numer><song title>.mp3 Is that what you are doing? do the mp3s have the pops when you listen to them on the PC? If not I would suggest you normalize the tracks. This basically rescales the volume if some where the track is too load. I have seen problems like this with some mp3 players. I suspect that free rip will allow you to do this audio grabber and cdex both allow you to do this.
I just wanted to pop back in and thank you for your answers.
I’ll try those other rippers to see how they do.
As for why the songs came out not in order – I was numbering them so that they’d order correctly, but I was ordering the wrong things. It seems the ripper would rip songs in more or less random order, so that it might first rip track 8 and call it track 1. Silly me, I believed it was actually track 1. So I’d rename it something like JTull_SFTW_1 instead of JTull_SFTW_8.
I had trouble with a lot of crackles and pops using my laptop. It turned out to be the CD drive slowly dying and it resolved itself when I used a different drive. I think it was due to excessive read errors - music CDs do not have the same level of error correction as data CDs do and it occured to different degrees on different source CDs.
