Ripping CDs to MP3

Factual Questions
21

Hi BNorton:

  • It’s really easy.
    First off, WHYYY would you want to record MONO music ? Well, it could be from Spinner. Use TotalRecorder to nip it out (it’s the only program that will), then bring up AudioForge.

Load in the .WAV file.
From the menu, click on:

  • Process
  • Channel Converter

Change Output Channels to Stereo
Click on the checkmark box: Convert to specified output channels only (no custom mixing)

After a second, you have converted the MONO to STEREO since you now have two channels, one for the LEFT ear and one for the right EAR.

It still sounds like MONO though cause you haven’t tweaked an ear yet.
That’s what we’re gonna do now !

With the mouse click on ONE of the channels (either above or below) NOT BOTH.

If you’re not sure with the mouse, just hit [Tab] twice and it’ll put you there.

Then from the menu, click on

  • Effects
  • Delay/Echo
  • Simple

Change the Preset to:
Pseudo-Stereo (Select one channel only!)

Let it run for a bit and TA DAH !
You now have converted the not-sounding-stereo into sounds-like-stereo !

How does it do it ?

Well, it takes the channel you tweaked and sneaks it up JUST a bit slower, 1/100th of a second. Turns out this is all that is needed to “fool” the ear into hearing Stereo. Now, it’s not perfect, but if you’re nipping music out of Spinner, it’s the only way to go. :slight_smile:

Hope This Helps !

David

22

They seem to play fine. The display (incl tracking bar) in WinAmp is incorrect, and when I try to burn with Nero it also shows songs as over 20 min when they are in fact 3 min or so. File is also slightly larger than it should be. This only happens with average and variable bitrates, so I now stick to constant bitrates.

In any event, I haven’t updated dBpowerAMP in a while - I have version 9a. I’ll download the latest version and see what happens. Still, while dBpowerAMP is handy and easy to use, I rely on CDex for extensive ripping and reliable encoding.

23

Actually I wasn’t all that interested in recording in mono, but you said something about converting mono to “true stereo” and I couldn’t figure out how in the world you could do that.

The process you describe makes sense but I would hardly call that “true stereo”. Neat, though.

24

Winamp 2.95 has a decent CD ripping feature too. Supports up to 320Kbps and variable bitrates.