Re: Bitrate with MP3's?????
As said before, the higher the bitrate the better the sound quality but also the larger the file. Also, some devices can't play files with high bitrates (some cell phones for example). Honestly, 128 sounds fine to me, but I always encode to 320. I figure that one day I may have a better home stereo system than I have now and I'll appreciate the quality then. Some day I plan to build a mp3 jukebox with a touch screen interface that will house my whole collection. Disk drives are getting larger and cheaper all the time so I don't worry about the size so much. I've already ripped and encoded my entire CD collection at 320. I guess I'm just paranoid that I'd have to redo that at some later date if I'd used 128.
For most of my collection I ripped with
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and encoded with
LAME. The ones I've done in Linux I ripped with
CDParanoia and used the LAME or
Blade encoder compiled for Linux.
I've gotten a little lazy as of late and used Windows Media Player to rip and encode. I hope I don't regret that later. I always use mp3 format so I don't run into any
DRM issues in the future. By default,
Windows Media Player wants to use its native format instead of mp3. It's nice to have the freedom to play my files on any of my computers, laptops, phones, mp3 players, and my truck. That's why I stick with mp3 format.
CD Ripping in a nutshell...
When you "rip" a CD, you're extracting the CD Audio from the disc and converting that to .wav format. This is a very large file (as in 60-100MB or more).
To make the mp3, you use an encoder to compress the large wav file into the much smaller mp3 file. Any time you compress anything you're going to lose some quality. MP3 is a lossy (but not lousy
) format for sound much the same as JPG is a lossy format for images.
Most modern canned "ripping software" will do both of these steps as such that the novice user is shielded from the reality that it's 2 seperate things (ripping and encoding). Windows Media Player does this for example. This is one reason I use EAC since it lets the user set the path to their own external encoding program of their choice.
Another trivial tidbit.... MP3 encoding is a CPU intensive task. Back in 1999 when I had a Pentium 133MHz computer, it could take an hour just to encode one song. I had a small collection of random singles back then that I'd queue up in my Winamp 1.x or 2.x player and listen to them on my computer. It worked my computer so hard back then that I could barely use the computer for other tasks while listening to mp3's. Today, it's trivial to do that.
More info...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3
