Which Audio Format

Mobile-D

So, after many transfers from hard-drive to hard-drive, partition to partition, computer to MP3 player, etc, a lot of my MP3 files have become corrupt. So, I was about to re-rip them all from my CD collection, but a friend was talking about other file formats the other day, so I started thinking.

What would be the best file format to rip my CDs to? I'm looking for about the best audio quality I can get out of a compressed format. My MP3 player plays: "MP3, WMA, WAV and Audible" files, so I guess it would have to be one of those?

And is there a best program to do this ripping? I use Winamp Pro currently.

Raere

Mobile-D wrote: »

So, after many transfers from hard-drive to hard-drive, partition to partition, computer to MP3 player, etc, a lot of my MP3 files have become corrupt. So, I was about to re-rip them all from my CD collection, but a friend was talking about other file formats the other day, so I started thinking.

What would be the best file format to rip my CDs to? I'm looking for about the best audio quality I can get out of a compressed format. My MP3 player plays: "MP3, WMA, WAV and Audible" files, so I guess it would have to be one of those?

And is there a best program to do this ripping? I use Winamp Pro currently.

Are you sure your MP3 player doesn't play AAC files? Those are preferable. If not, MP3 is fine. There are tons of programs out there that'll do it for you. I personally use EAC to rip my stuff, but it can be confusing. If you take an hour or so to set it up and learn how to use it properly, you'll get excellent results.

DrFrylock

MP3 is the most compatible format you'll find. It probably doesn't have the highest quality to bitrate ratio, but it's within a factor of 1.5 or 2. WAV files are lossless and high-quality, but they're 10X bigger than the equivalent MP3. 256kbps MP3 is extremely good and will play anywhere. Don't encode with VBR, because it can mess up seeking and such, and doesn't improve filesize or quality that much.

SoulStalker

Sorry DrFrylock, I'm going to have to disagree with you when you recommend against VBR. VBR encoded files offer the best quality/file size ratio, as they encode different samples at varying bitrates to optimize compression for the target quality. Any player with a decent MP3 decoder (i.e. - any MP3 player made within the last 5 years) should have no issues with seeking through VBR files. See this wiki article from Hydrogen Audio (one of the most respected sites for audio encoding) for more information:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lame#Recommended_encoder_settings

Edit: Sorry, I missed answering the other questions the OP had. The only formats you should really consider are WMA and MP3. Audible is a file format used for audio books, and WAV (as DrFrylock pointed out) is an uncompressed audio format, which means your files will end up at least 10x larger. As DrFrylock also pointed out, MP3s are by far the most common format. I've heard tell that WMA's are better at very low bitrates (less than 128kbps), but for higher bitrates you would probably be better off sticking with MP3.

How large is your MP3 player, anyway? And how much do you care about/notice the difference in sound quality between MP3s encoded at different bitrates?

Mobile-D

My MP3 player is a 30g Creative Zen Vision M, and with most of my stuff encoded at 256kbps I'm closing in on the 20g mark. I'd like to be able to fit as much video on there as possible, too. While I notice different bitrates on some songs more than others, I'm more worried about keeping a high quality encoding in case (god forbid) anything ever happens to my CD collection.

Monolithic_Dome

Mobile-D wrote: »

So, after many transfers from hard-drive to hard-drive, partition to partition, computer to MP3 player, etc, a lot of my MP3 files have become corrupt. So, I was about to re-rip them all from my CD collection, but a friend was talking about other file formats the other day, so I started thinking.

What would be the best file format to rip my CDs to? I'm looking for about the best audio quality I can get out of a compressed format. My MP3 player plays: "MP3, WMA, WAV and Audible" files, so I guess it would have to be one of those?

And is there a best program to do this ripping? I use Winamp Pro currently.

If you really wanna keep the highest audio quality possible, encode everything as FLAC and then use foobar to transcode to your portable. in high bitrate MP3

SoulStalker

Personally, if I were you and I was planning on re-ripping my entire collection, I'd rip them in VBR with quality V0 (as described in the Hydrogen Audio wiki). That should produce files which are similar in size to your current rips (and so will not take up more space), and it should give you the best possible quality to file size ratio that MP3 can offer.

Daemonion

I would rip everything in WAV, so you have an exact copy of all your music, and then get a free program like "db poweramp converter" (google that) to encode the WAV into any formats you want.

I have all my music in several formats - the original WAV, WMA Losless, WMA 198kbps, MP3 320kbps, MP3 128kbps, OGG 500kbps.

All you have to do is select all your .wav files, tell the program to put the new files into a new folder somewhere, and let it sit overnight.

With a q9450 quad-core I encoded over 5,000 songs from .wav to .wma in just a few hours.


This way I can utulize pretty much whatever media play I get in the future since I am flexible codec wise. Also, db poweramp lets you easily install new codecs, so you can even encode to apple's.

What

Listen to Soulstalker. VB0 is pretty much the best MP3 format at the moment. It keeps the bitrate at a decent rate while keeping the file size to a minimum. I also recommend you look around the HydrogenAudio forums. They are excellent.

For collection/library purposes, FLAC is the way to go. It's the best lossless codec.

EDIT: Also, as Raere said, Exact Audio Copy is the best converter available. It is a bit difficult to set up, but this guide should make it a bit easier. It includes instructions on how to rip in OGG, VBR, FLAC and some others.

ben0207

I would go with MP3 or if you can play it, AAC. AAC is much higher qaulity for the filesize, but there's a chance your player can't do it.

Avoid WMA like the plague, and you probably don't need lossless copies so don't worry about that.

1ddqd

FLAC is space hungry - I would argue that if you are collecting for the sake of having, not listening to intently then 256kbps to 320kbps MP3 OR VBR is the way to go. I wouldn't rely on FLAC unless you're a quality whore and/or have the space for this.