We all started somewhere, and we all made stupid mistakes. What're yours? Here's mine....
I started off making MP3s with MusicMatch, since that's what came with my laptop(first computer I had that I used for something but an offline typewriter, last June), with error correction on. The CDs weren't scratched, so there weren't any skips. I listened on a two speaker boombox, so the 128k didn't bother me. Then I ripped them all to 192k and made a new CD two weeks later. Then I found dBpowerAMP and used that instead since MusicMatch was really annoying and ripped to 192k MP3s(again, outdoor boombox, and bad laptop integrated sound, $20 headphones, 112k could've been easily transparent to me). Then in August I learned all the lossless compressions and Ogg Vorbis, and in November of EAC. Here's where the big mistakes are.
I used a spectral analyzer to show that a 48k Ogg Vorbis was better than dBpowerAMP's 128k MP3s, for a while, then I tried to make my own --alt presets using razorLAME's GUI and used the spectral analyzer for it, until I saw "wait a sec, WTF does volume have to do with quality?" after humiliating myself for the first time here . Then I just used razorLAME --alt preset standard -Z after some reading around here, and I'm pretty much in the category with many of the audio freaks here now.
What did you do stupid starting off? I know %90 of you didn't start off perfect and just go to easyLAME and EAC's website the first day. I think I progressed well though.
I used Xing for awhile when they first developed VBR..... Cry for me my brothers... cry for me....
Stupid mistakes?...writing audio programs
Hehe... well, before there was EAC there was WinDAC32 and Fraunhoffer mp3enc (iirc). I used to rip at 112kbps (only used crappy speakers) - but this was probably around 1997 - when it took around 45 minutes for a Pentium 75 to encode a file. After that I used Audiograbber, then Audiocatalyst because of its super ripping speeds - I went up to 160kbps because I heard it was a good idea... still using crappy desktop speakers.
Then the first revelation came through when r3mix was made public - a wonderful site at the time despite having technological innacurracies - it did pose quite a fair argument and remedied the problem with mp3 quality to an extent. Roel (r3mix) had created various presets to satisfy some of people's needs of mp3, but mainly his own - he did have a trade-off point where he thought it was good enough for him, and therefore good enough for everybody. Oh, and not forgetting, introducing me to EAC.
The second revelation was coming to HA - learning about the alt presets and secure ripping. Easily put.
The third revelation was Frank Klemm's MPC and learning about Offsets, who I have to attribute to MTRH who has taught me a hell of a lot, as well as GenjuroXL, Case, Seed among others. IRC is definately where its at.
Ruairi
the first thing I used I'm not even sure what encoder it was. All I remembered was that it was freaking slow. So i never bothered to make mp3s until I met Xing via Audio Catalyst. I never made vbrs though. I used that for awhile but then never bothered to make mp3s of the things i owned and only sampled mp3s.
Fast forward to now, I use LAME -ape and MPC
My first steps in audio compression were (on AMD K5 100):
a ) Ripping with Audiograbber
1.L3ENC @128 kbps - was nice, but sloooooow...
2.VQF @128 kbps (test) - well, just destroys sound...
(K6 200)
b ) Ripping with CDex
4.BladeEnc (test) - was too bad for me
5.Plugger (test) - quite nice and fast
6.LAME ~3.2x - tests in Chip magazine showed that this is the best and it really is.
(K6-III 400)
c )Ripping with EAC - found it while looking for 'scratched cdrom recovery'
6.Tried alt-presets - were nice...
7.OGG Vorbis - at that time it wasn't too great
(Athlon 1000)
8.Monkey's Audio - used that for long time...
9.Discovered FLAC
10.Hydrogen Audio
11.Using MusePack Compression now for HDD storage,
FLAC for archiving, MP3/OGG for friends and some CDs.
(Athlon-XP 1700)
12.New HDDs - lossless only now... (FLAC)
Was Bedeox (now dead) - AstralStorm...
My biggest mistake was to burn CDRs.
I've lost about 20 of them, now unreadable.
What worries me most are the 5 ones I burned from early 70's 9 ips tapes that my father recorded in USA from microgroove private collections. XIII - XV century music recorded in the 50's.
The CDRs should be currently dying, and it's a miracle that the tapes were still playable 3 years ago when we recorded them (now they are 30 years old).
Biggest audio-newbie mistake(s):
Early 1980's: Listening to dad's 8-track tapes and thinking that they were cool.
Mid 1980's: Buying 45's of Michael Jackson and thinking that they were cool
Late 1980's: Taping my LP's onto cheap BASF brand cassettes, which I now realize had a frequency range of about 200Hz-10Khz
Mid 1990's: Listening to MD's recorded with an early version of ATRAC. Need I say more?
Mid-Late 1990's: Buying into that audiophile "green sharpie" and "spatial resolution" trash and thinking that LP's on my cheap $60 turntable I bought in 1985 sounded better than CD's (which is utterly false).
Thank heaven for Hydrogen Audio.
Back in 1999... pirated copies of Audiograbber + Audioactive Production Studio, 128 CBR HQ Fraunhofer MP3s. Used this for 1 1/2 years... too bad when you don't have internet and all your friends are using the same programs Discovered Lame in 2001, used 192 CBR and I actually thought transcoding would give me better quality, since Lame was better and all...
Then -r3mix came and I became more interested in quality rather than small & many files... I spent hour for hour reading boards, FAQs and tests and discovered Musepack, named MP+ at that time. I never encoded a single MP3 again and am still happy with Musepack.
i liked CBR 192 xing because of the fast encoding times... also used audiograbber forever having to refresh the CD many times to rip all the songs on the free version
believing the words of the bladeenc coder that "his app was dedicated solely to quality, not to speed" and happily used it at the default setting (128k dual mono, no lowpass)
I should have read further, where he explains that his code sucks at anything < 256k
I started off using CDEX with Blade then I moved to LAME. I tried VBR (On my pentium 200Mhz) and it sucked, not the sound, but the fact it took two hours to compress a song.
Well, at first I didn't really know how to rip and encode music. I copied some mp3:s from a friend when Winamp (i think it was) was still command line based. Then, after a while i found out about some ripper, I think it was WinDAC. I don't remember how i encoded the rips. I do remember wanting to use AudioGrabber, but I couldn't get it to work with my cdrom.
Then came AudioCatalyst, I really liked that program. To be able to rip and encode in just a few clicks was a dream after all hazzles i had had. Of course I used VBR setting that gave an average around 128 kbit.
Then i got a new cdrom, and all of a sudden i got AudioGrabber working. At this point i had for the first time realized that different encoders existed. I read somewhere that both FhG and Blade where the best ones, so i tried them. Never got Blade to work though, so i just used FhG.
All of a sudden, a friend of mine started harrassing me, telling me to encode everything in 192 CBR, because that was the standard of the "scene" and all the release groups.
Then, a while ago another friend told me about MPC, he said it was the best format ever, but I didn't really listen to him. I felt satisfied with my 192 CBR mp3s.
After that I somehow discovered Ogg. I tried and used that for a while, I was really satisfied. Somewhere along the way i discovered APE through some P2P-program, I didn't know what program to use, though. I asked my MPC-loving friend if he knew, and he directed med to this site.
After a week of reading through these forums i switched format to MPC --braindead, just to be sure.
I used to use realjukebox to encode 96kbps mp3s. Then, I used LAME, and now all I use is MPC because it encodes so fast.
This story starts in 1998...
Back then, I used Creative CD Player to playback CDs, and Creative Wave studio to record them. Both came bundled with my SB16 ISA sound card. (yes, you read that right. That was analogic audio extraction).
Any disk usage during the recording process would introduce clicks. If there were too many, I would re-rip. Usually I didn't bother. I was that concerned about quality back then.
Then, encoded the wave file (one at a time! I had "only" a 1.2Gb HDD) with mp3compressor, by MP3hc (actually, it's a program that included stolen binaries from FhG. I never knew until I went to it's website to check for updates and a message about copyright violation was displayed. Of course, I didn't care and kept encoding my files away). Always 128kbps.
Then, I listened to them on Creative SBS32 speakers, using Winamp 1.55
That was a P166 w/o MMX puter, 16Mb RAM.
Some years (2?) later, now with a P333 / 48Mb RAM computer, I discovered the joys of fast encoding. (Gogo no Coda +CDex). Gogo was so ficking speedy! Back then, I didn't even know you could get different qualities with different encoders - I thought they would all output the same MP3 file. So, speed was all I looked for.
Finally, early 2001, I discovered PsyTEL AACenc at an obscure web site. (aacfree.da.ru, later I discovered a famous developer owned that domain). At that time, I didn't move to AAC because it sounded better - I did it just because people were saying it was the "Next Best Thing". I used AACenc v1.2. Was slow as hell but - oh, what the fick, it was soo 31337!
By then, I had an AMD K-6 500 with 128Mb RAM, so speed wasn't all that horrendous, anyway.
I remember back then holding that Psytel developer in extreme respect and awe. "that guy must kick ass. I won't post any question to him at the VQF.com bbs, or he'll laugh at my insignificance".
Later (mid 2001), I started posting at the Audiocoding.com forum (my first audio board, which still holds a special place in my heart). But made sure to avoid getting in touch with Mr. Dimkovic. I was still too afraid.
I couldn't really imagine months later I would be again in the same forum as him and - delirium of deliriums - have him as a friend and in my ICQ contact list!
During these years, I have experienced almost everything (sounds like drugaddict talk. Maybe it is): MP+ (SV5), Ogg Vorbis (back when it was bundled with Lame), VQF, Astrid AAC, ePAC, WMA, RA, Liquid Audio, even IMA ADPCM. Most lossless flavors too.
And some people would say it was all useless, because I didn't learn how to properly choose codecs in the process.
Well, that was my audiocoding history. Hope you enjoyed it.
Kind regards;
Roberto Amorim.
It's nice to know I wasn't the only one who thought it was really cool to rip CDs 10 years ago through my SB16 ISA card using analogue capture either, on my 486SX33, with 4 meg of RAM. The quality didn't seem half bad, as long as you did not touch the PC, turned the screensaver off, kept the massive 1 Gb hard disk in tip top shape and fiddled to get those blasted recording levels just right.
I then exercised lossless compression by trying to use Pkzip, arj, rar, etc, with what is best described as completely crap results.
Discovered MP3 a few years ago, but thankfully on the same day, came across an impressive web site with lots of pretty graphs, showing me how Xing was a piece of crap, and instead I must use the ultimate, Blade... Same day, came across a killer ap called CDex that had Blade included. Cool... (Despite EAC being favoured, I can't let CDex go, and probably never will, thanks Roberto.)
When I went through a Linux phase, I discovered this strangely named encoder called LAME, which I had ignored it completely in Windows because I thought the name represented the quality, but it didn't seem half bad in Linux, and so many people were using it? A weird format called Ogg Vorbis (very early release candidate) was also bundled with my Linux distro, but who the hell would use something called Ogg? I didn't bother with it...
But hell, I've made mistakes more recently, and I nearly fell for the dodgy Sony Minidisc marketing about a year ago because the brouchure claimed that you could transfer WMA, MP3 and Wav directly onto Minidisc. It was only at the last minute that I realised it was all a transcode into ATRAC, but goddamit, I fell in love with the format anyway, and haven't looked back.
I also have ripped and encoded my entire CD collectiion about 5 times (Blade mp3 128 kbit, LAME CBR 192 kbit, LAME aps, Ogg Vorbis q5/6, MPC q5/6, and am now in the throws of doing it again, but at least time I'm going lossless, so hopefully it's the last time. All with CDex in various versions I might add.
Fat Boy Slim - "You've come along way baby" B)
Den.
(Despite EAC being favoured, I can't let CDex go, and probably never will, thanks Roberto.)
Thank-you, but I only did a very small part. You should really thank Albert Faber. He's the creator and maintainer of CDex.
Well, hrm. Began with the standard 128k MP3s back in... Must have been 5 years ago or so. Possibly more. Back when the place to download MP3s was on websites, and back when IRC was used for trading, not leeching. Over time, I learned that I could make MP3s as well. The kink was that my CD-ROM drive wouldn't let me rip in Windows. So, I had to boot into DOS to do any sort of ripping. I figured, "CDs are digital, so my CD-ROM drive will get a perfect copy every time," using some program called CD2WAV, I think it was.
As for encoders, I started out with some FHG encoder, not sure which. I discovered Xing and its speed, and had encoded a dozen or so albums with it when I realized: "Hey, this sounds horrible." Then, I migrated onto Blade, because, hey, it was an MP3 encoder, and I wasn't breaking the law that way. Eventually, I came across RazorBlade, and began tweaking my settings. Then, I migrated to Lame as the RB dev did, and decided that I was going to forsake the psymodel altogether and encode MP3s with only ATH measurements.
Around this time, I slowly migrated from 128 to 160, then to 192. I did several major ripping binges, on my dozen or so CDs at the time. Then I lost interest in it all. What I wanted from my encoders was to give me a perfect copy of the music, and I couldn't trust LAME, as I found artifacts at 192 kbps. The most disturbing thing was that I wasn't expecting that, and I thought that 192 was perfect. So I began to doubt in MP3.
I went into a phase of little activity, in terms of encoding. I just couldn't be sure that my copies were transparent, so I didn't bother. I came across R3mix, and thought "That sounds intriguing", but I couldn't really do much, because I had a 1.7 gig hard drive, and my CD burner had died. I likely would have used it to encode masses of music if I had storage available. Time passed, I got a new CD-Rom drive, I came across Vorbis, via Slashdot, then ff123's encoder tests, then HA. Finally, I found out about MPC, and I now am in the process of encoding my 100+ CDs in MPC -q6.
Other random stupidities:
- I thought that the "boost high frequencies" option in Nitrane was nifty.
- I burned CDs using Winamp's EQ to make them sound nice.
- My earliest rips were performed by placing a microphone next to my CD player for background music for SimCopter.
- At one point, I thought 4-bit ADPCM was transparent.
- At one point, I thought I could hear some sort of artifacting in 44.1/16bit audio. To me, it felt like a roughness or incompleteness. Since then, I've proven to myself that I can't differentiate music beyond 19kHz, and can hear in about 14bits.
- My earliest rips were performed by placing a microphone next to my CD player for background music for SimCopter.
That's the best one yet
My audio encoding future...
2004 Switched to OpenEAC commandline version, with --pimp, using MPC SV8. Using Foobar2000 1.03 for playback.
2005 Frank Klemm retires from audio scene following job application to work for RealNetworks. The scene has an outcry for Open MPC.
2006 Andree and Frank decide to open source MPC, however the code doesn't compile - and most of the comments are in German. CiTay translates however half the output comes out as gangster rap. Dibrom finishes acedemic activities and hacks in some new patented techniques. Perceptual CD quality starts floating around the ~90 kbps mark. Meanwhile Monty from Xiph.org has concentrated on video and licensed vp5 to be open.
2007 Roberto's AAC religion gets an official political presence. Ivan Dimkovic's face can be seen on the back of coins in Brazil. Peter stops coding so much, been spotted with John Romero's ex-wife, Stevie Case. Monty from Xiph sadly dies in an accident with Dance Dance Revolution 2409347th mix. Dibrom's hair is now so long he has a device at home where he can sleep in it hammock style.
2008 SK1 reaches puberty. Dibrom by now is on his 800th avatar, CiTay advocates german rap and starts his own record label consisting of halfcast multilingual rap artists called "IST DEATH". Linux gets hugely popular but its full of bugs and everyone reminisces about the "Windows" days. CD's and DVD's are no more, its just "the wire". Everyone uses lossless.
2009 Emmett Plant opens Xaph.org, committed to closed multimedia. By this time, he's incredibly thin and survives completely without sleep. JohnMK invents another gender and wins a coveted science award. Peter leaves Poland, buys Xiph.org, and really lightens up by adding an integrated seekbar to foobar2000. Asian Prince http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg (http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg) forms a life long friendship with HydrogenAudio, and writes plugins for foobar2000.
Ruairi
Around 1997 or 1998 I discovered that you could download music thanks to some format named MP3. Since I was a computer geek 10th grader at the time, I naturally wanted to figure out how to make these MP3's. I discovered a lot of different software that claimed to make "the best MP3's", so I set out to try different ones until I found one that made me happy usability wise and quality wise. I settled on MusicMatch Jukebox and 128kbit MP3's. Ripped my collection and listened to them using those lovely cheap $0.01 speakers you can find a dump. I honestly thought it was the best quality ever.
Then later on of course I fell into the "Microsoft kick ass WMA format can encode at CD-Quality at half the bitrate" spell. Reripped my collection at the lovely bitrate of 64kbit. However even with my crappy speakers, I knew something wasn't sounding right. By this time I got a CD-Burner too and the first time I listened to these files burned onto a CD-R with my car's good speakers was a rude awakening I tell ya.
So I ended up switching back to MP3, using 192kbit CBR with MusicMatch again. Much much better quality. Few months later (after I re-ripped again), I got new speakers and noticed another whole set of flaws.
I then went on a crusade to encode my music better. I discovered r3mix.net and used the infamous --r3mix switch. I was in VBR heaven, but the nasty bitrates that my loud punk/rock music created where getting on my nerves. Was around this time I discovered MPC and then later on --alt-preset standard.
Now I use --alt-preset standard for MP3 CD's that I play in my car and MPC for my music collection on my computer. All happy
Horror of all horrors. I started out by paying for Cakewalk's Pyro V1.0. Not that there was all that much wrong with the quality (128 was fine for me at the time). It was just so fickin slow.
Damn, I wish I could remember how I found HA, but I can't.
Damn, I wish I could remember how I found HA, but I can't.
I found HA because JohnV spammed about it at Audiocoding.com. :B
Damn, I wish I could remember how I found HA, but I can't.
I just remembered how I got here.
I was at the r3mix forums, mostly lurking. And then came the, from what I remember, big "fights" between Dibrom and r3mix. Then I learned that Dibrom was starting his own forum. I thought that was totally uninteresting, and that it would never take off, so I didn't bother to register for a while. I was here on the very first days of HA, so I could have gotten a user number much lower than 680 .
It seems the idea worked out afterall . Been visiting almost daily for over 1½ years now.
Oh and for the record. I've been through the whole analog ripping, xing encoding stuff. Even had a brief encounter with VQF. I'd prefer not to elaborate on that :x. You know, you can say a lot of things about r3mix.net, but I belive it has pushed many people, including me, towards the light. I wonder where I would be today, had I not stumbled onto r3mix.net on that fateful day .
Encode all my collections in mp3 112 first, then switch all to vqf, then all to wma and then burn them to cdr. Built a computer with 4 cd-rom drives(back when hard drive is expensive), and put all my collection in those cd-roms and play them non-stop and think I was the coolest cat around.
My first mistake was to use AudioCatalyst (Audiograbber With XING) ... later I used Audiograbber only and compressed my mp3s via FhG (buggy Nero implementation).
I am still trying to fix that by getting the source CD's back for a new archiving round ...
I still remember my first encounter with EAC ...
Ripping AudioCD through analog output connecting to analog input of my soundcard
Not due to lamership but due to lack of digital output capability of my CDROM - it was at 1993.
Love to BladeEnc. Because of unknowledgment, of course.
Then WinLame beta with (not my mistake!) distributed lame89a instead of announcing lame92 - I happy that my bad eyers notes this.
Using r3mix. Once look at histogram (at RazorLame) and see WHAT r3mix does!!! Get it out.
That's all, I hope
I started out in 1996 with my brand new IBM Aptiva 150 MHz.
It had this nifty tool called Voyetra AudioStation, that would allow me to record using the two-dollar microphone from my stereo. I recorded my first songs using this tool.
I recorded it in 22 KHz, 8-bit, Mono and saved as AIFF or WAV. A song was only about 5 megs of so, and the quality was supposedly top notch......
In late 1996 or the beginning of 1997 a magazine came with a CD, which had a copy of Winamp and L3ENC with some frontend. It said, this program could compress the musicfile into 10% of the original size. And I tried. And I went mad - god, this was cool.
Now I encoded all my uncompressed 22 KHz 8-bit mono WAV's into 22 KHz, 32 Kbps, Mono, MP3-files.
Excellent program indeed - and you could not tell a difference......
From then, I began wasting more of my 1,6 GB Harddrive.
I began recording in 44 KHz, 16-bit, Mono. , and then encoded it to MP3.
The first album I ever ripped was Aqua - Aquarium, and it only took like half a day to record and encode through my el cheapo microphone.
Then one day, something great came.
"CD-Streamer". A program, that could rip a song in like 5-10 minutes. Unfortunately, I could only get the demo, and it did record in RealAudio (which I didn't know at the time), so I never bothered much with it.
In june 1998, I got a new computer.
An AMD K6 266 MHz equipped with a mighty 32x CD-ROM, that - unlike my former drive - supported some sort of DAE. Anyway, in my eternal search for software and "MP3 recording", I stumbled across a site hosting a cracked version of WinDAC32 and the Fraunhofer MP3 ACM codec.
I was owned. This program could create MP3-files in 44 KHz, 16-bit, Mono, and it could do it on-the-fly, and they sounded FAR better than my previous rips. It didn't understand though, because after all - they were both "recorded" in 16-bit, 44 KHz, Mono - at a fixed bitrate of 64 kbps.
Oh well - I can't be bothered.
My CD-ROM drive broke in 1999, and got replaced with a perfect Toshiba drive.
Then sometime around 2000 or early 2001, someone introduced me to dBpowerAMP, and I was like
It could name my songs AUTOMATICLY (using CDDB). I used the Blade encoder though, because I thought Blade sounded way cooler than LAME. Later I found out, that I should use the LAME one instead, because it's supposedly better. In 2000 I also upgraded my CPU to AMD K6-2 500 MHz, as well as my harddrive, which grew to 26 GB. I now decided to take the next step and rip in glorious true CD-quality (joint) stereo.
I was ripping MP3, 44 KHz, Stereo, 16-bit using LAME 128K CBR. God, that sound was GREAT.
Now, I had perfect duplicates of all my CD's on my computer, so I could burn a new copy, of my original should break. In may 2002, my computer got struck by an evil virus, which erased all my partitions. All my music and a lot of other files was lost.
When I went to download the dMC from www.dbpoweramp.com I saw there was some "additional codecs". At the time, I've been hearing about WMA for some time, and how it had CD-quality audio @ 64 kbits. I downloaded all the popular codecs, and came to one conclussion. Microsoft couldn't be farther from the truth, WMA sounded extremely metalic, and my precious CoolPlayer refused to play it. One of the other codecs that came was "Ogg Vorbis", I initially thought it was some obscure leftover from the 80'ies or early 90'ies, and didn't care much about it, since the name just doesn't sound right.
A few weeks later one day, I was opening a file manually in CoolPlayer, when I saw this ".ogg" file format, was among the short list of supported filetypes. And since CoolPlayer only supported cool filetypes, after all - WMA was not cool, and it was not supported, I decided to give this Ogg thingy a try (it was the RC3 from late 2001), and so I did. I said to my self, if I should switch from 128k MP3, this thing has to sound good at 96 kbps or lower. I did a 96 kbps rip, a 80 kbps rip and a 64 kbps, and compared them, and boy was I moved...
And here the story ends - I've been ripping 80 kbit Ogg's since may 2002, and in july or august I updated to the Vorbis 1.0 codec, and continued my 80 kbit ripping.
For me - standard: I thought that Xing 112 KBps (Joint stereo 32) is CD quality.
have a tons of files in vqf.
i was fast to shift from mp3 to vqf because vgf "96kbits should be mp128kbits."
at least it was stated in the www.vqf.com website.
now i use AAC/ instead..MUUCH better :-)
My audio encoding future...
2004 Switched to OpenEAC commandline version, with --pimp, using MPC SV8. Using Foobar2000 1.03 for playback.
2005 Frank Klemm retires from audio scene following job application to work for RealNetworks. The scene has an outcry for Open MPC.
2006 Andree and Frank decide to open source MPC, however the code doesn't compile - and most of the comments are in German. CiTay translates however half the output comes out as gangster rap. Dibrom finishes acedemic activities and hacks in some new patented techniques. Perceptual CD quality starts floating around the ~90 kbps mark. Meanwhile Monty from Xiph.org has concentrated on video and licensed vp5 to be open.
2007 Roberto's AAC religion gets an official political presence. Ivan Dimkovic's face can be seen on the back of coins in Brazil. Peter stops coding so much, been spotted with John Romero's ex-wife, Stevie Case. Monty from Xiph sadly dies in an accident with Dance Dance Revolution 2409347th mix. Dibrom's hair is now so long he has a device at home where he can sleep in it hammock style.
2008 SK1 reaches puberty. Dibrom by now is on his 800th avatar, CiTay advocates german rap and starts his own record label consisting of halfcast multilingual rap artists called "IST DEATH". Linux gets hugely popular but its full of bugs and everyone reminisces about the "Windows" days. CD's and DVD's are no more, its just "the wire". Everyone uses lossless.
2009 Emmett Plant opens Xaph.org, committed to closed multimedia. By this time, he's incredibly thin and survives completely without sleep. JohnMK invents another gender and wins a coveted science award. Peter leaves Poland, buys Xiph.org, and really lightens up by adding an integrated seekbar to foobar2000. Asian Prince http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg (http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg) forms a life long friendship with HydrogenAudio, and writes plugins for foobar2000.
Ruairi
ROTFL !!!
ROTFL !!!
My words exactly!
My first rips are dated 02.02.1997. I made them with the famous Audiocatalyst. ('cos it was sooo fast on my P-100) In 1999 (i think) i moved to CDex and lame 160/192 CBR. Later in 2002 i first met EAC i im proud to use it. At last this year i switched to MP4 using Nero plugin and the VBR-Audiophile setting. Now i'm a bit happier.
Hi everyone! This is becoming a tell-me-your-story-with-audio-coding thread, and I will also help to it.
In mid 1996 I got a warez list in the internet and there was a reference to a small program that would compress audio CDs to mp3 with 1/12 of the original size, maintaining "CD quality"... OMFG WTF all day long 'cause I also already had made experiences to compress some tracks with zip and rar... *grin*
I asked some l33t friends of mine but they didn't know anything about it and so I only got l3enc v2.60 in the end of 1996... and "IT WORKS!!!1". Ok, it tooked 10 to 15 hours to encode a whole album on my Pentium 100 MHz and I could only store 15 albuns on my 1.4 GB HD (had no cdrw back then). When harddisk space was low I even encoded some albuns at 96 kbps . My first player was Winplay3 and after it MuseArc (which was ok back then).
I don't know if the low speed of l3enc (didn't improve much in the following months) was due to quality remarks or lack of optimizations, or both. It got better with MP3 Producer and AudioActive but at this time other encoders started to appear everywhere and when Xing MPEG encoder hit the streets it was like w00t w00t... (crappy SB16 and speakers). I still have over 40 albuns made with Xing mpeg encoder/AudioCatalyst (although I only encoded at 256 kbps these days)...
The EAC transition was really a no-brainer for me. I knew LAME in mid 1999 but I didn't tried it until v3.70 IIRC. In the early 3.8x versions I had a hard time decidind between Lame and the Radium hacked codec, but it wasnt' too big of a deal 'cause they were both "CD-quality" at 256 kbps, acording to r3mix. I really enjoyed r3mix.net because it was the first site with a more scientific approach to testing encoders and settings and its forum had some of the LAME developers, like Gabriel and others. I remember when things got nasty and r3mix started to lose his head mainly because Dibrom didn't agree with the --r3mix preset and wanted to improve LAME even more...
I also used MPC a lot since then but, nowadays, the only lossy format I use is Ogg.
cya
My audio encoding future...
2004 Switched to OpenEAC commandline version, with --pimp, using MPC SV8. Using Foobar2000 1.03 for playback.
2005 Frank Klemm retires from audio scene following job application to work for RealNetworks. The scene has an outcry for Open MPC.
2006 Andree and Frank decide to open source MPC, however the code doesn't compile - and most of the comments are in German. CiTay translates however half the output comes out as gangster rap. Dibrom finishes acedemic activities and hacks in some new patented techniques. Perceptual CD quality starts floating around the ~90 kbps mark. Meanwhile Monty from Xiph.org has concentrated on video and licensed vp5 to be open.
2007 Roberto's AAC religion gets an official political presence. Ivan Dimkovic's face can be seen on the back of coins in Brazil. Peter stops coding so much, been spotted with John Romero's ex-wife, Stevie Case. Monty from Xiph sadly dies in an accident with Dance Dance Revolution 2409347th mix. Dibrom's hair is now so long he has a device at home where he can sleep in it hammock style.
2008 SK1 reaches puberty. Dibrom by now is on his 800th avatar, CiTay advocates german rap and starts his own record label consisting of halfcast multilingual rap artists called "IST DEATH". Linux gets hugely popular but its full of bugs and everyone reminisces about the "Windows" days. CD's and DVD's are no more, its just "the wire". Everyone uses lossless.
2009 Emmett Plant opens Xaph.org, committed to closed multimedia. By this time, he's incredibly thin and survives completely without sleep. JohnMK invents another gender and wins a coveted science award. Peter leaves Poland, buys Xiph.org, and really lightens up by adding an integrated seekbar to foobar2000. Asian Prince http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg (http://www.lamer.net/sexyuo.jpg) forms a life long friendship with HydrogenAudio, and writes plugins for foobar2000.
Ruairi
Hahahaha, great one
My mistakes were...
back in the good old days, using the Fraunhofer mp3 encoder at 128kbps before I'd heard of Lame.
Using VQF (although briefly)
When mpc first came out (and encoded files with extension mp+), and I read a review saying it was great cos it encoded to a textual format (it didn't quite say that, but that was the idea it was basically presenting) I tried it but didn't stick with it.
When I converted to lame, I continued to use 128kbps for a while.
I started using ogg at beta 2 (still got some of those files kicking around here and there).
That's about it. These days I use ogg at 160.
My first big mistake was getting interested in music half a year after getting my first computer at 13 (Hey I'm only 17 now).
Then I was fully convinced by Microsoft that wma rules mp3.
Then I discovered Musicmatch.
Then I discovered Winamp (No just kidding!)
4 years later I'm beginning to rip in Musepack -q5 for my music and LAME -aps for my siblings'. See? I've come a long way. Of course, like many others, I was led to HA from r3mix.net. It was the latter site that first convinced me of LAME's superiority (but anyway by then LAME was already 3.92), so kudos to r3mix for that. But HA convinced me of Musepack, so kudos to this wonderful community too.
I stated out with Audiograbber and fraunhofer @ 56kbps - I made a nice collection of mp3's this way.
Yes very bad - but I didn't know and I only had lame pc-speakers.
The my brother said that it didn't sound that well so I actually tried playing the original after the mp3 and the difference was huge.
Searching for something better I saw someone talking about 192kbps but I thought that was way way overkill (is he insane or what!? 192kbps? that's freeking huge!) so I switched to 96kbps (now LAME).
Tired of AG because of those weird ripping errors it gave if you touched the computer while ripping (and sometimes even though you didn't) I started using a fine but program called simple mp3 maker (a ripper) with LAME. Weehee. No annoying ripping errors anymore.
Then again the first site to enlighten me was www.cdfreaks.com where I became aware of the importance of good ripping thru a nice flamewar where I stated that "simple mp3 maker" was the best ripper ever....someone didn't quite agree and told me to go read r3mix.net.
Well, so I did and after the first couple of n00b posts I started using EAC and razorlame AFAIK.
Then I was hook and after spending a lot of time and getting addicted to the "recent posts" page I started actually being able to help out ppl and after some time (actually I don't know how long I was at r3mix before starting to really help out).
Now being hooked everything had to be perfect.
I got EAC set up with combined offset (only found my read and write offset recently) and heard of some other format called mpc. I went to ask at r3mix if there was really any reason to use mp3 anymore (remember that flamewar anyone?). r3mix being a --r3mix and mp3 zealot did not think that there was any reason to use anything but mp3 and --r3mix and so he told me. Fortunately he failed to convince me to stay with mp3.
Then came the flamewar between dibrom and r3mix and after dibrom set up r3mix did some weird things turning everybody against him and all the knowledged ppl starting to move to HA. And so did I (r3mix forum died shortly after this).
After some time at HA I thru up my own site that was suppose to hold installers (NSIS) that made it easy for newbies to get started with audio compression. Not a long time after this I was asked to join a project to make a site with info and programs (together with rc55, Roberto and xmixahlx). Sadly this project died but a collaboration with HA was planned in the meantime and so I became a moderator.
So... I not such the old user - I have bought computer in 2000. But I have made many mistakes
First I rip Audio CD only in mp3 (128 kbps quality) with the FreeMP3Rip programm. Then I have read article in the "Upgrade" magazine about mp3 and ogg audio formats. Then I start rip Audio CD only in ogg (128 kbps quality), but already with the EAC programm. I have rip five Audio CD in this audio format when I find websound.ru Internet site. There I have read article about testing some audio formats.
And now I has decided - MPC forever!
I very much regret what I have five excellent Audio CD in ogg format and I can't take they again
Listen to councils of advanced users and don't repeat my mistakes
P.S. Sorry for my bad English - I'm Russian and I don't know English very well
I started ripping with a P-60 (16 MB, 540 MB), and I used Opticom MP3Producer Pro (Fraunhofer) with 112kbps... this was the highest setting you could choose. As ripper I used EAC at that time (iirc).
Then I somewhere found AudioCatalyst (Xing) and used it quite a long time because it was so damn fast, even on my P-60 ... in the beginning with 128kbps, later at VBR high and finally at VBR very high (I am not sure if remember the names of the settings correctly).
I also tried VQF once (didn't hear a difference between Xing 128kbps and VQF 96kbps at my crappy PC speakers), but I continued using MP3 for compatibility reasons (nobody knew VQF at that time).
A friend of mine pointed me to R3MIX (I just remember I had a 28.8 kbps modem at that time... funny thing) from when on I regularily checked his site for updated LAME parameters (I think it was before the --r3mix preset has been implemented).
As there was ISDN at my home, and the amount of time I spent surfing the internet grew, I discovered LAME --alt-preset standard and was happy with that quite a long time.
Believe it or not - until then I never really found a difference between 128kbps (or even 112kbps) and preset standard! Although my stereo got better and better over the time.
Thanks to HA I found that (double) blind tests are the only way to really get accurate results, and during my first ABX session (my good old 112kbps MP3Producer vs. Original CD) I really got angry about my stupid mistakes...
Today I'm using EAC with LAME --alt-preset extreme... It's the best compromise between quality, size and compatibility for me.
Regards, fileman.
finding ha (if that didnt happen i would not be aware of any mistakes at all...)
1998:
* Using an Iomega application that came with my zip drive software to rip some audio CD's in some god aweful, straight from hell, unknown lossy Iomega audio format that even a gorilla would gladly throw poop at and stomp on.
1999:
* Using the Blade dll at 160kbps and avoiding LAME because I didn't know any better. It's really stupid now, but I didn't use LAME because of the wording of the name. Boy was I green back then.
* Believing BS that 96kbps was "near CD quality" and that 128kbps was "CD quality" because documentation in programs said it was, this disinformation was further enforced by mp3 download websites that gloated "CD quality" downloads.
2000
* Normalizing wav files and then encoding them.
* Encoding mp3's at 192kbps stereo thinking I was archiving it -- yet more disinformation by some rather shoddy websites
* Visiting the now disinformation audio format forum R3Mix and thinking I knew my shit, when in reality I didn't know shit.
2001 - 2002
* Took these years off -- no mistakes
2003
* Finding out that 100's of encoded --alt-preset standard mp3's should have been encoded using --alt-preset standard -Z.
2004
* Making New Year newbie mistake resolutions right now.
Heheh, I'm glad I'm not the only one...
I used the trial of Audiograbber 5 times over on each cd to get the entire tracklist ripped, then utterly destroyed it using Xing's VBR 30. At least I used VBR instead of CBR...
I then reripped and did at VBR 100...
I then reripped and did CBR 224..
I then discovered HA
Even now I can mess up royally! I just lost 7gb of MP3 and 2gb of APE because I fumbled a backup job before formatting
My mistakes were...
back in the good old days, using the Fraunhofer mp3 encoder at 128kbps
What's the mistake of this?
Fraunhofer was always the best mp3-encoder until LAME 3.90 (if you ask me), and the first producer-pro relise in 1997 could'n code higher than 128kbits! So there were no mistake done, when at the time you could'nt have used something better.
I can't think of any misktake I did other than thinking that MP3 was some sort of very advanced MOD-file back in 1996, cause mods back then was the popular music format.
And the first week I actually thaught that MP3s from was an exact copy, just nonlossy compressed
Then in early spring 1997 I heard the L3enc version of metallica - fade to black, and I knew that mp3 was far from cd-quality.
I remember that I bought a cheap soundcard for my old 486 (50MHz, 16MB Ram, Win95) and ripped some cassettes from our school-band in my PC. That must be in 1996 / 1997 and I was about 10 / 11 years old. The wav-files were quite big, about 30MB each. For my 325MB harddisk this was very much and I only ripped 3 songs. Later I got internet with a old 14k modem and I read about mp3. I found a program that could make these 30MB files smaller than 3MB without affecting sound-quality: Blade.
In february 1998 I bought a new PC (Pentium 2 350MHz, 128MB Ram, 10GB harddisk) and I connected it to my soundsystem. The result: the quality of these blade-mp3s was terrible. So started to search for better compression and made a blind listining test: Blade vs. Vorbis beta3 vs. Astrid/Quartex AAC. Astrid/Quartex AAC had a very good audio quality at 96kbps and it cleary won this test. So I ripped several CDs into A/Q AAC. The only bad thing I always had to use KJofol as player, all AAC plug-ins I found for winamp didn´t worked. So I switched back again to mp3, but this time I used lame and ripped my CDs with CDex to lame-mp3 160kbps stereo. But I also always had a look at Vorbis and when RC2 came I switched to Vorbis. I´m still using Vorbis today (sometimes I also use Monkey´s audio, but only for some few, special CDs), but now GT3b1.
I never ever used Xing or VQF.
The biggest mistake was clearly to use Astrid/Quartex AAC.
I ripped my firs 40 cd's with xing 256 cbr. Used burst extraction.
Never saw a need for tagging until I ran into Joliet restrictions on my back-ups.
Used EZ CD Creator for burning. It was buggy and cost me more than a few coasters.
Well... long list, can't remember years, not mistakes but rather steps in order:
1) 'Recording' sound on Spectrum compatible thing (2-3 secs, guess what quality...)
2) Ripping through analog-out to wav using Goldwave on a 486 then equalizing like hell to compensate for lousy (old Philips home stereo though) speakers & ESS688 soundcard. Added some very bright el-cheapo piezo tweeters later to that
3) Ripping using Windac & l3enc on Cyrix PR166 overclocked to PR200... took a day (used 128 though, and 160 for Pink Floyd stuff which sounded like crap - try 'Wish you were here' CD on 128... yucks.)
4) Using Blade Stereo 128 for a few CD's... then realizing it's crap
3) Using AudioCatalyst Vbr Medium-High or something (around 15 cd's full of mp3s I use now to put under coffee mugs/etc)
4) Starting to use EAC & LAME with god-knows-what switches... (r3mix forum)
5) The best one: removing noise from wave files ripped from CD's (poorly done...) and encoding with LAME --r3mix
6) Buying Klipsch Promedia 5.1 to listen to music (computer speakers are all crap!)
Soundcard history: ESS688 ISA - ESS1868 ISA - Yamaha OPL3-SAX ISA - cheap Crystal ISA - AWE 64 Gold ISA - SoundBlaster 128 PCI - Yamaha (cheap, don't remember) PCI - SB Live 5.1 PCI - M-Audio Delta 410
GOOD (no order):
0) Buying a M-Audio Delta 410 card
1) Switching to MPC & staying there
2) Investing around $1000 into vintage audio gear (Revox Pre+Amp - 1973, Infinity RSII speakers - 1982)
3) Searching on Google "Best mp3 decoder" and finding r3mix forum -> off to HA. Or is this bad... ???
Heh lol, I just ran into another big ol' mistake. I transcoded 128kb CBR MP3's I downloaded into Xing VBR 30. wtf... I actually blind tested myself with this one, I couldn't tell the difference, I was using some £4 speakers at the time
Oh, forgot to mention my earlier audio mistakes:
-Recording Commodore 64 music with a personal (portable) tape recorder not using external microphone.
(see next - that C64 was portable enough to record that using mic)
-Copying CD to tape using a microphone between the speakers though my tower supported direct copy
(guess what, I didn't knew about it - read the instruction 10x, it was written on the first page...)
-Using tapes Type-III (Metal) and trying to play them in Type-I (Normal) player
-Trying all ADPCM compression models just to see which one is worst
And a new one:
-Trying to create a linux ABX/HR program having no time to even use the computer.
Poor trees... used up so much paper for nothing (yet). This has to wait a couple of years.
EDIT> Vintage gear is great... (though I had to modify tone controls - they were always on!)
Its all heart warming stuff....
I fall into the category that ran a few DSP's and the equaliser on winamp, writing them back to disc as Wav's and then burning that.
I started off with WinDAC32 for ripping to wave, then encoding with Blade at 128kps! Oh the nightmare of it all! I did have a crap soundcard then (1997). As my audio equipment improved, i realised the poor quality and discovered Xing. So i used audiocatalist with 160kbps CBR and high frequency encoding enabled. That was fine for me until i again upgraded my equipment and i realised that xing wreaked high frequencys.
I started searching for high quality mp3 encoding, and discovered r3mix.net. From here i learnt how bad Xing was and how cool lame was. I started using --r3mix for about a week before descovering Hydrogen Audio. Here i discovered the alt presets and EAC and started using that. Then i descovered MPC and never looked back. I now use mpc extreme and use lame alt preset standard for transcodes for my in car mp3 player. But damm i wish they made in car mpc players! Looking back on what i used to pass as good quality mp3s brings nightmares! i cant believe i started off with Blade at 128kbps! aaarrggghh!
OT> I'd say that properly encoded (LAME alt preset cbr/abr) 128kbps MP3 is quite good...
OT> But on some music it's really bad - castanets - just try MPC/AAC/lossless
OT> It's good that my new Kenwood CD rack can read FLAC... I have the discs to spare.
OT> MP3 playing racks... Some have poor decoders, other poor DAC, etc.
Forgot about another mistake - trying to scratch LP with a normal needle...
Not only damaged poor LP, but also destroyed the needle
Back in '99, I've got my first burner for US$199!!!(a JVC's 2x - no accurate DAE...) What a bargain...and using Easy Cd Creator for copying audio cds or ripping/encoding to mp3 wich its internal codec... (Blade?)....Slow like a hell.
Tried AudioCatalyst/Audio Grabber for a while, but my JVC always refused to extract a single track without errors...For good I abandoned Xing... Thanks God.
Also, I remember burning audio discs from Napster mp3 files!!!!
The best for last:
Borrowing cds from friends and ripping/encoding them at 192k(to save disk space), before burning my own copies....(no laughs pls)...
Re-encode low bitrate mp3s(96k, 112k, from Napster) to 160/192k...
In early 2001 I discovered R3mix forum, as well some audio related sites...
Bought a LG 8x(now with accurate DAE) and started using EAC, after a little period with CDex and Poikosoft's Easy CD-DA Extractor...
2002: HA's forum bookmarked on my favorites.
Another LG in da house(16x).
Discovered Lossless Audio compression.
Still learning a little bit everyday, tnx to HA.
LIF
This topic takes me way back, so here we go....
Back in the day (probably about 96' or 97') little old me was the proud owner of a Pentium 166 with 32mb of ram and a SB-16 ISA sound card. I was fascinated that I could record songs by hitting the "play" button on my 8x CD-Rom and quickly hitting the record button in the Windows Sound Recorder. The problem was that I could only record for 60sec at a time, making this solution impractical. Still, I was impressed with GSM v6.10 compression @ 44,100 / Mono, because I could send sound clips to my friends in 20 or 30 minutes, making me a l33t computer guru B) . I was also fascinated with a web site where you could dl 30sec mp2 clips of the latest hit songs. It was at this website where I found out about MP3. I quickly went to Download.com and got a no name WAV ripper and Right Click MP3, which included the high quality "Blade" encoder . I soon realized that 128kbps sounded like crap (I was never deaf,) but 192kbps was way too big for my 1.6gb HD. I went back to dl.com, and got the latest version of RealJukebox, but was disappointed with its 96kbps MP3 bitrate limitation. That left me using 96kbps .rm files, which I felt sounded GREAT ! After encoding about 3 albums, I found out I could do nothing with the files (convert them, play them in Windows Media Player), so back to dl.com! Now armed with MusicMatch Jukebox, I was a happy camper. 128kbps FhG sounded fine, it ripped really fast, and it could even convert MP3 to Wav and vise versa. Soon after, my parents bought me a brand new 4X Memorex CD-RW drive with NTI software, and 5.1 and 10gb hard drives were purchased. After a quick update of NTI so it could burn directly from MP3 format, I was ripping albums at 128kbps and burning copies of them in a heartbeat - it sounded much better than from WAV files because it cut out all the bad parts of the music that I couldn't hear (1 to 12 compression RULES was all I could think of!) I even converted several Vinyl albums that I recorded to WAV-MP3-WAV at 128kbps to get rid of the "bad" noise and clicks in the background . I then started using the Xing encoder and Audiocatalyst @ 160kbps, armed with a new Celeron processor - MAN, this is so fast . And I felt safe after reading so many positive reviews about the Xing encoder! I alternated between MMJB and Xing for a while, all at 160kbps.
Now to the current - I stumbled on to r3mix.net and learned of the LAME and Vorbis encoders and the evil of Xing. I started re-ripping all my albums to -q4 Vorbis using the RC3 encoder. I then found HA.org, and now armed with a 160gb HD, CDEX / EAC, MPC v1.14 and 40x Pioneer DVD-Rom drive, I have re-done much of my collection using LAME --alt-preset standard, Vorbis -q5 or -q6, and MPC -q5 (MPC is all I use now.) I am still paying for some of my mistakes, as certain of my CDs are at 128kbps FhG quality forever (I was smart enough to keep the original MP3s, so no transcoding has gone on, just plain old low quality. ) Many of the old 160kbps MMJB rips and Vorbis RC3 files survive as well (although the quality doesn't bother me day in and day out, it's clearly not transparent...) That's my story to audio encoding maturity!
Edit - A ' shows up as ’ when you cut and paste a post from MS Word.....
I used easy cd creator to burn audio-cds
I ripped my cds with audiograbber an Audicatalyst (not for a long time) and I encoded them in 128Kbs
After few listening tests I used audioactive production studio to backup my cd at 112 kbps.
I've transcoded some mp3 (about 12 albums) from internet in mp3Pro when I found the nero mp3Pro Crack
I was fascinated that I could record songs by hitting the "play" button on my 8x CD-Rom and quickly hitting the record button in the Windows Sound Recorder. The problem was that I could only record for 60sec at a time, making this solution impractical.
Ah, but as us 'leet Sound Recorder analog professionals learned , if you record a 60 second clip and then copy/paste, you can increase the file length past 60 seconds. After that's done, increase it to the length of your track, and then your record will work just fine, and get the whole file.
The most unbelievable stupid mistake I have ever made is ripping CD with Wplay pro (not sure, but it didn't ripped CD in digital mode) and as encoder I set Blade with 128 Kbps.
:x
I must warn you guys, at my early days I was not quite interested in quality.
I had a P1 133 with 16MB RAM, a SB16 and a analogue radio ISA card. I used to listen quite much to the radio, cause back in 1996/7 I got only 3€ pocket money each week. So I couldn't afford many cds. My father was so friendly to give me a pair of crappy 15 year-old speakers (that probably cost about 100€ when they were bought) and an amplifier you can find in every supermarket (I'm sure it was not any younger than the speakers but maybe a bit cheaper ). I had no internet connection at that time and, well, I had *not much* knowledge about Hifi, computers or audio compression.
With this fabulous settings I was quite glad because the time before I got the crappy amp and speakers I had a pair of desktop speakers with low-frequency-cut-off at maybe 300Hz. Each time I played GTA at the home of a friend I wondered why the music sounded so different. Later I realized it was because of the basses. From my point of view now, I must say that the speakers of my friend are also crappy, but not as crappy as mine. Ahh, I forgot, my desktop speakers hum really loudly so that it s***ed a lot.
I had a microphone, this time not from a super market, with which I used to record the radio music I heard through the crappy speakers. What impresses me now is, that I cannot remember to have heard a difference between the recorded and the originally broadcasted radio version. I hung the microphone in front of the right speaker and I was happy to have recordings of some of my favourite tracks. And I used the Audiorecorder of Windows 95 to manipulate the music. I could add echo and play the music slower or faster. That was damn cool (at that time).
With Windows 98 and the Media Player 7.1 I found out that I could compress my cds with cd-quality! Yes, with WMA! I did so with some tracks... But when I started the secondary system installed on the PC I wondered why I was not able to play the wmas back. That was my first (and last) experience with DRM and WMA. Before that I tried encode MP3s @ 1/5 realtime (dunno with which encoder). But as the PC wasn't in my room I didn't do this for a long time. I preferred listening directly from CD.
Later I made 160kbps CD-Rips with the fhg-mp3 producer. Without internet connection I had to type each track name seperatly... Long live FreeDB!!
And finally I found Ogg Vorbis around two years ago. That's when I think that my newbie mistakes end!
1998: Microphone + 22050 Hz 8 Bit Mono (The Encoder was GSM)
1999: Audiograbber + FhG ACM Codec (56kbps)
2000: Audiograbber + WMA 128kbps; AudioCatalyst + Xing New 192kbps JS
2001: AudioCatalyst + Xing VBR; CDex + Lame 3.87 VBR
2002: EAC + Lame 3.92
2003: EAC + Lame 3.90
When I switched from 22050 Hz wavs to mp3 encoded at 56kbps (24000 Hz) I was very happy of the gained quality!
I discovered Lame in the summer of 2000, but I started using it in 2001.. at the start I used to prefer Xing over Lame
Started off with Audio Catalyst VBR 96 kbps - forced stereo
-COOlL fast ripping + encoding
then shifted to Poikosoft Easy CDDA extractor with LAME 128 kbps "stereo" (forced - stereo) again
then MUSICMATCH 7.2, 128 kbps stereo COOL this is highest quality encoder!
Now, I know why....FhG Fastenc uses js.. I'm so evil to force LAME to encode to stereo, now I prefered LAME at 128 kbps
and I found OGG at the year 2000, that codec was cool, vbr 112 kbps sounds like mp3 128 kbps
NOW goodbye to 128 kbps, currently using MPC, sometimes OGG
Mistakes? Why, I've never made one.
zing
(Ducks shoe thrown by ol' lady)
Well, my n00b mistakes were somehow "hardcore". I used to rip tracks@256kbps with Musicmatch's FhG encoder then get some songs from kazaa that were@128kbps or 160kbps then reencode'em to 256kbps in order to have all my files at the same bitrate...(I did know that it wouldn't improve quality, just I thought that it wouldn't go worse...)
Like somebody already posted here, a lot of the so-called "mistakes" are really not. There simply was not better stuff to use back then.
A true mistake is refusing to use something that's been confirmed to be better through scientific methods, like ABX.
Having said that, what I regret the most is back in 1999 when I wanted to burn the audio of U2's VHS concert tape from Mexico City during the Popmart Tour in 1997. I captured it through a series of stereo cables conected to each other (about 10m/30ft) because the computer was (is) too far from my VCR, directy to my tremendously crappy SB-16 clone ISA card. Because the audio was very low sounding (it was difficult to make it louder without clipping) and a bit too trebly and bassy, I ran it through Winamp's Preamp and EQ. I used Xing to 128k the whole thing for "archival" and burn it FROM THOSE FILES. The quality satified me and my friends very well back then (and still satisfies most...).
I CANNOT FIND THAT VIDEO TAPE ANYMORE.
Anyway, I did a lot of mistakes back in 1999, specially with girls...
Anyway, I did a lot of mistakes back in 1999, specially with girls...
I'm still making stupid mistakes, and I'm the wrong side of 40.
It doesn't get any easier
Is there anyone besides me, for whom it took awhile to figure out
that LAME was an acronym rather than an adjective?
Made for some interesting interpretations of forum posts.
Dex
I don't have any amusing/frustrating newbie encoding stories, because I was lucky enough to have access to the software, equipment, and ears to let me make the right decisions from the start.
However, the day I got a CD burner I used it's CD copy function to clone an audio CD using my DAE-ignorant CD-ROM drive - clickety click! Only did that the once!
In the general field of audio, there are a very few times when I've got rid of an original recording because I've already copied it onto a "better" format. The thing is, the original is always better - don't lose it!
(I wish TV and record companies would learn this)
Worse still - when I was a teenager, and running out of space for even more LPs, I dumped a few of the records and tapes that I'd had since I was very young. Now, as a late 20-something, I'm buying most of them again from second-hand shops. Whether it's good or crap, music can really define points in your life, and it's good to have it all there - even if you only listen to the worst of it every ten years for a moment of nostalga! Annoyingly, the copies I'd had since I was five years old were/are in much better condition than those that I can buy now!
Cheers,
David.
One of my most stupid mistakes (a friend was with me, so maybe it was his fault ):
1. Rip a Celine Dion album using WinDAC32 on a Mitsumi 4x drive, and encoding it to VQF format.
2. I still have those files !
Stupid Newbie Mistakes?
Let's see....
-Using BladeEnc for a while because it was the only free mp3 encoder I could find (1998-1999, ie, before google.)
-Hacked Audiograbber and a REALLY fast L3Enc
I lost all of the above in drive crashes, so I looked for another free mp3 encoder. Lame kept coming up, so I wondered if there was a front end for it, like the front-end I used with BladeEnc. Guess what? there was a RazorLame program that was close to identical to RazorBlade.
But even with all that, for the last two years, I've been encoding with RazorLame's vbr setting of 32kbps through 192kbps.
Earlier this year, I got into a discussion with a friend who claimed that he couldn't stand 128kbps mp3s because they sounded horrible. I told him that I could hear a difference, but that they didn't sound THAT bad.
So he told me about r3mix and came over to do some blind testing. He could identify 128 pretty easily on my stereo system, but he admitted that it didn't sound that bad on its own. I searched online to find some more info about r3mix, since his own site appeared to be dated.
Now I've got piles of mp3s that are probably encoded sub-optimally, and when I feel like it, I rip and encode my own CDs into mpc -q 5s. I still worry that I'm being a n00b, because I haven't gotten around to setting up a good proper ABX program yet. (WinABX site was down when I got that urge, and I've been busy since).
But if you ask my girlfriend, the biggest n00b mistake was discovering hydrogenaudio, since I've been spending more and more of my free time here...
My first grabbing experience (1998) was with AudioCatlyst, I was grabbing to 128k Xing listening it on cheap comp. speakers. The most annoying problem was that my Mitsumi 32x drive stopped copying track if it encountered any error and I had to rerip the track again. It was really boring. Even earlier I thought that lower bitrates are exactly the same quality as higher but with higher compression (like normal and high compression in zip, rar). I've bought Delta 44x drive later and it was cool to rip at reasonable speed with few problems. I mostly used WinDAC, don't remember which encoder. Bought much better speakers and amplifier. After that I somehow got to r3mix.net, was using EAC, LAME -r3mix. Bought Teac W524E, really better than all drives I previously owned. Being on HA onlu half a year or so, using MPC 5 mostly.
Joining Columbia Music House when I bought my first CD player. 12 CDs for only a penny!
My first, and I think only , notable mistake was not bothering with tags. I started ripping to ogg (very pre1.0) and for the number of files i could fit on my harddrive, and the use I would make of it, tagging wasn't worth it - the file name is enough.
Wrong! - currently re-ripping with GT3, and tags!
Amazing, you guys sure have superb memory. Ok I ALMOST transcoded my 128kbps mp3s to 96kbps, didnt know anything about transcoding, lossless, lossy at that time.
I used to have MOD, XM before I discovered MP3s. What was that wonderful DOS based player that played MODs XMs MIDIs, etc? I cant remember!
From then on it was [ Winplay *I still remember it jerked every 5 seconds on my 486 DX66, I had to pause for like 10 seconds every 1 min for smooth play back if i remembered correctly* -> MuseArc -> Winamp -> FB2K ]
[ Windac32 -> EAC ] [ VQF Forum -> R3mix -> AudioCoding -> HA ]
[ L3Enc -> FHG Pro -> Lame R3mix -> FAAC -> Lame aps -> OGG -> Psytel AAC -> MAC -> MPC -> FLAC...]
Anybody here remembered TAC?
A few years ago I had a pretty big library of mp3's mostly at 128kps on my hard drive. I then heard of wma and how it was supposed to be twice as good as mp3. So I transcoded my whole collection to wma with dbpoweramp. I thought it sounded okay through my cheap computer speakers but then read some posts on the internet about how much quality you lose with transcoding. I've never transcoded since and now I rip all my cds with lame 3.90.2 aps or apx quality. I need to still use mp3 because that's all my mp3/cd player plays. I download my mp3's off off of **REMOVED BY ADMIN**
dj_digital
What was that wonderful DOS based player that played MODs XMs MIDIs, etc? I cant remember!
i used to use iNERTiA player to play mods in dos. cubic player was quite good too iirc.
my encoding history -
i started out ripping cd's in goldwave (!) and encoding using l3enc. i thought the quality wasn't that good and kinda lost interest in mp3 a bit. then a friend introduced me to audiocatalyst and the super fast xing encoder, which sounded much better than l3enc (to my ears at least!), and man, the speed! i still have some of those mp3's (encoded using vbr medium/high quality) and i still think they are listenable, especially when compared to l3enc!
move on a bit... discovered cdex with it's built in lame encoder, used that for a while... then found ogg vorbis! started using it at q6 and haven't deviated from that at all. B)
now i use eac to rip to wav and encode using oggdropxpd (in windows) or grip (in linux). replaygain with either foobar2000 or vorbisgain in linux. playback with foobar2000 in windows or xmms in linux. xmms doesn't yet support replaygain (although it is in cvs so it'll be there very soon!)
I'm still making mistakes. Some are serious, some trivial BUT as long as I continue to make them it will mean that I'm still alive!!
Thats an important consideration for one soon to be 40 and 240 months. (OK do the calculation but don't beat up on me!!!)
auldyin
40 yrs = 480 months...
My n00b mistakes...
1) Ripped with AudioGrabber and encoded to MP3 @ 32kbps with Fraunhofer, because my speakers were so bad it really didn't sound much different from the CD at that time.
2) Normalized everything to 98%.
3) Began ripping to WMA@96kbps, and converted all my Napster downloads to WMA, because of some crap somebody on an IRC channel "#WMA" told me about the evils of MP3...
MP3 @ 32kbps....,converted all my Napster downloads to WMA...
http://www.dailyconfession.com/confessyesins.asp (http://www.dailyconfession.com/confessyesins.asp)
I didn't do all that terribly bad, started out with L3enc and 112kbps like everyone else was using at the time (and WinDAC in burst mode), moved on to 128k when everyone else on IRC did (still with Fraunhofer), later moved to Lame part-time and had a nice long fancy "preferred" command-line (while messing with --r3mix but disliking VBR), then finally accepted VBR completely and switched to the --alt-presets (out went the Fraunhofer, except for really low bitrate stuff for special purposes).
Somehow I managed to bypass Xing, Blade & all that junkola... whew. Still haven't really taken up any other codecs (except lossless), not seeing much need for it. Lame --a-p s is pretty transparent from here, and works on my portable player.
Hey NeoRenegade,
I said 40 and 240 months.................by my reckoning that makes 60 years!!!!
auldyin
In the Scottish tongue: auld means OLD, yin means ONE
yeah, windac was my first ripper i ever used, forgot about that one, then was audiograbber (free version) and audiocatalist all CBR128... later used audiograbber with CBR192 LAME then came EAC then CDex... stuck with CDex for a while but finally found this place and its been EAC --aps ever sence... and sometimes q6 ogg GT3
My biggest mistake:
Got into the computing industry !
I used CDex with LAME @128, thought it was CD-Quality
Well here's my story :
Discovered mp3 - woohoo! (I wasn't into Computer-Audio before '98)
Started ripping my CD's with WinDAC in burst mode.
Tried out several bitrates - tought that 56kbit mp3's sounded just great, (with my crappy desktop speakers I had back then) went up to 64kbit just to be sure.
Got an RIO 300.
In an attempt to squeeze as much music as possible onto the tiny 32MB internal storage I transcoded my files back to 32kbit, and again they still sounded quite good on these speakers.
Before using the player I got some "decent" Sennheiser earbuds - well they were way better than the ones that came with the device. And when I finally listened to it on the go - I was like "Man, what's that - it sounds like total crap to me - must be the player"
Well a friend helped me out.
Then my next stupidity was that I ripped all my CD's in LAME 320kbit CBR, just to be sure. But i still transcoded them to 96kbit to use with my RIO.
Now I'm using mp4 files at ~132kbit ABR - which is perfectly fine for me as I am a person who is highly insensitive to artifacts of any kind. And I'm quite happy about that, because that means more Music on the go and less space needed to store my music collection. According to my own observations the only artifacts that disturb me are those that make every HA hardcore user cry.
Well so much for now.
Heh. No offense; sounds like you're a work in progress.
Okay... mid '80s and I was in middle-school. We had an interesting - and slightly progressive, for the time - extra-curricular entertainment policy: every couple of months, part of the budget would go toward bringing a semi-professional rock band into the school. So I smuggled in an ultra-cheap portable cassette recorder (the monophonic microphone was built in, and the closest thing you could get toward directionality was to point the whole thing flat-on and hope the vibrations from over-cranked amps didn't shake the tape loose, because the alternative was to have the mic cradled in your jacket and all you would hear later would be a muffled rumbling...) and taped 'em. Then I made dubs for any of the other kids who wanted to listen to the show again. And we all thought it was such a cool idea.
Sometime in that same era (might have been my first year in highschool) I decided my portable Walkman was too bulky, so I borrowed a micro-cassette recorder from my folks and patched it into the home stereo system. By then I had a few CDs, so I did line copies to micro-cassettes and spent a few hours recreating the jewel-case artwork for micro-cassette cases. Looked pretty cool, even if it did sound - well, bad. At the time, micro-cassette recorders (at least the ones I had access to) were also monophonic.
When I remember how I began, I supose it's inevitable that I would still be messing with audio... but it's also surprising folks would trust me with their master tapes! Fortunately I've learned a thing or two since then.
- M.
was going through some of my collection after I encoded The Best of Manhattan Transfer LP (1981) the other day, and realised that I have master copies of the Self Titled LP (1975) and Mecca For Moderns (1981) album in 128 bit mp3. They were done around two years ago but it still pissed me off to put it mildly. Those albums are 400 miles away at my parents house and I think just might borrow them and do them on my much higher quality current turntable and use a real codec this time.
A pair of new ones for you guys:
1. abandoning audiocatalyst for real jukebox, and having an arguement with my roommate who considered 64kb rmj's (just renamed ra's) good enough. Me (being the 'quality fanatic' inisited on 96....)
2. joining HA. No, really. Do you guys have any idea how much time/money i've spent contemplating audio then re-ripping my familys (relatively extensive) cd collection to ape....
hmmm.... my earliest audio mistake was probably my makeshift "CD to tape" ripping method. the thing was i was too short at the time to get to the back of my parent's hi-fi, so i ran my walkman headphones (little ones that fit in your ear) to a portable tape deck (the cool 80's kind) and taped the buds to the mics on the ghetto-blaster. for a deck made in the late '70s, it was pretty forward thinking of them to include 2 mics for stereo. i was about 10yo at the time...
started playing with digital audio as soon as i got a sound card. ran it into old circa 1955 hifi speakers with no intermediate amp did all my recording through line-in, or the mic jack (whichever one worked at the time). decided samplerates of 22050 were transparent (until i listened to the files...).
discovered mp3 in late 1997, with winDAC32 ripping to blade and/or plugger. i noticed squeaks in plugger, and metallic sounds in blade, so i stepped up from 128 to 160, then 192, then 256 - until i got transparency (bearing in mind i was running through car speakers in a home made box with no intermediate amp).
heard about (and acquired) l3enc at a party while stoned. kick-started my collection with 3 CDs from one of the guys at the party
got radium when it came out... and nothing changed until Ogg and LAME became known. i haven't got into Ogg yet, but that's due to my own laziness - i noticed some artifacts when i used newbie settings and haven't played with it since.
mainly just using LAME now, or simply playing CDs - with such cheap media these days and gargantuan hard disks, i haven't even bothered with lossless codecs - just stuck with PCM.
Biggest audio-newbie mistake(s):
(...)
Mid 1980's: Buying 45's of Michael Jackson and thinking that they were cool
(...)
But, man, Michael rocks... I didn't listen to him then, but have discovered him in later years and the guy is simply a genius.
I don't think it was a mistake, but I started off with r3mix like many other (and that sounds better than cbr 128 any way). r3mix homepage was very good, I learned a lot from there.
- ripping to wav by recording sound while playing a cd on my computer, encoding with l3enc
- i moved to audiocatalyst (using cbr 128 and vbr)
- for some reason i moved to audiograbber at 192kbps joint stereo (that was not a bad move, but i don't know why i did it... did i hear quality difference? i don't remember)
- then i started to use r3mix
- aps
- and now musepack/flac with EAC
Back, when I only had crappy PC speakers I considered wma@64 = transparent (well, with those speakers there actually was no audible difference ).
But one fine day I connected my HiFi-system to my PC...
Looking back I have made no mistakes. At least no one I regret.
late '97 I discovered MP3's and Winamp because of the dorm-intranet. Heaven delivered in kilobits.
Start of '98 I began messing around with Windac (my drive synched, so I used that) and Radium (FhG) encoder. Man, was I on the pre-beat. I was an inverse Ringo Starr in the world of encoding. 128 kbs of course.
Did some funny encodes, where after ripping an album I cut off last 30 seconds of wavefiles ('Hey buy the album, I'm just sharing these files as previews"), before sharing them on the intranet.
Discovered my first experience with flanging hearing Tears For Fear's "Shout".
Can't remember when, but moved on to AudioCatalyst and Xing. Had a brief stint with Blade, but thought that 192 was size/quality overkill, and it performed poorly on lower bitrates.
Then someone told me of LAME. Checked it out, dug the idea of more options. More options sounded like more work had gone into it, and it had VBR. The concept of VBR just made more sense than CBR. So I converted to Lame
Somehow I discovered Roel's forum and was turned on to EAC. I was now lurking and l33t. Using EAC and Lame VBR -something (-r3mix in special cases. Still found the bitrate/quality tradeoff too high compared with discspace).
Lurked, listened, learned. Learned of MP+ and was captivated by it's praise, no-nonsense approach ("You just use "Standard". It's heavily optimized and it works"), flexible VBR, and general sleekness.
I don't have golden ears, so I tend to listen to more sensitive ears's claims, praises, critique in deciding too.
Then came Roel Vs. Dibbie discussion.
Followed from the sidelines, but Dibbie gained the upper hand by being more pragmatic and objective in his way of discussing and when Roel censored certain posts he lost a fair bit of credibility in my eyes. Followed to Project Mayhem when its birth was announced (look at my member mumber, mommy) and followed both forums for a while. R3Mix died out, while Mayhem thrived.
later on I learned the way of the Xiph, the Monkey, the Flac, the anonymous audio conservation, and open source in general. Hallelujah.
Encode all my collections in mp3 112 first, then switch all to vqf, then all to wma and then burn them to cdr. Built a computer with 4 cd-rom drives(back when hard drive is expensive), and put all my collection in those cd-roms and play them non-stop and think I was the coolest cat around.
Same here. I thought vqf sounded great at the time. Until I saw the light
My greatest mistake ...
Ditching all my vinyl.
Capturing the best vinyl using a SB16 ISA sound card, encoded to mp3 overnight (and more) on a 486 with Blade at 128kbps - SO much better than the original .
I ripped with windows media player.
Discovered RealAudio Player and trascoded from mp3 96k/s to 320k/s.
Discovered LAME and EAC when I bought and iPod and have never looked back.
One of the best decisions I made was to buy some Kilpsch 5.1 THX Promedia and Audigy2 ZS soundcard?
If you have a copy of the cd is it worth it to have a losseless encoding stored on the HDD?
Its all heart warming stuff....
I fall into the category that ran a few DSP's and the equaliser on winamp, writing them back to disc as Wav's and then burning that.
I did that once, too... lol and it was like last year, but I know a little about quality and such (discovered HA a few months after doing this). It was because I wanted the same audio as I got on my computer on my portable cd player, I was also using wireless headphones, wireless headphones really sucks IMO.
Mat
-Downloading mp3 files from Napster (at that time) on 33.6k (and no way downloading overnight for my parents).
-Trying to encode my audio files using a microphone and my speakers (encoding from mp3 to real audio, using realproducer for my website, never worked, I remember I was really far away and I said to my mom "please make no sound as the computer is recording audio" and when listening to the recording we actually heard that.
-Downloading mp3 files was on websites, I remember when I was in secondary 1 (2000-2001) a friend made me discover Rammstein, on Audiofind (or some website of that kind) cant remember exactly, but it has a black background and it has a search box. After that I searched for Rammstein audio albums and found Sehnsucht on a website, it was labelled that way 01_Sehnsucht.mp3 I remember The website was in russia and it was downloading at like 7kbps even though I had cable modem (!!). I remember I was the first one to have broadband in my area, the modem actually cost 400$ (CAD), I still have the same one. I also still have that album (Sehnsucht), the same version, I got a better one though so I will possibly replace it soon. I also remember transcoding some audio files from napster, but don't remember using what. Later there were some programs that you needed a lame.dll file for them to work (they were encoders) so I always ended up on google searching for it, I believe I always got different versions .
I never agreed the fact that WMA was better than Mp3 encoding, in fact, I hated WMA (and still hate). I tried once to do transcoding [wma->mp3] but hmm it
sounded even worse so I deleted everything lol.
I didn't do a lot of encoding, because I have almost no audio cds here, only downloaded albums... I have like 4 audio albums here
Mat
I started in 1999, by reading about ripping/MP3 on the ABSM MP3 FAQ and Xory's MP3 FAQ. Wow were those outdated. I remember searching all over for the NAD player as the FAQ's said that Winamp Mp3 decoder was crappy (which it was!).
Started ripping using WinDAC (I used WinDAC as it was the smallest download among all rippers then). I used to use the R***um codec at 160kbps but stereo instead of joint stereo (as I had read bad things about joint stereo.)
My biggest mistake however was installing a lot of so-called audio exhancer's for Winamp. I remember going goo-goo-gaa-gaa on DFX. (I had really crappy speakers and yes, DFX would make my MP3's sound better on them.)
Now, I do cdex (or EAC if the CD has scratches.). And I rip using alt-preset-standard -Z using lame 3.90.3. And decode using foobar2000 (after replaygain in Album and Track mode depending on the album). And at work, I use Itunes for ripping at 160kbps AAC, though I'm annoyed at the lack of Replaygain support. I work on a Mac so I can't use foobar. What is a good audio solution for OS/X anyway?
In the future? I am hoping for a HA version of lame 3.96. It does rip faster and smaller!!!
rajas
I have mpman mp-F10 (32MB). I should rather buy a MD player.
My big mistake is that i used blade for a group of cds, even with the big bitrates (192kbps and 256kbps), it sounded bad for my ears (kinda like bad EQ) so i switched to lame by just following the mp3encoder mailing list and reading the qualty discussion, before the r3mix and ha sites exited I also had two fhg encoders handy, l3enc and producer pro 2.1 (non radium) which used instead of blade or lame in certain cases.
Luckily i knew Xing's bad reputation from its mpeg video encoders, i assumed they did the same with everything else, and they did...
At the r3mix forum era i started to encode my own music into musepack format, and currently i still do. Despite current day drives being larger than ever, i still believe high quality lossy is the way to go, it just gives unbeatable number of songs/per byte ratios; and mpc just does it right, and quick. Lossless is nice when you need to edit, and or distribute samples, and i think the raw/pcm formats should not be used by default in so many apps (ie ripping should go into .flacs instead of .wavs)
Never had any big problems with cd ripping, i used mostly cdparanoiaIII, cdex and eac. In the old times i had the only non ripping capable cdrom drive (mitsumi) but i got an old little damaged panasonic drive (i just needed to help it start rotation, so i used it without the cover case all the time) and still that one would rip just fine (just slowly) using some dos proggie i forgot that detected and corrected the "jittering" issue.
As for p2p i quickly noted that the stupidest ever made program, the original napster, couldn't resume a partially downloaded file... So i quickly switched to one of the many open source alternatives, and opennap networks when napster went down.
Today there are many p2p networks and a very nice p2p file transfer protocol. There are no problems for getting things in free countries like mine. Besides, the things i like are never ever sold here; except for classical music and thats not so common either. And well, there is always IRC and the annoying member/queue/centric fservers, just as a last resource; napster started there, and even today there are still plenty of these. I never tried it, but some ppl say that newsgroups carrying binaries are another source too.
It is too late for the big labels and their police states to do anything; sure within their borders they can terrorize their inhabitants with corporate paid politicians passing obscene and unconstitutional laws in their countries, and try to impose their policy worldwide thru the WTO alikes, WIPO, ALCA/FTAA/ZLEA crap, etc. But thank God my country is officially opposed to these idiots (Just guess why CIA incited a failed coup d' etat here on april 11 2002 and attempt of kidnapping the president just like they succesfully did on Haiti with Mr. Aristide).
As for "Intellectual Property", yes, i think it does more harm than good, down with it. It can only be enforced by the rich, wealthy and powerful against the poor and weak. We know it very well in the "third world", natives using certain herbs for centuries, some "smart" american corporation comes and "discovers" the medicinal effects, goes back and patents it and impose their law everywhere, including the hometown of said natives... Back in the "first world", Artists are treated like slaves by the labels and don't get a dime for sold discs; so they are better off without the labels. With the internet, CDR, and other information technology tools (that some want to control) they don't need the big labels anymore, they can earn a life performing to the public as they currently have to do anyways... In software, we have Open Source as a fact that we can do better without "licenseware", and still maintain a strong local economy without sending so much money to a foreign monopolistic corporation; money much better spent in local talent working in open source solutions for the whole world to enjoy.
Ah, nothing like a nice rant.., oh wait, this was about audio mistakes? Oops! (move/delete if undesired, argh stupid human mind...) Have a nice Day .
- Using Fraunhoffer codec
- Using Audiograbber
- Using Lame 3.93 !!! (in full stereo mode, left channel sounded all right, but the right one...
- Thinking that CBR is better than VBR
- Thinking that Joint Stereo mode is worse than Stereo mode
- I was comming to this forum too rarely!!!
Kvak
using blade encoder @ 128 kbps (i knew blade had to be used only at high quality bitrates, only i thought 128 kbps was high quality ! )
then (lately) using easy cd-da extractor with lame 3.93 @ 192 kbps cbr...
heh, how about actually believing microsoft when they claimed that wma cbr @ 64kbps was "cd quality!" seriously, that was just pathetic.... i dont know what i was thinking...
I first used Musicmatch Jukebox 3.x to rip my CDs. Then someone told me Xing was better, so I ripped the CDs all over again using Xing Encoder . Even on my crappy speakers, the artefacts were obvious. Then, I came across r3mix and used that. Finally, i stumbled across HA.org. That's when I attained Moksha from the endless cycles of ripping and encoding.
assuming foobar2000 would be easy to set up.
transcoding 192kbit MP3s (LAME cbr) to 128, as surely 192 is overkill. I was so used to how low bitrate MP3s sound that something more transparent sounded actually worse to me
I also fell for the not-so-uncommon idea that transcoding does not degrade quality
- Not using tagging
- Not using MPC
- Not keeping extraction logs
- Not backing up my data ( a 24 GB mistake)
Hex editing an MP3 file, replacing big chunks with 00 00 00 and wondering why it didn't show up as silence.
I didn't have any idea what MP3 or PCM was.
My biggest mistake was to burn CDRs.
I've lost about 20 of them, now unreadable.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=85581"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Uh-oh.
Hypothetically, let's say that this is what I've been doing. What might one hypothetically suggest instead? Especially if one is, hypothetically, poor?
Around 5 years ago, I read one article of internet that recommended the Blade encoder by its excellent quality .
I downloaded the encoder and I used in 128 kbps, because I believed that this setting was CD quality
I ripped the wavs playing the CDs in my CD player, and I recorded (with Audiograbber) connecting the analog line-out of my CD player to the analog line-in of my PC
I said in that moment: this is incredible Hi-Fi
My biggest mistake was to burn CDRs.
I've lost about 20 of them, now unreadable.[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=85581")
Hypothetically, let's say that this is what I've been doing. What might one hypothetically suggest instead? Especially if one is, hypothetically, poor?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=281427"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
You should have nothing to worry about if you use decent media and store it properly. You can get Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs at about $30 a 100pc spindle at Newegg or Rima. Or for a little more, Maxell CD-R Pro (TY with scratch protection) at your local Staples.
For storing info, see [a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/contents.html]Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists[/url] by Fred R. Byers (downloadable PDF here (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/pub121.pdf)).
Well, I can't name any, cause i'm still in the process of making them
You should have nothing to worry about if you use decent media and store it properly.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=281731"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Thank you for all the info, Never_Again.
this is a great thread! i have plenty of noob mistakes one being--
-using Musicmatch Jukebox at 128k
-using CDex with LAME @ 128k
-burstmode
-"downgrading" to Id3v1 tags (i <3 v2)
...not too bad
- About 5 years ago, i encoded with audiocatalyst (old xing version) and used stereo instead of the better joint-stereo.
- Thinking that mp3trim is a nice app and then mass-trimming my entire mp3-collection with it... destroying the lame-headers(including the gapless-info) in the process - about 30% of those albums had seamless trackchanges (!!!)
- Lyx
Myself, I just hated VBR. As someone else mentioned in this thread, seeing the bitrate jump around made it seem buggy and unstable. Instead, I opted for 160k MP3s ripped through CDEX.
I started in the mp3 world back in 2000 with Napster, but the first CD I ripped wasn't until early 2001 (192kbps with iTunes 1.0 )
Back then, I only kept the songs that I immediately liked so I had an awful lot of incomplete albums and single songs.
- About 5 years ago, i encoded with audiocatalyst (old xing version) and used stereo instead of the better joint-stereo.
With old Xing, joint stereo could often really destroy the stereo imaging, so you did the right thing!
I've made soooo many mistakes that I don't remember them all but maybe the biggest one is this:
I had around 30 CDs ripped with MusicMatch @ 192kbps. One day I decided that those thing take enormous space on my 40 GB HDD so I downloaded a free audio conversion program and brought them all to 112kbps!!! Really nice
I don't have most of those CDs anymore
I've come up with my own encodings about three years ago. Back then, I used Lame 3.87 beta with "-v -V0 -q0" options.
The most horrible mistake was, I thought transcoding from low to high variable bitrates would improve quality.
Not going lossless, ripping my 1900 CD's to mp3, then having to re-rip my entire collection to flac.
Took about 9 million hours, or thats what it felt like.
NH
using music matchbox, ripping my cds in 128...then after a while i stumbled over fraunhaufer or hows its written with audiograbber, then lame 192 cbr and then eventually to the alt preset standard...never used xing, i was told that it was crap so i avoided it lol
Reading this thread, I discover that some of the "natural progresses" I made, were actually "stupid newbie mistakes".
Somewhere in 2001, I luckily discover CDex, which makes it easy for me to rip my own CD's into mp3 format. I hit off with using the LAME encoder, in dual-mono mode, 128 cbr. Some time later I discover that 128 is just not enough for the music I listen to (Death/Black Metal and their respective subgenres), so I switched over to 192 cbr, with the same old LAME that I got with CDex.
Later, searching for an unrecoverable album I have in my collection on eMule, I discover a lossless release of it (Yeehaw!), thus leading me to the release groups bulletin board, thereby leading me to EAC and lossless audio compression, which led me to finding HA.
I now rip all my audio in either --preset extreme or --preset cbr 192. This is because my mp3 player doesnt have more than 128mb and it supports nothing more than 256kbps ):
During my early days, about 2 years ago, I first heard of the ability to copy a CD onto a HD with Windows Media Player. I first used WMA at 128kbps until I larned that it was a closed format (and Microsoft was always re-hashing the codecs), so I re-ripped all my discs to MP3 at 192kbps (I was never a fan of VBR) untill I downloaded Winamp 5 and found out that this program could encode MP3's at 320kbps (I was never limited by HD space, so quality was my concern), -oh- and it supported MP4's as well, so I again re-ripped all my discs to MP4 untill I bought a 250Gig HD this year and just used ISO Buster to extract the raw audio to WAV files and have been doing that ever since because if I ever wanted to encode them, I can just use the WAV's.
so I again re-ripped all my discs to MP4 untill I bought a 250Gig HD this year and just used ISO Buster to extract the raw audio to WAV files and have been doing that ever since because if I ever wanted to encode them, I can just use the WAV's.
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Which is another mistake, since you can use FLAC and EAC, get perfect rips, compressed music, lossless, and easily convert them to any lossy format with.. pretty much any program (but foobar2000 comes to mind)
I have started back in 1999 with some version of MusicMatch. I remember that i have encoded about 50-60 cds in mp3 128 and after i have finished i realized that they were encoded in mono . So...back to work (Pentium I @ 200mhz)
Then i have discovered Xing and AudioCatalyst. Wooowww, the speed was amazing. So i was encoding everything @ VBR highest with an average around 210-220 kbs.
In 2001 i have read something on the internet about an amazing Lame
I have searched and i found the command line of Lame. A friend of mine offered to make me a program with some presets so i don't have to write presets all over again. I have used that program for about...2 days, and then i have discovered CDex.
That was the mp3 time. Then i have discovered MPC (found about HA too)and use it for some time.
Now i am using Lame 3.97 (for car & friends who don't want to hear about nothing but mp3s) and...i am waiting for Sebastian's test to decide what format should i choose.
'Till then i am saving everything in .wavs
That was me
'Till then i am saving everything in .wavs
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Why not as WavPack, FLAC or any other lossless format? It can save some space.
I know Sebastian, but since space is not a problem those days...and i am a little busy to encode in anything... so i decided to ...wait.
Until a few weeks i have encoded in Nero Mp4 "trancoding" but since the latest test...i have decided to wait a few days and then i have to decide if i choose OGG over AAC.
Maybe i am crazy, but this is me
By the way, i THINK that @ around 320 kbs the difference between codecs is not that big. Am i right?
By the way, i THINK that @ around 320 kbs the difference between codecs is not that big. Am i right?
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Actually, some people claim to abx mp3 at 320. And lossy codecs always have limitations versus their lossless counterparts.
Your best bet is to go with flac or wavepack.
Try wavpack hybrid, perhaps.
Or OGG q9
Something like that.
By the way, i THINK that @ around 320 kbs the difference between codecs is not that big. Am i right?
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Actually, some people claim to abx mp3 at 320.
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But I think only with killer samples.
Do you want a good one, guys???
Mistake (this one is from around.. 2000, maybe 1999) :
Thinking that the last bar from the Winamp equalizer (16Khz one) was broken, because when playing 128kbps mp3's (the majority of the ones i had at that time) i couldn't hear any difference when tweaking it.
Ok...this is how I started out...
At first I tried to rip cds by copying the *.cda file from the audio cd to my computer.
Then I found a program that ripped cds to mp3 (I don't even remember the name of the program), but ripped only 75% of the track for free (You had to pay if you wanted complete ripping capabilities. However, I didn't know that at the time. The result was me burning 2 or 3 cds from these mp3s and then wondering why all the tracks sounded so short...
Then I ripped using Windows Media Player and WMA (Yes, horrifying, isn't it...), and hunted around the Internet for a program that would convert WMA's to MP3's, but I couldn't find one for an age...
Then I stumbled on dbPoweramp, and thought that its 'CD' mp3 preset using LAME at 192kbps CBR was really CD quality (not like I could tell the difference back then anyway...)
And finally, I uninstalled foobar2000 after using it the first time waaaaaay back in the day - because I thought it was too simple in looks and confusing in features.
LOL
nazgulord
P.S. - I'm still learning these days...
I used audiograbber burst with Xing at 256 at first then switched to Lame 3.85. In all honesty the files I could not re-rip don't sound that bad.But the burst thing was an error.
I used r3mix for awhile. Who knew, right?
My more enduring mistake was not to tag anything up until Lame 3.89 came out. I had to go back and re-do all the tags which took time.
Well, I'm not sure if I made any serious mistakes - I was always very aware of the quality aspect. Made test CDs with multiple encodes at different quality levels, etc. Always knew that transcoding was bad, re-ripping was good... but anyway, here's my ripping history:
~1999 Used CDex to rip CDs to 128 CBR MP3s, because I somehow thought it was "cleaner" to use CBR than VBR... Lol. (I have always been very systematic when it comes to this kind of stuff.) I guess I just couldn't quite grasp the benefits of VBR...
~2000 Had a short WMA period - re-ripped what I could to 96 kbps WMA, and transcoded any songs I had encoded from borrowed CDs.
~2001 Back to MP3 again. This time around I went for VBR, but not "true" VBR. I set an upper kbps limit at 128.
~2004 After having been a Mozilla/Firefox nerd for quite some time, I had a look at Ogg Vorbis. (Both open-source stuff.) I remember hearing way back what must have been nothing but a rumour: that ogg hid the original data somewhere on the HD, and saved and presented a small file to the user... Don't know where that came from. Anyway, I did a few quick tests and realized it kicks @§§ compared to both MP3 and WMA. Basically couldn't tell Q3 from originals (no true ABX tests though), so I settled for Q4 (~128 kbps) to have a little margin.
~2005 Discovered HA.org. Have realized that my decision to go for Ogg at Q4 probably wasn't such a bad one... Still have only found one sample that I can ABX at this quality level:
Conjure One - Sleep (wavpack, 3.34MB) (http://davidnaylor.org/temp/Conjure_One_-_Sleep.wv)
Conjure One - Slepp (ogg Vorbis Q4, 543kB) (http://davidnaylor.org/temp/Conjure_One_-_Sleep.ogg)
Am now taking part in the 128 kbps listening test with great interest, and enjoy doing the occasional ABXing on my own.
Thinking the 128Kbps of gnutella was good quality. Then I found --alt-preset standard. Audio Bliss
Stringing together plugins in wiamp to do all sort of crazy stuff to "spatialize" music to sound homogenous throughout the room. I don't know if this was noobness, or my need to have music sound that same wherever I as at in a party. (audiphilia extremus?)
I also thought that EQ sliders could make anything sound good. I guess I should have looked into a career at Sony music if that were the case.
1998:
I was still a newbie at computers, lol. My first computer was a Compaq, AMD-K62 333mhz (sigh) 48mb RAM.
I used to rip music from my cds using xing encoder lol. I then realised that this was a shitty codec a few years later. Oh yeah, and I had a crappy external USB iomega cd-rw lmao.
2002- 2006:
New pc, a Sony VAIO RX305, Pentium 4 2ghz 1gb RAM etc...I used audiograbber + lame encoder @ 192kbps - 320kbps. Space wasn't really an issue and on my ipod, most of my songs are 192kbps.
2006:
Built my own pc, a pentium dual core 3ghz (overclocked to 4ghz) with a 300gb SATA II HD etc... One fast machine...I use lame encoder.
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
Except you just resurrected 9 months old dead topic. Congratulations newbie.
I first started ripping CDs to WAV using CD-TOOLS, which was a MS-DOS based program included on the CD-ROM magazine PC Format (I guess, some UK magazine anyway...). CD-TOOLS was actually more than a ripping program, it could do all sorts of things. Even list the TOC and technical data.
I did this on a 486 DX2 computer me and my dad build from components we got from a computer parts supplier for cheap.
The soundcard was an ESS type card and sounded pretty good (at the time).
In order to compress the PCM WAV files I used Bladeenc, l3enc (pirated of course, Fraunhofer stuff was very expensive at the time and still is with it's damn royalties) and also experimented with Xing suite all on Windows. Even though Fraunhofer had playback software for Windows 3.1 I didn't play MP3 content until I got Windows 95 on my computer. The only MPEG audio I played on Windows 3.1 was MPEG-1 Layer 2.
The only real mistake must have been using the Astrid Quartex AAC codec which was a fake. Even though PsyTEL AAC was actually using the original draft specs for the Advanced Audio Codec I didn't try AAC again until Nero released it's own implementation of the AAC codec under the name NeroDigital which I claim is the BEST implementation ever. Those german peeps really know their codecs (heh, MP3 is also german you know with patents owned by Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Multimedia).
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
Except you just resurrected 9 months old dead topic. Congratulations newbie.
I'm far from being a newbie.
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
Except you just resurrected 9 months old dead topic. Congratulations newbie.
What would you rather have him do: create a new topic for the same purpose, so that you or someone else could tell him that "we already have a topic for this"?
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
Except you just resurrected 9 months old dead topic. Congratulations newbie.
What would you rather have him do: create a new topic for the same purpose, so that you or someone else could tell him that "we already have a topic for this"?
Exactly, I detest those who are quick to prejudge someone as a "newbie".
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
As you can see, I didn't really make any serious mistakes...
Except you just resurrected 9 months old dead topic. Congratulations newbie.
What would you rather have him do: create a new topic for the same purpose, so that you or someone else could tell him that "we already have a topic for this"?
Ahhh... the great bulletin board dilemma...
Find an old thread that suits what you want to say, someone reprimands you for resurrecting an old thread -- you're a n00b.
Decide that a thread is too old, start a new thread, someone reprimands you "here's a topic about that" -- you're a n00b.
Do not post something, only to blurt it out later, someone reprimands you "that is off topic" -- you're a n00b.
The only real mistake must have been using the Astrid Quartex AAC codec which was a fake. Even though PsyTEL AAC was actually using the original draft specs for the Advanced Audio Codec I didn't try AAC again until Nero released it's own implementation of the AAC codec under the name NeroDigital which I claim is the BEST implementation ever. Those german peeps really know their codecs (heh, MP3 is also german you know with patents owned by Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Multimedia).
I'm not really sure what "BEST" means, but iTunes or CT might beg to differ. Oh, and the people responsible for AAC at Nero, are not really german.
9 months old dead topic.
different point of view,not a criticism...
no n00b:
means that he search,read lots and post in the relevant thread because is interested.
n00b:
just start a new post without read anything.
n00b and no n00b,who really is?
n00b is one state of mind and not the number of posts.
the new user can have few posts here but lots there.
Q:
why this thread is not closed or deleted?
A:
because is one cool thread full of informations.
Q:
we can't resurrect one old thread?
A:
if you're in topic...why not?
comments:
smsmasters have more answers here where lots are off topic than starting a new one.
in the end...the off topic answers resurrect this thread.
TYA for resurrect this thread.