Ripping a CD with best MP3 settings

Seeker · Post by **Seeker** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:23 pm

Question from a friend:

If I have two mp3s of differing bit rates, which would be preferred:
256 VBR, or
320 Fixed?

Extreme: VBR ~256 kbps - Near CD Quality+
Insane: CBR ~320 kbps - Highest Quality

From the above it appears the latter, but others may have different opinions.

Teknojnky · Post by **Teknojnky** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:37 pm

320 cbr wastes a huge amount of space.

I am sure in 99% of the cases, the 256 vbr (v1 or v2) will be sufficient.

When in doubt, ABX and prove it to yourself as everyone's ears are different.

Big_Berny · Post by **Big_Berny** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:10 pm

Well, the difference of filesizes (bitrate) of this two options isn't so big. So you also could pick the CBR as it surely has the better quality (even if I doubt that you hear the difference) and the files are only a bit larger.

EDIT: But IMHO a bitrate of about 192 @VBR is already more than enough!

telliott · Post by **telliott** » Sun Jun 15, 2008 11:25 pm

I'm ripping a large collection and MM ripping to flac is fast. I tried EAC and it reported accurate results. Perfect is perfect (to me) and nearly all ny CDs are scratchless. I may go back toe EAC to rip a few CDs I got used to make sure I get an accurate rip.

Can someone from the MM development team explain why secure rip is not needed? It's been a requested feature for a long time. To me, if the CD is good and the drive is working properly it should not matter. Will MM report errors if it's unable to read every sample?

Tim

Big_Berny · Post by **Big_Berny** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 2:36 am

@telliott: Well I thinkt that accuraterip is not needed by te majority of users because they just don't care. And it would need a lot time to implement that. That's why it's not implemented yet. But if you really want to be sure to have perfect rips I'd use EAC or dBpoweramp.

telliott · Post by **telliott** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:43 pm

I just did a test and MediaMonkey as well as EAC preserves HDCD data.

I ripped an HDCD encoded CD to flac using both programs and used Nero, with flac plugin, to burn a sample of tracks to a virtual CD. I had 2 virtual CDs, one containing rips from each program. Then I loaded each into Daemon tools and played the virtual disk in WMP11, which is the only program I know of that will decode and display HDCD. The HDCD display came on for both rips.

Maybe one day we will figure out how to use that extra data to make better mp3s.

Tim

Big_Berny · Post by **Big_Berny** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:09 am

Are you sure that it preserves data? I almost can't believe that.... If you encode to wave you should have a bitdepth of 20 instead of 16.