MP3 help.......

[father ted]

sorry , not to clever with MP3s.....

how can i convert audio CD tracks on my laptop into MP3 files for onward transfer.....do i need a particular program (freeware?)or will something like windows media be able to convert them.....?

thanks for any info received.

love,
the thicko

[mcflurry]

dbpoweramp

[parrot of doom]

Windows Media Player will happily do this, although its preference is to use the superior WMA format. Just click into the options and select mp3 as the ripping format.

[-DeaDLocK-]

parrot of doom said:

Windows Media Player will happily do this, although its preference is to use the superior WMA format. Just click into the options and select mp3 as the ripping format.

For MP3 ripping at decent quality (I think it only goes up to 96kbps standard) you have to buy an MP3 encode pack though. WMP itself leads you on to all the right places. It's about a tenner IIRC. Worth it for the ease of use, but you can do what you want to do for free though.

Google either CDEX or EAC, along with LAME. You'll get all answers then.

[father ted]

cheers for that chaps

[Mr E]

I use freeRip (google for it)

Will rip to pretty much anything, and I'm most impressed with the quality.

[sadako]

WMA blows goats. Use CDEX and set it to use the ogg codec

[darthPaddington]

sadako said:

WMA blows goats. Use CDEX and set it to use the ogg codec

Look Ogg is nice enough but it doesn't work everywhere. you are just too limited

WMA is actually good quality these days but again it doesn't work everywhere (e.g. an iPod) also Microsoft tend to mess about with formats and DRM so there's no way to be sure that it'll be ok in 6 months.

I've ripped my entire cd collection (around 1000 albums)
I really suggest that for most people MP3 is the best solution. it is the one format that will work about everywhere and it you rip at a gecent quailty then you won't really notice a quality difference between this and any other format for normal use (e.g things like Flac that produce no quality reduction)


I recoment downloading Exact audio copy to rip the music
[url]www.exactaudiocopy.de/[/url]
It's free and there's basically nothing better

this works well with Lame to make MP3 files
[url]http://lame.sourceforge.net/[/url]

again free and again about the best you can get.

Peter

[Bodo]

Peter is right about the distribution of the MP3 format¹. If any player plays compressed music, then it is MP3! (except for a few players, whose manufacturers want to establish their proprietary format)

This, however, is the only advantage of MP3. Windows Media Audio (*.wma) and OGG Vorbis (*.ogg) do have better compression, where OGG uses dynamic compression, so that high bandwiths are used where they are necessary. This results in better quality per filesize than MP3.

WMA is Microsoft's proprietary format. Microsoft determines, who is allowed to offer it for compression and players. Whoever uses WMA is directly dependend on Microsoft's product policy.

MP3 is a proprietary format as well. Its use costs money and is dependent on Thompson and the Fraunhofer Society. They do charge for it, but you may use it for free for *scientific work* for now.

OGG² is entirely free and open source. Nothing is charged from consumers or developers. It allows as well compression rates up to 500kb/s and gapless playback.

So if you start ripping your music CD collection to your computer, and you're not already dependent on a device that only plays MP3, you may as well use the technical and licence advantages from Ogg Vorbis.

Don't worry, there is a really high number of portable players³ that support Ogg Vorbis beside MP3, and some do even support the free lossless format² FLAC.
One special to mention is the Cowon iAudio X5 which supports all mentioned formats.

¹ Wikipedia on audio file formats
² Wikipedia on Ogg Vorbis
³ Portable players that support Ogg Vorbis

[ferg]

Mr E said:

I use freeRip (google for it) Will rip to pretty much anything, and I'm most impressed with the quality.