Posted by jcsarp on 06/12/06 00:52

A high quality ripper and encoder can make all the difference. I'm a
former club DJ and I've recorded about 1,200 disco/dance tunes from
vinyl to full wave CD. I've been doing this for several years (when I
have some free time) since about 1999 or 2000. It's actually quite
relaxing. The end results are EXCELLENT sounding full wave CDs.

A couple of years ago I started converting the full wave CDs to mp3. I
use the AudioGrabber ripper and the LAME encoder. Both are among the
BEST mp3 programs you can get. I always encode at a constant 128 bit
rate. Why? ... Some mp3 players and cell phones will only work with
128. There are others out there that will not work with variable bit
rates ... and still others that have problems with ID tags when the bit
rate is anything other than 128. So ... I decided to go with the
constant 128 to eliminate any player problems AND because the quality
is so good with Audiograbber & LAME that it actually SOUNDS BETTER than
the 192 bit rate (and above) tunes that my friends send to me. (They
must have used a lower quailty encoder)

Use a high quality ripper and encoder and all you need is a 128 bit
rate for great sounding mp3s.


John



name wrote:
> Hi.
> Since a long time I've been collecting mp3s (classical, rock, pop,
> modern, jazz, blues, reggae, etc..) on p2p. I've always re-encoded
> everything I collected to 128 kbps, since this is said to be near-CD
> quality by many people. Often however, I encounter people who insist on
> 192 kbps or even lossless formats. Is there any proponent of 192 kpbs
> quality who is able to illustrate the advantage of this difference in
> quality by means of a few mp3s (or fragments of them) where this
> difference can be heared most clearly? I've heard that for piano music
> for instance it's very hard to distinguish between 128 kbps and 192
> kbps and I've tried this out for myself with piano music I'm fairly
> familiar with and couldn't pick out the higher quality in a blind test.
> So I'm interested in some music to put on my mp3 player (iaudio 5) to
> listen to with decent headphones (shure e3c) to see if it's really
> worth the extra diskspace to collect music at 192 kbps rather than 128
> kbps.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help with this request, kind regards, Niek

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