Best quality

[didbox]

Hello,

I'm new on this forum. First of all, thanks for your great product!

I have two questions:
- I'm an audiophile and I'm looking for advises in configuring the ripper for best quality.
- What to do if I have unsecure and/or inaccurate rip?

Thanks.

Didier

[LtData]

Re: Best quality

1. Go lossless.
2. Try to re-rip it or, if you have one, use something like a "SkipDoctor" to "resurface" the CD and try to take out any light scratches. If it still will not rip correctly, try a different computer, maybe? If nothing will work, then you will probably just have to get a new copy of the disc.

[neilthecellist]

Re: Best quality

3. If you can't get a new copy of a disc, there is always iTunes or another internet music downloading site, but they won't be lossless, (it'll be damn near close if you choose the highest bitrate though)

[oldtimer]

Re: Best quality

Not that I have ever stooped to 'do' itunes, but what I have read suggests you can only down load 128 BR. I am fortunate to have a large CD collection and a monster vinyl collection. I had a town house when most of my friend were in apartments getting rid of their large vinyl collections. If not for that I would be going to iTunes as well. 128 BR is considered low quality by the poweramp browser, a GREAT tool.

When you are ripping, there is a mode where you can check the quality of your read from your CD. I would not waste time cleaning up my CDs if the rips were verified at 100%. You could ruin the CDs instead of make them better. I am fairly new to poweramp but I understand how surface defects effect the quality. CDs write tracks so big surface defects don't do much. I got 100% on a disk I thought was ruined. DVDs are a different story. The reader makes a big difference with them. Maybe having a power burner allowed me to rip a terribly damaged CD. That is something to consider if you are looking for a new burner. Some moderately priced burners are close to the best. Unfortunately, the best is also by far the most expensive.

You can't go wrong with loseless other than bloated files. neilthecellist made a point that we all need to ponder. There are some 128 BRs I can't tell from loseless either. I have gone away from loseless to tiny loss. I figure if I can sometimes hear the difference some times with low quality audio at 128 BR it is unlikely that I can hear the difference at extreamly high quality lossy. Poweramp can encode that way. I still get a 4:1 to 2:1 compression and the tunes play on everything try to play WAV or FLAC on your iPod. That mode is called variable bit rate quality. The ripper is worth the money for that feature alone! You tell the 'thing' how much quality you are willing to lose and it figures out what it can do. CDs featuring Spanish guitar maxes out at 320 BR while most rock&roll runs in the low 200s. The more complex the music the more samples it takes so the higher the BR. To produce silence or a note you can use the same sound frame and play it multiple times instead of storing many copies of the same frame.

I do not know but I also bet there is some correlation between how we see videos and how we hear music but I don't know for sure. Our brain can only see something like 16 frames a second. We can't comprehend faster than that. If you saw a movie at 50 frames per second you could not see the difference between that and 20 frames a second. The bit rate is over double over the slower one but you can not tell the difference. I am only trying figure out why something 6% of the original size can sound so good.

I also have heard that lossy compressions cut out the high frequency tones. They use up much more band width than low tones. A 4 htz tone is like thunder which you feel more than hear has no band width compared to 20,000 high pitch tone which few of us can hear even if if our speakers can reproduce sounds that high. There is 5,000 time more data for stuff you can't here. If the encoder cuts off above 20,000 htz did you lose any quality? Technically yes but not really. I don't think I can hear above 18,000 because I have been to too many rock concerts.

I really wish I knew exactly what the fancy encoder was doing but I don't other than it increases the BR for complex music and decreases it for less complex music. The one drawback for this is players assume a constant BR when you FF or go back. It will play OK but the player will be confused as to where it is inside the tune. I can easily give that up.

One last thing, I rip vinyl. I always rip lossless for 2 reasons. One I make a CD, ripping vinyl is a pain so I don't want to do that again! The other reason is if you need to edit the music to get rid of hiss or pop you should do it before it is compressed. I am not 100% sure about audio but I know you can't compress to lossy then decompress video and pictures without losing quality. If you think you will ever need to edit your music keep a lossless copy. I figure I have my originals that I never play so I can go lossy without a second thought.

Hopefully, I have given you food for though and also hopefully no real wrong information. I say if you can't hear the difference why bloat up your computer and mp3 player. I do not know how well extremely high quality tunes decompress if you use them to burn back to a CD but I bet you lose something.