Comments on: Have you heard good music lately?

By: the.effing.librarian

the.effing.librarian — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:12:52 +0000

I ripped thousands of songs at 128 and didn’t notice too much loss because I’ve been playing them in the car (I was trying to cram as many songs as possible onto the CD). But one day, I had the volume up all the way and the audio just broke up and sounded like crap. It had always sounded like crap, but I never really paid attention. So now I do 160 which doesn’t break up in the car. I use the lame encoder and dbPoweramp. I don’t do VBR because my CD player has trouble reading that. I might experiment now with the settings just to see what I get. I can’t imagine I would want to go over 192, but I’ll see (hear) what I get with the highest settings. I just really like having 200 songs per CD. I wish my player had an input jack or USB slot and that would solve some these problems. Anyway, running my test with Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick. “Stiff Competition” should make a good test with loud and quiet parts.

By: walt

walt — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:35:51 +0000

I used to use MusicMatch Jukebox, before Yahoo! bought it and then shut down its successor. I use Windows Media Player, which uses one of the big Internet databases, and gets things right most of the time. (There are occasionally spelling errors.) Even with MusicMatch, once in a while the database data would be wrong.

It is, after all, a magic trick: CDs do not contain any data indicating what songs are on them. The databases are using the length of each cut on the CD as a key to determining what the CD is.

Blake: You’re using music as background–and the rules are different there. (There are no rules there, actually.) If the sound quality doesn’t actively irritate you, I don’t see a problem.

By: Blake

Blake — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:30:48 +0000

“Pay attention.”
I guess that’s my problem, I almost never pay any attention to what I’m listening to. I don’t even know the lyrics to almost every one of the songs I listen to all the time. For me it’s just something playing in the background while I work now.

When it comes to music, I’m now a quantity over quality guy now. I’d rather have a million crappy small files than a thousand high quality large files.

By: Francesco

Francesco — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:32:17 +0000

>I long ago reripped all my CDs at 320K MP3…
Very interesting article. May I know what kind of software (if any) do you use to have the titles of the tracks automatically downloaded? I tried with Windows Media Player, but often it seems not to download them correctly, and write them manually is a very time-consuming task.
Thanks
Francesco, Rome (Italy)