On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 06:59:59PM -0400, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Neal Lippman said:
> > I was looking for some advice on what people are using to create mp3's. My
> > task is to take .wav files from CD's (which I own) and convert them to mp3
> > format; I am doing this so that I can store much of my music collection on my
> > computer, but don't have the necessary space available to keep the files in
> > .wav format.
> >
> > I know there are a few different mp3 encoders around, but I'm confused as to
> > the various descriptions, which seem to hinge around various encoding
> > algorithms.
> >
> > What are people using and what works well for this task?
> >
> > NB: I am using woody, but am willing to grab from sarge if necessary.
> I use grip - it has a nice GUI, easily configurable, etc. As the
> backend, I think LAME makes a nice encoder, but it is not in Debian, due
> to restrictive licensing. There are unofficial apt sources for it,
> though I don't have one in front of me. There are plenty of other
> encoders out there, though, and many of them are free. I've found the
> quality to vary a fair amount, though, and that's why I returned to
> LAME.
Definitely agree with grip, it's by far the nicest ripping/encoding
frontend I've seen. If you care about the quality of your ripped music,
do use cdparanoia rather than the (possibly) slightly faster cdda2wav.
It tries very, very, very hard to avoid any sort of error in the rip,
and works very, very well.
I also second LAME. There're a few other Free (as in fairly free
speech) out there, notable BladeEnc and gogo, but they both seem to
sound worse than LAME (in my rather unscientific tests). You can get a
source tarball from http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/. It might be worth
compiling from source so that you can use nifty optimisations ("-O3
-march=<cpu> -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" seem to be popular), and if you
do, have a look at GNU stow (apt-get install stow), it makes installing
from source easy as pie.
Use VBR! Unless you have extremely strict space constraints and
require predicatable output size, use VBR and let LAME figure out what
bitrate to use for each section, while maintaining a constant average
bitrate. It sounds better and can lead to smaller files.
Of course, if MP3 is not a requirement, then have a look at Ogg Vorbis.
It sounds better than any freely available MP3 encoder at the same
bitrate, is (as far as anyone knows) patent free, supports better
metadata (arbitrary key=value pairs), better streaming support, and just
better all-round goodness. The V1.0 encoder just hit the streets a
couple of weeks back, after years of testing, and is in unstable right
now. I imagine it'll get into sarge within a week or two, but you can
of course download the deb from unstable and install it yourself, or get
the source from www.vorbis.com and compile it...Of course, grip supports
it out of the box; just select 'oggenc' as your encoder in the
preferences tab and you're ready to roll.
Wow, that turned out a lot longer than I thought it would; hopefully
there's some useful info in there
-rob
Attachment:
pgpKCD5hVigKZ.pgp
Description: PGP signature