hi neal,i would definitely suggest you to use ogg instead of mp3, because of the already mentioned patent issues. further ogg seems to have a better compression/quality ratio -> uses less space than mp3 for the same quality.
i used to encode most of my audio CD's to mp3 a while ago. problem is that you have to decide for a specific quality while encoding, which means you have the same quality for listing a song on your PC (maybe using your home stereo for that) as well as on your portable mp3 player, if you have one. but usually you want the files on your portable player to have a smaller size to be able to carry more music with you. smaller filesize means poorer quality. what you can do now is transcoding, which means to re-encode the same song with a lower bitrate so it takes up less space on your portable player. but that's actually the worst thing you can do, because ogg/mp3 are lossy, they suppress specific information in the music according to a psychoacustic model of the human ear/brain. transcoding then produces a poorer result in terms of quality than if you would encode to the same bitrate from the original (CD) data.
what i want to point out is if you are thinking about building up a digital collection of your music on your PC you should as well consider using a lossless compression method, like flac. flac is a free lossless audio encoder, which means that you have exactly the same data that is on the CD. it's not a big surprise that you can't get as high compression rates as with lossy compression (mp3/ogg), so one audio CD (~650MB) will end up in around 300-400MB flac files. what you get as a benefit is that you don't have any transcoding problems anymore. you can then as well burn audio CDs from the flac files with _exactly_ the same quality as the original CD. but you need a big harddisk for that. maybe that's overkill for you, but i thought i will tell you that anyway. xmms also plays flac encoded files, but i have no idea about winamp.
i also use grip/cdparanoia for CD ripping which works well together with flac as encoder. grip also knows CDDB queries, so it will know the album/artist/title for most of your CD's, that saves you a lot of typing, i tell you.
./michael Neal Lippman wrote:
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. Thanks. nl