Hello. i am converting a medium sized cd collection, about 850 original cd's to mp3's for a network music server. can anyone point me in the direction of some good tips on what software/settings to use to do this right so i don't have to go back and/or wish i had done a better job? i am thinking of doing them all at 256k i want to use id's because they will be played through an audiotron (www.turtlebeach.com) and it has a nice display/menu system that makes good use of the id's matthew
Since you are planning on using those bitrates you'd be better off using the mpc (musepack) audio format instead of mp3. It offers much better audio quality than what mp3 can offer from mid (>160) to high bitrates. However, if you must use mp3 then using the LAME encoder is the best way to go. One good idea is to use Monkey's Audio as a frontend program for LAME. As far as encoding settings go then the use of alt presets is highly recommended. The alt presets are tweaks which have been tested thoroughly so that they produce the best results regarding audio quality. Various listening tests have proved their value. There are various places to get Lame Win32 executables. One place is here: http://www.hot.ee/smpman/mp3/ Monkey's Audio can be found here: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ Markus Edit: removed the presets -part. Thanx for the heads up cd-rw.org
I would recommend the Exact Audio Copy+LAME VBR combinatior -- if there is ever a change that these files could be used on a hardware player. If you are absolutely only using computer as a source, then MusePack might be a wise choice: It encodes faster and provides quite low bitrates with 'standard' profile. Markusk, the full LAME settings list is right on top of this message board, posted with the permission of it's author:http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1912 Here's my simplified EAC setup guide. http://cd-rw.org/articles/archive/eac_and_lame_setup_guide.cfm and there is actually another one coming online soon.
