do aac's sound better than mp3's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#AAC.27s_improvements_over_MP3

Even a regular encode at 192kbps is better (160kbps is sort of on the fence, sometimes they can be acceptable) never mind a serious LAME alt-preset-standard job.

AAC is probably very slightly better, but for all the hassle of having things in different formats (AAC, OGG, WMA etc etc), I'll stick with the universal (if flawed) mp3 for now personally. Fuck iTunes btw.

Way to be a perfectly useless and pointless iconoclast. Your faded t-shirt is in the mail.

Way to be a perfectly useless and pointless iconoclast. Your faded t-shirt is in the mail.

oh come on! there are any number of reasonable objections to be made to iTunes' general business model, choice of formats used (is it still a loss leader for the promotion of iPod's or are they in the black yet?)

I didn't say "fuck mp3 sales, period" (there are plenty of iTunes alternatives fwiw).

(re: susan's post) did you become happy with your iPod in the end btw? I realise that was a different thread, but I understood your frustrations there.

CC - iTunes, with the standard mp3 encoder is probably one of the fastest rippers out there :( I have no idea if AAC is faster, it's possible.

that is pretty much the exact problem I had with my iBook (and various programs, not just itunes) which I still haven't got round to selling. Just infuriating. I went back and forth over the "is this just psychological?" thing too. Various audio setups, soundcards, crappy kitchen cd players, cassette, vinyl, MD players... no problem accepting/adjusting to the sound which came out. That thing from Apple? UGH! Not music!! Weird.

go and put a record on - does it sound good? a CD does it sound good? or bad? mp3's and aac's vary in quality (AFTER A CERTAIN POINT) by not much more than those formats.

Absolutely everything that was played from my iBook (wav, mp3, aac, wma) sounded appaling & totally unsatisfying and I have no idea why. Whatever kind of variation it is has nothing to do with the rest of this discussion.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

You'll have to configure EAC appropriately, but it's better than absolutely anything else.

I didn't detect any sarcasm here, so I guess it needs a comment. Do you realize that decoding to wav does not change the musical data at all? If you are hearing things in the wav file that you did not hear in the mp3 file (e.g. low end), it means that your mp3 player/decoder (winamp, iTunes etc.) is not doing a good job with the mp3 file, and you might want to experiment with others (there are various decoders for winamp, you could try foobar2000, etc.). Just so you know...

-- cdwill

OTM! I have just recently discovered EAC and will never go back. I was forwarded to this link and found it to be most useful in setting it up though the learning curve is quite steep. They do sound like Nazi’s on some of their rules but I just ignored the things I wasn’t going to do.

http://www.ubernet.org/index.php?p=UberStandard

http://www.ubernet.org/index.php?p=UberGuide

I mean, 500+ million songs sold, that's $500+ million. And they're already pulling in tons of $$$ with crap downloads of TV shows. If Apple is still losing money with that model then all is lost.

Which is that if we're talking about AAC... IMO it's really more about selling hardware than concern for the customer's audio experience. Which Apple are very skilled at (even if it's 50% marketing and 50% genuinely great design) the iPod being one of their biggest sucesses ever.

Bleep.com have started selling stuff in FLAC (lossless) format now. That is a worthwhile small step forward. AAC probably does sound slightly better than MP3 (it helps them that the MP3 encoder in iTunes is allegedly pretty sub-par) but if you ask me it's just the same BS as Windows WMA (albeit with slightly less offensive DRM implementation). But Apple get a pass 'cos they're cool.

Apple Computer launched its iTunes Music Store for Windows amid much fanfare, but the company said it doesn't have any illusions that it can make great profits from selling songs over the Internet.

Instead, Apple is counting on the store as a key part of an overall music business for the company that can produce substantial profits--mainly through sales of its iPod digital music player.

"The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller told CNET News.com in an interview Thursday after the launch of the Windows version of the store.

Schiller said the music store is close to profitability but is still losing money. Apple doesn't see the business as having much long-term profit potential either.

http://news.com.com/Will+iTunes+make+Apple+shine/2100-1041_3-5092559.html

It's Bell Laboratories and telephony technology all over again -- with regards to bandwidth (in the case of MP3s, bit rate) how much do we need to give the receiver so that they can adequately process and comprehend the information? iPods and other mobile digital audio devices are all about portability, so what does it matter if you're listening to a 128kbs AAC file or a lossless MP3? Perhaps if you imagine yourself as some sort of "digital connoisseur" and you're listening to these files on a high-end playback system the gap between file formats and encoding rates is significant. Perhaps the latest (and somewhat dramatic) upgrade to the 5G iPod's soundcard capabilities (featuring a far greater dynamic sweep than previous models) suggests a space is opening up for such a connoisseurship. But if we're talking about wandering around the city with some earbuds, most of the ongoing format debates are senseless. They remain unknown to 90% of the people buying iPods.

aren't AAC files just the newer, slightly improved version of the MPEG audio codec anyway? Except they aren't making them open and accessible to all as 'MP4' files, instead using some wrapper* that makes them specifically into AAC files.

*tech jargon I don't entirely understand the fine details of.

There are many, many sited to configure EAC but this one is for "A practical community standard for extremely high quality audio archiving" or geeks!

http://www.ubernet.org/index.php?p=UberGuide
Congratulations, you are now creating the highest quality MP3s on earth!

also, try setting the EQ to "treble booster".

There is no such legal entity as "iTunes." It was kind of a hijack to start referring to the music sales ("iTunes Music Store") as just iTunes in this thread. As far as I can tell, the original question was purely about codecs. Apple's digital rights management software really exists outside of the codec and the format itself doesn't have much to do with the licensing.

At equal bitrates AAC is usually considered to be better, but there isn't a consumer tool with variable bitrate AAC that I know of, so LAME with the built-in presets probably serves you better to get the best quality. BeeOK, EAC just uses LAME like everything else, but it's an error-detecting CD ripper so you might end up with slightly cleaner audio going into the encoding process. On a new CD, probably not. On MacOS, you can use the iTunes-LAME helper application to use the LAME encoder and get very similar results to what you're getting with EAC.

Also, Apple has not seen the iTunes Music Store as a profit base in the past, only a promotional tool. I have no clue if they pull any profit off of it now, but I think they're probably rolling the money back into it if so. Apple uses it to drive iPod sales more than anything else, and the spillover computer sales that come with that.

Thanks for the lesson Mike.

Not to mention that EAC has a secure mode which prevents errors within the ripping process itself (as opposed to scratches on a CD, which can create errors in reading that CD), which, as far as I know, ITunes does not have. You'd be suprised how many errors result from this, even when the CD is brand spanking new.

Since changing PC's I've been getting errors on ripping new discs (have a backlog of about 20 cd's now that I have to re-encode :| ) 'errors' meaning stuff that sounds like vinyl scratches. Really tiny, but noticable, unnacceptable distortions.

It's not helping me pick out which rips have been affected that my soundcard is -total shit- right now (the slightest extra load on the CPU at all = chokes horribly during playback).

Anyhow, I have 'spin up before extraction' checked now (I'd forgotten about it), and the external ASPI (instead of the potentially problematic native Win2K one). Hopefully that'll sort it. EAC not being trustworthy is worrying me.

It always puzzled/enraged me that the iTunes store doesn't offer you your download as an AIFF file. I just paid for the damn thing, I want the frequencies above 15 KHZ! Probably a bandwidth issue, but still.

I think this is an attempt to prevent sharing of ITunes files, by keeping quality lower than users who know better would prefer. Same reason that all ITunes store files are at 128, rather than 192 or higher.

I haven't had too many problems ripping CD audio for a few years but I remember a period of time where I got really paranoid about it -- using EAC or cdparanoia, encoding with the best possible mp3 encoder options, really considering just using flac. You can actually eliminate a lot of possible errors by buying a really nice CD drive, especially if your PC shipped with a cheap one. It's less of a problem these days since nearly every drive is a DVD/CD-R/DVD-R type drive so the quality control is better, but I remember having a few really bad CD drives years ago.

The iTunes stores and other online stores don't offer high quality downloads because they've established a price/quality/size point and want to stick with it. Bleep and some others (Beatport) offer lossless files, but a lot of sites charge a premium since you're getting something that could be even better than a CD, quality-wise. There's also the bandwidth costs, storage costs, etc.

Now, that's something I hadn't considered, but that could (I think) explain why I've been having this problem on both PC's using EAC since it last worked flawlessly. I'll definitely have tried to make the headphone out work on the other machine I put together too.

I guess I'll have to set it back and see what happens.

Wait, is it possible for EAC to create FLAC files directly? I've been ripping .wav files with EAC and then dropping them into the FLAC frontend.

you could also try ripping it in "paranoid mode"

I just found "paranoid mode" and "burst mode" under Drive Options. So Burst just does a quick scan of the disc instead of the extremely stringent one that ubernet recommends? What does paranoid mode do? Any clue as to why a perfectly healthy disc would get such errors anyway?

Q:

What is "Paranoid Mode" and why is it not recommended?

A:

This mode is the oldest read mode in EAC, it exists from version 0.1b on. It will read every sector twice, but in very small blocks. This will slow down extraction, no drive features are used. If the drive does caching the option below should be activated, but this could create problems on some drives. This mode is stressing the drive very much and should not be used, if one of the other secure modes works ok. The "disable CD-ROM drive cache" will disable the drive cache when using Paranoid mode, by resetting the drive after a read command. On some drives this will take several seconds and should not be used in that case.

I'm sure we've done this a million times but what is good for encoding to for archival purposes (i.e. if I am selling CD)? I am terrible at this stuff

uh probably wav files? unless i'm misunderstanding what you're asking.

If you have no storage constraints, then something lossless. FLAC for openess; Apple Lossless for iTunes. Otherwise, 320kbps MP3 or 320 AAC.

This here guide is pretty terrific and detailed but with lots of screen shots so it's pretty easy for someone without much experience ripping CDs and stuff

For archive purposes, I would encode everything in FLAC (which you can covert back to mp3 for ipod use, etc. using ALL2LAME (pretty basic conversion software)

If you're archiving digitally, what are you ever going to play it on besides some kind of mp3 player? I mean, maybe you want to burn it to cdr or something, but the big difference is in the 0's and 1's; the sound quality difference is negligible if at all. What I'm getting at is why waste all the space of WAV or FLAC when you can just rip to 256, V0 or 320 mp3 and be perfectly content with the results?

the sound quality difference is negligible if at all

if you intend to play music loud on a decent stereo, you WILL notice the difference

and if you're going to make actual for-sale cds then mp3s/aacs shouldn't even be involved

FWIW, I encode everything at 256kbps AAC and it's the best compromise in terms of storage size and audio quality (and yes it's a compromise)

compromise is fine

lyfe

one day ,when everyone has 100 terrabyte drives, all the people who ripped to mp3s/AAC's will regret not making flacs.
Or when those drives die, will regret selling their cd's/vinyl.

for reeels

Yeah, not me. I have so much more space now without my tangible music collection and I only miss it rarely.

Or when those drives die, will regret selling their cd's/vinyl.

I do not regret selling off my Pale Saints CDs. Even if my drive did die.

I still wish I could add flacs to iPod. But then iPods are basically pieces of shit that break anyway. I'm having to reload a lot of stuff onto my second iPod now that I already fucking had on the old one and it pisses me off. I just loaded all that stuff LAST YEAR! Hard drives die, iPods die. We're all going to DIE!

when I sell stuff I rip to flac, burn a CDR copy of each disc, and make a backup DVD-R full of all the flac files. Once I get a bigger HD I can load all that stuff back in and have it all on HD, assuming the DVD-Rs hold up. If they don't, well that's the point of redundant backup - I'll still have a CDR.

i wish i had your stamina

i need to start backing things up

it's kinda funny when you encode something like 30s Ellington in V0 and most of the tracks end up around 96kbps

yesterday i lost 2 cds to the rot.
one original bought cd (orbital - snivilisation, PDO pressing of course), and the other a generic cd-r.

libcrypt drops some serious knowledge about backup technology here:

The Data Migration Thread

i wish i had your stamina

― guammls (QE II), Friday, June 12, 2009 9:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

See, this is exactly how I felt when I read sleeve's post. Like dude, I think it's great what you're doing, but I personally just can't imagine going there.

What? Mark E lost two CD's to rot? And one was Orbital & one was a CD-R? *faints* Really, I can't handle that kind of news, dude. Jesus H. Okay I'm leaving this thread now. I really don't want to know anymore. I'll check out that Libcrypt link when I've found the strength to deal with this shit again. Not now.

May all your cds rot to hell

Hahahahahah I bought some fucking vinyl today! Did you know that? I never buy vinyl anymore!

i knocked over a glass and spilled water on several lps last night; it sucked

Oh man, we need to have a thread about water damage to LP's. I'm serious. My dad had it pretty bad (his records were in the basement and the basement flooded), I had a little bit of it many years later (the roof over my room caved after I'd moved out of my parents' house).

But in the end it's only the COVERS that get fucked up as far as I know. I mean...running hot water has proven to be one beautiful, lovely thing to put parts of my (naked, black) LP's in at times.

yeah thankfully it only got to the very bottom of the sleeves and all seems to have dried out ok. still worried about mold, though... again, another thread

mold! yes! Oh my god! my father's collection...mold...let's not speak of it eh? It's still better than your whole freaking ipod or hard drive dying in one fell swoop. Or if your whole collection got stolen, but that's less likely.

Although I'm going to qualify this all a bit and say that my father was not nearly as much of a music nerd as I am. I mean, he was definitely the catalyst for me, he turned me on to things for awhile, but then his interests drifted elsewhere from music. So it might not have even been as traumatic a thing for him as it might have been for me to see all his records go like that. I barely remember the exact moment when it happened anyway. By the time I was old enough and really ready to peruse his records, the damage was done.