Having read recommendations here (and hearing recommendations by others of the paper versions), I decided to use my post-dental retail therapy time to acquire a complete set of Harry Potter CDs. Now I'm about to encode them, and I hope to get advice from those who have already done it before I feed the first of these 45 discs into the drive.

I'll be using lame 3.92, with the aim of listening on long motorway drives (lots of engine and road noise).

Presumably I can get away with encoding in mono, but it would be nice to know other useful hints to get the encoding down, such as high-pass and low-pass frequencies, and perhaps different VBR quality settings or presets (--preset voice, perhaps?).

Any advice?

Greetings!

As one of the obsessed, I performed my encoding with my standard audio set: full quality VBR using a now defunct tool called Siren by Sonic Foundry. Depending on your encoder, watch your track breaks carefully - you will want to have plenty of breaks if you are on a short drive, and the ability to fast forward or use bookmarks to set your position easily. VBR is much tougher to do this with.

Which version did you get? I would strongly recommend the UK version over the US version (for English language use). Stephen Fry is (in my opinion) better at the characterization than Jim Dale, and the original UK vocabulary seems more appropriate.

"--preset type" type must be: phone, voice, fm, tape, hifi, cd or studio
"--alt-preset type" type must be: "standard", "extreme", "insane", or a value for an average desired bitrate and depending on the value specified, appropriate quality settings will be used.

It all depends on how small you want to go, I did use "--preset voice" on one audiobook and it was noticable when driving. The (female) reader's voice was a bit harsh in places. I don't recall what the final bit-rate was, but the 3 CD took about 46megs of space (I think).

If i was doing it again I would give "--alt-preset type" (where type equalls the targeted bitrate) a go, whether it would be better I don't know.

I've got the UK version. Luckily, I'm in the UK, so it's the default here, but even if I wasn't, I remember the comments here last time Rowling's books were mentioned.

/me opens the folder...

Hmm, I'm not sure I like the way that chapters are divided into 2 or 3 tracks (though I appreciate that chapters have to straddle discs). I'll try it as it is for a disc or two and see how I feel, I suppose.

/me inserts Disc One...

A test run with lame reveals that it is in mono or at least very close.

Time to do some listening tests (it's a bloody nuisance that none of the players on my workstation will DTRT with my stereo-only sound card)...

Greetings!

Trust me. That chapter division can come in very handy with some of the longer chapters. Especially if you have trouble getting to exact points in VBR files. It flows fairly seemlessly, but there is very little flow between tracks (I don't think you will need GapKiller).

I would recommend you find "favorite spots", tracks / sequences you like and with a lot of different characters / voices, and run the test on those spots. Maybe about three different ones from different books if possible. That should give you a good baseline without having to go through too many trial rips.

Perhaps you can take those three tracks, rip them and name them with the options they used, and move them to the player for later evaluation. This way, you don't have to worry about reproduction through your sound card, and can prerip the interesting sections for later comparison.

I would be curious to see if you have problems ripping. With my US version (not as much the UK), it was picky about the reader I used to rip.

I would strongly recommend the UK version over the US version (for English language use). Stephen Fry is (in my opinion) better at the characterization than Jim Dale, and the original UK vocabulary seems more appropriate.

Having listened to about an hour of the US version when testing a player sent in for service, I'd agree - Stephen Fry does a far better job of it.

In reply to:

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I would be curious to see if you have problems ripping.

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Some discs caused cdparanoia to retry more than I'd like, and the last two tracks of Disc 3 totally failed in my drive (which had no problems with the Cactus-protected Natalie Imbruglia album), giving kernel messages like

Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: hdc: packet command error: error=0x54
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: ATAPI device hdc:
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: Illegal mode for this track or incompatible medium -- (asc=0x64, ascq=0x00)
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: The failed "Read CD" packet command was:
Sep 9 21:42:32 suilven kernel: "be 04 00 04 a6 fc 00 00 04 f8 00 00 "

[Edit: using cdda2wav or cdparanoia executable instead of grip's embedded cdparanoia didn't help]

But a colleague's Mac did these for me (and saved me time by doing the downsampling for me, giving Lame less work to do).

I've now encoded the first book, and I'm going to listen to it for a bit before going further. I found it was a bit quiet, so I used "normalize" to add 5dB or so. I also omitted the "Chapter Seven, continued" introductions where chapters were split across two CDs, as those boundaries disappear on the Empeg (simply omitting the first 250 audio frames from the rip). I kept the other metadata lines, though.

I set Lame to use VBR level 9, in mono, resampling to 22.05kHz and lowpass filtering at 10kHz. This gives me something that still sounds very good through headphones, so I expect that it's more than good enough for the car. It comes out at 181MB for the full 8h25m - only 50.11kb/s, in other words.

I have no new information to add to this thread, I just wanted to chime in and say that your subject line was quite clever and makes me laugh out loud each time I see it.

Greetings!

I don't actually think they are protected, but I am certain they are not a large production run. I get the feeling that the format is a little flaky in spots, and the rippers sometimes have trouble with it. Almost as though it were a mass produced CDR...

Speaking of Harry Potter

here

I was too amused

...now that is scary...

Ok what's wrong with this picture?



Calvin

The vibrations, ... make for a very magical journey! It is a very durable toy, as well. My only complaint is, I wish the batteries didn't run out quite so quickly! This toy is a wonderful escape into a world of imagination

gosh

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