Ekk Run for your lives I am an Empeger again

Going to Re rip all my cd's and after reading I the board I have a few questions.

Which rip program (Windows xp)

Will the Empeg Play Flac, Apr, Ogg ??
If so which one should I encode with I have about 400 Cd's

Do I still get ID3 Tags with Flac, Ape or Ogg ?

Best settings for the Best quality ??

Dumb Question is the Empeg really 4 channle out (front right front left rear right rear left) or is it some division of 2 channel ?

Which rip program (Windows xp)

EAC with LAME.

Will the Empeg Play Flac, Apr, Ogg

No, unless you run the 3.0 alpha. However, that alpha is still too unstable to use every day. For you, I recommend that you do NOT try to use the alpha. So, stick with version 2.0 final and play MP3s for now.

Best settings for the Best quality ??

Alt preset extreme, or alt preset insane.

is the Empeg really 4 channle out

No. It is like any other car stereo. It is stereo left and right. The fader controls how far forward or backward the sound of the four speakers is balanced, but the output is the same for front and rear.

In other words, if you're looking for surround sound, go buy a home theater system.

If you have the drive space, rip to FLAC, as it's a lossless format. Then you can store the cd's and hopefully never have to rip them again.

Use EAC and LAME for best ripping results.

The 3.0alpha5 software will play Ogg and FLAC but not Ape. Unless you are comfortable with alot of tinkering and software flashing, I wouldn't recommend using it yet though. Hopefully they'll have a 3 series beta soon that will be stable enough for daily use (not that alpha5 isn't, but the database rebuild bug is a killer.)

My recommendation would be to encode in VBR 192 or 256 for the greatest compatibility.

The empeg is only stereo. The front and rear outputs are simply for ability to fade sound from front to rear.

EDIT: The pebble remains...

> Which rip program (Windows xp)

Hand down; EAC in secure mode. It is the only way to guarantee perfect rips.

> Will the Empeg Play Flac, Apr, Ogg ??

Ogg and Flac yes, APE no.

> If so which one should I encode with I have about 400 Cd's

Well, they have their strengths and weaknesses. Flac is lossless (i.e. a perfect copy), so you can transcode to any other format you want easily at a later date. But the files are huge, 40% of the original wave file. Ogg is technically a little superior to mp3 and a truly free format, but still has not taken off yet. Mp3 is still the standard.

> Do I still get ID3 Tags with Flac, Ape or Ogg ?

Yes, there are tags included in all of them.

> Best settings for the Best quality ??

Depends on the format of course. For Mp3 you should use one of the "alt preset" standards. Never used Flac, but since it is loseless I would assume quality setting are meaningless. Do a search for Ogg here on the BBS, there was a thread about the best settings for it not too long ago.

>Dumb Question is the Empeg really 4 channle out (front right front left rear right rear left) or is it some division of 2 channel ?

The latter, it is only split left and right.

All IMHO of course. Your millage may vary. Void where prohibited by law.

"EDIT: The pebble remains..."
Indeed.

Just for the sake of completion, 2.0 final will also play non-DRM wma files and Wav files.

Tony, have you looked at Cdex yet? I downloaded it and actually had no problems getting it to work with a local freedb (I never could get that to work with EAC). It seems to have the same functionality as EAC, even installs lame with it with a nice little configuration section (containing most of the cooler lame presets).

I'm pretty sure people here have tried it, just wondering if there are still any advantages to using EAC over Cdex and what they are?

I haven't used CDex recently, so I don't know where it is with its features nowadays. The key thing about EAC though is that its main aim is to rip CDs as accurately as it can. It sacrifices out right speed (some rippers rip a lot faster than EAC, but less accurately).

I don't know what approach CDex takes to ripping quality.

> I don't know what approach CDex takes to ripping quality.

I was looking at it a bit today after it was mentioned in this thread, and it does have a "paranoia" mode, which might be the equivalant. I would have to do some tests on hard to rip cds to see if it failed to know for sure.

I keep vaguely thinking about getting EAC, but as yet have had no requirement for it as all my CD's rip perfectly with Audiograbber with Lame. Are there any other benefits other than the absolute surety that a slightly scratched/dodgy CD will rip?

You will find that most of your CDs do no actually rip perfectly. I was very surprised when I moved to EAC when I discovered that many CDs without visible damage require multiple passes to get an accurate rip.

I only discovered this because I was forced to switch to EAC because I was considering joining an elite MP3 swapping group (which in the end I decided not to do). In my case, even using EAC rather than Audiograbber the process doesn't take much longer, because I have a very slow CPU so LAME accounts for 90% of the time it takes me to rip/encode a CD...

Hmm - how are we defining accurate rip? I'm certainly getting no read errors, the checksum checks out ok, and there are no audible glitches.

Checksums. If you rip the same track multiple times and the checksums are the same then you can be fairly sure you are getting an accurate rip. The completely paranoid can also check the checksums against the checksums that other people have got.

Even with my Plextor drive I found that on a surprising number of disc (and my CDs are well looked after) checksums varied on multiple rips.

Now that I don't have an external requirement for 100% perfect rips I would probably move back to Audiograbber if I got a faster CPU. Given that it takes more than an hour for LAME to encode a CD on my PC there isn't much need to speed up the ripping process.

The key thing about EAC though is that its main aim is to rip CDs as accurately as it can.

I know, I've used EAC for the last 2 years now, re-ripped my whole collection with it. They sound great, but I honestly never used most of the quality related settings, it seemed to do just great without them, that and I didn't feel like take an hour to rip a cd.

I use Audiograbber, and they sound fine to my ears. Mind you, I've got a Matsui CD player, so I'm not exactly an audiophile

I think I once had a CD with some scratches and I ran it through twice but got the same checksum...can't see me bothering with many, really, unless I get a few CD's with issues. It only takes about 15 minutes to rip and encode an entire CD on my box anyway - takes me a reasonable proportion of that time to type in the track info, as it's on a machine I don't connect to the World Wide Interweb Superhighway.

I use CDEX and have real good luck with it.

Are WMA's really the pariah they are made out to be?!?! I have encoded my entire cd colleciton (300+) as WMAs and except for the fact that the empeg doesn't like any bit rate above 160, I am happy with the results.....

Are WMA's really the pariah they are made out to be?!?!

This isn't a technical question: WMA's are fine. It's a moral/ethical question: Do you want to give Microsoft easy entry to yet another market? It's kinda like with vampires -- they can't do any harm unless you invite them in.

There's also the notion that WMA support might go away, or it might mutate into an incompatible form. Sure, the WMAs you made today will continue to work on today's WMA decoders, but what happens when you try to create WMAs years from now and they no longer work on the empeg or the WMAs you create today no longer work on tomorrow's decoders? With open technologies, that's not a problem. There will always be decoders around. (We can still play Zork and other Infocom games on basically any OS because we know how to decode them, for example.) But since WMA is totally closed, when Microsoft stops supporting it, you're pretty much SOL. Sure, you can play your 8-tracks on your 8-track deck, but no one's made any new tapes or decks in decades, and dusting it off is too much of a pain. But that becomes even worse when you have to find an old computer that will run the latest version of Windows that supported the WMA you want, install that OS, install the WMA support and encode, assuming you can find all of those things.

I see....bit if you retain the original cd's the worst you would have to deal with would be to rip them all over again....

so essentially you are saying that since WMA are proprietary to MS that when and if the day comes they, or any other vendor, no longer provide decoders the format will be worthless.....

kinda like the Betamax video format????

Yes. I also have a political bone to pick with Microsoft that prevents me from ever wanting to use their proprietary technology, but the potential intentional obsolescence is an important nonpartisan point, too.

Do you want to give Microsoft easy entry to yet another market? It's kinda like with vampires -- they can't do any harm unless you invite them in.

Hahahahaha! Now, that is the first time I ever heard that comparison!

kinda like the Betamax video format????

Yeah, but betamax was way better than VHS......

/Runs away

It was. My SL-HF300 (black version) is still kicking VHS's ass.

Cool, have you had it re-headed?

Yeah, a couple years ago I sent it to a guy in California to get new heads.

Yeah, but betamax was way better than VHS......

Yeah, but Betamax and VHS are both inferior to Video 2000.

Pim

Bugger, I'd forgotten about that.

Alt preset extreme, or alt preset insane.

Does that go in the additional command line options area?
What is the command that goes there?
Right now mine says.

%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s

Oh, should I just change the standard to extreme or insane?

--alt-preset standard should be all you need if you have "LAME MP3 Encoder" selected for "Parameter passing scheme". You'll have to put %s --alt-preset standard %d if you have "User Defined Encoder" from the pull down list. Both do the same thing.

The alt presets are VBR, so you don't need 128 on the command line.