MP3 or WMA?

[M0nkeyb0Y]

Like the dimwit I am I didn't back up my recently defunct Mp3 drive. I'm now going to commit my CD collection to hard drive (once more).

Which format and burner shall I use for this - my first instinct was to go with Media player 10 at 192kps MP3, but just read some spiel about how lossless WMA is better quality per meg.

Please advise guys.
Ta, MB.

[chuckskull]

192 MP3 is considered transparent, which means the average person cannot tell the difference between the original and ripped version.

Personallly high quality VBR is my choice. Lossless WMA is useless to you, you dont need lossless files and even if you did Lossless WMA is far from the best lossless format.

[Funkstar]

How many CD's are we talking here?

Personally i would go for a lossless rip using FLAC. Then whenever you want to encode them again to the latest greatest format you can just transcode them to anything you like. No more shuffling CDs, just let it encode. My 800+ library took about 2 1/2 days only my laptop to transcode to MP3 192kbit (Pentium M 1.67ghz)

[chuckskull]

Personally I rip to FLAC, but I have a terabyte of hard disks to play with and another terabyte waiting to go in. For the average home user with an 80 gig hard drive though. It's just to large a format, and very easy to end up with bad sounding music.

Though if you decide on lossless, make sure you do it right http://jiggafellz.isa-geek.net/eac/ Don't worry you wont need to go through all that for every CD.

[Steve B]

i rip to OGG, as i like the name

[chuckskull]

i rip to OGG, as i like the name

[jackvdbuk]

i searched for a comparison of flac Vs mp3 and there sayign they cant even tell the differnce :S so why bother?

[M0nkeyb0Y]

Cheers guys - talking 250-300 CDs - not counted them.

What software are people using?

Oh, btw - have 450gigs on my desktop, 200 on my HTPC, and 80 on my lappy - but hope to move to either a 0.5/1 TB media server within the next couple of months

MB

[starbuck]

I use EAC to rip in secure mode as it does a couple of passes to check what it's ripping is accurate. I rip to MP3 using the lame encoder(all you need to do is put the lame exe in the EAC folder and it will do it for you) and encode at the alt standard preset(which is 192 vbr).

Media monkey is also good. It doesn't do 2 passes but it will encode using the alt std preset, organize all your mp3s and anything else you want.

[mike_w]

OGG Vorbis supposed to be rather good. And free. In both meanings of the word.

[charleski]

Another vote here for EAC+lame. I use -V 3 --vbr-new (-V 2 for classical) for the compression settings. It's fast and excellent quality.

[autopilot]

i searched for a comparison of flac Vs mp3 and there sayign they cant even tell the differnce :S so why bother?

Well it depends on what bitrate you are using, but on my 2 modest systems i have to encode at nothing less than 320kbps (ok, sometimes maybe 256) with MP3 before its hard to tell the difference from lossless. Even then, i can still tell them apart with some stuff. Nothing major, it just losses its 'sparkle' and seems flatter. But the difference is more noticable with some types of musc. At the end of the day, why settle for lower quality music when you can have it better for free and very little effort. The other reason why you should bother is transcoding - if you ever find that you might be better off with a different format, trancoding from FLAC to WMA or ACC lossless will sound just as good as the orginal CD - nothing is lost. Plus transcoing from lossless to lossy is just like ripping the CD again, but without the hard work. Lossy to lossy sounds crap because you loose even more data again.

People who tell you that it's imposible to tell the difference between 192kbps and the orginal CD are talking out of thier arse, and i believe that orginally probably comes from companies that make poor quality products that can only store and play low bitrate MP3 or even the sites that sell crappy low rate ACC and WMA's. You dont need an audiophile quality kit to tell the difference. Not to say 192 sounds poor, but blind test 192 and CD quality of a reasonable system and you mind will be made up.

M0nkeyb0Y : Now seems like the pefect time to learn some new skills and treat yourself to the music you deserve WMP maybe very noob freindly and what you are used to, but it's truly terrible for ripping CD's. Stop using it! Forget WMA, get EAC (free) and use the LAME MP3 encoder at 320. If you have the space, rip to FLAC (better than lossless WMA due to its support for gapless, but will sound the same). Lossless is the future, all music will be sold online as lossless one day. We will laugh at MP3 etc soon enough, it's destined for ringtones only.

EDIT: One other thing - if you absolutly never ever intend to listen to any music that requires gapless playback (almost imposible IMO) and really cant use any player but WMP because your a spanner (kidding mate ), then WMA lossless is the best option - because WMP cant read FLAC tags and thus cant add FLAC files to your library (will play them though with the right codec installed). Of course you could switch to a decent player, like Foobar.

So in a nutshell... MP3(320/LAME) > WMA. But FLAC > than all.

Enjoy

EDIT 2: Just read your second post, with all that space it would be a crime to not use lossless. You can always transcode in one job lot for your laptop/portables.

[Yohji]

I find OGG to be the best, definately better than MP3/WMA.

[autopilot]

I find OGG to be the best, definately better than MP3/WMA.

Indeed, 30%+ of my music is in Ogg. But support is just too poor for me to recommend it to everyone. LAME MP3 is the 'safe' option.

[charleski]

Indeed, 30%+ of my music is in Ogg. But support is just too poor for me to recommend it to everyone.

I'm about 1/4 of the way through ripping my CD collection onto disk (another 600+ to go ) and support was the major issue as I want something I can be sure will play on any PMP now or in the future. Unfortunately that meant mp3 was the only option.

[Mithrandir]

OGG Vorbis without a doubt!

Definitely a first choice for me. As a secondary format I'd choose MP3 at 192 or higher if you want decent quality.