Proper compression options on EAC
Reply #1 – 2012-11-30 17:43:33
A more up to date version of LAME will make little if any difference, and very very very rarely noticeable either for good or bad given that you're using -b 320 A plausible quality gain might be to use halb27's special functional extension of lame 3.99.5 (search the forums) using setting -V0+ but you'll scarcely ever notice if it does perform better (or worse) than -b 320. As for more recent EAC, that might be a truly worthwhile update. It now supports plugins. The most useful one is the CTDB plugin (that queries the Cue Tools DataBase as well as AccurateRip). This not only verifies your rip in a second database (of no great value itself unless the rip isn't in one of the databases - and I found one CD that was in CTDB but not AccurateRip the day it was released) but CTDB can also correct modest amounts of errors and query more sources of metadata. For that reason, you can speed up your rips and reduce optical drive wear by using a single Burst Mode rip if the disc is in CTDB and may avoid spending hours trying to do a secure mode rip on a damaged CD. An alternative is to install the open source CUETools package and use CUERipper instead of EAC, again with Burst Mode and CTDB error correction for improved speed yet verified secure results so long as the CD is in AR or CTDB or both. It appears CUERipper and EAC are both on a par on most measures, with CUERipper having simpler set-up than EAC, and CueRipper does perfectly good offset-adjusted rips on my hardware. The other option you might consider is whether to rip accurately once to lossless (either to tracks or to Image+CUE, or even tracks+CUE) and then convert to your lossy or lossless format of choice using your encoder of choice at any time in the future. (Tools such as CUETools and foobar2000 make this conversion easy) This way you never need to go through the laborious task of re-ripping all those CDs if ever you need a copy of your music in a lower bitrate lossy format or think you've disovered flaws with lame -b320 and want to compare with the original lossless. I personally have a modest laptop drive with software occupying a lot of space, but can store over a terabyte on my external HDD. Thus I can use good lossy or even use lossyWAV --standard compressed with FLAC as a proxy for lossless on my laptop yet still have access to the lossless originals by hooking up the external drive - much faster than re-ripping from CD. I can also quickly convert on the fly from lossyFLAC or lossless into small lossy files (MP3, AAC, Vorbis or Opus) for portable listening on a phone or DAP. Personally, I still haven't re-ripped all my stuff to lossless (when I first ripped some years ago, I didn't have the storage space I have now), but my new rips are lossless on the external drive, and often lossyWAV -S on the laptop.