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Topic: How did you find out about the whole encoding process? (Read 8744 times) previous topic - next topic
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How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #25 –
"exactly like that, except it was with Kazaa. Before I was using Samplitude to rip CD's to WAV, and they just sat there, stuffing the whole (4GB) drive."

I think I had a P1-100 with a 1 GB drive at the time. I was madly downloading all these old tunes from Napster with no regard for quality or bitrate or encoders or anything, and suddenly got an error message that my drive was full. Yikes! How much did I download?

Stopped to listen to a bunch of it, wondered why so many of them sounded so crappy. The hunt for knowledge began.

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #26 –
I knew nothing about computers and was told about Napster by a friend. I was given a 486 computer at 66Mhz and started downloading 128 files. I had to decode them to wave to listen to them as the processor was too slow for realtime. The drive was only 512 Mb.

So I bought a zip drive to get the files off the system but was generally unhappy because I had to always mess around and decode to wav to listen. I was on a 56k dialup and although I thought the files sounded good at 128, it was clear that the 192 files were much,much better.

But they took too long to download.

So I called Dell, got the hottest box they sold then,P3 733 with 133 mhz bus. It had a burner which made life easy. I also switched to DSL which blew me away totally. Encspot was another big step in the evolution of my library. Eventually I was ripping friends and family's cd's at -V1 -ms and getting ever larger hard drives. Razorlame was a key discovery for this.

I originally started ripping to xing with audio catalyst until I found R3Mix.Lame 3.85 was the latest at the time. I thought it was cool that  the Lame VBR at around 180 was better than xing 256. I eventually switched to Eac and have been upgrading as recommended ever since.

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #27 –
I started out with MusicMatch sometime in 1998, I think. Back then it used a Xing encoder. The LG CD-ROM I had could not rip for sh*t: horrific jumble of clicks, pops and squelches, with a teaspoon of audio was the best it could manage, and the P-233MMX did not bid especially well for fast encoding. So I didn't get serious with it until I had a Kenwood TrueX 72X CD-ROM and a Pentium II.

The TrueX was fast transfering data, but when it came to DAE it was only slightly better than the LG. Ripping was slow and errors were very common. Only my first CD burner, an 8X HP drive, brought ripping results to an acceptable level.

By the time I discovered Napster (Nov 1999), MusicMatch had advanced a couple of versions, switched to Fraunhoffer encoders and I registered it ($25 IIRC) to be able to encode over 112kbps (the limitation of the trial version). In the meantime I briefly tried Real's Jukebox - I hate bloatware that tries to take over my system- and l3nc, which I found very good but painfully slow (under realtime). In MMJB, 128 kbps was touted as CD quality, but I picked 160 because it was labeled with oversampling (I kid you not). Of other curiosities, I recall that you could rip either via IDE or the soundcard, and there was an option to rip at 1X while listening to the CD (!).

Soon EAC emerged as the ripper standard on Usenet, dethroning CDex and Audiograbber. After experimenting with Blade and Radium for a while, I stumbled onto --r3mix and it has been LAME ever since. IMO, here on HA it seems the politically correct fashion to slam the r3mix site, but it was the source of cutting edge info in the pre-HA days...

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #28 –
Probably 1998 or 99.  I was listening to streaming radio.  Liking the songs I was hearing, I began finding ways to record/download these tracks.  I was actually transferring them to cassette tape by playing them from my Sony VAIO laptop to the line in on my stereo.  My wife kept complaining about the sound quality (most of the files were wma 48 and 64 kbps, although I think some tracks went down to 20.)  While I could hardly argue, I loved the new music I was getting. 
I knew nothing about encoding, figured that the kbps was a direct relationship to my dial-up connection (it was - but I knew nothing about bandwidth and what was necessary for streaming).
Later, I began some other downloading, finding that I could get decent sounding files at higher kbps.  I knew wma and mp3, but really hadn't considered the differences.  Just kept making mixed cds for myself.  Got tired of this for a while.
I found out about ripping/encoding when I started looking around for an mp3 player.  I started playing with formats/bitrates.  I kept doing this, even after buying my Karma.
For ripping: tried WMP, Musicmatch, dbPowerAMP (my favorite until recently), EAC.  More recently started using foobar2000 and love it.  For encoding:  have fiddled with wma, mp3, and vorbis, some FLAC.  Am in the process of re-encoding my entire library to vorbis

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #29 –
Quote from: xmixahlx on
audiograbber ->
remix site/forums ->
lame ->
hydrogenaudio ->
NOW


Similar, but not really:
good old analogue days ->
some old wave editor ->
l3enc ->
Winamp ->
audiograbber -> split

split 1
Winamp forums ->
HydrogenAudio.

split 2
LAME ->
EAC (yes, I've found about EAC using some old search engine)
ruxvilti'a

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #30 –
Before 2003 I didn't have the means to play with encoding.  I started off with 160kbps MP3 ripped by MusicMatch.  Later on I tried out Ogg Vorbis and wondered how q0 would sound without the 15khz lowpass.  Headac3he answered that question for me.  Then I learned how to change the lowpass with oggenc, got dBpowerAMP and its generic cli plugin, rigged up oggenc for it, and never turned back.  I wanted my disk space for video capture so saving space was more important than transparancy. (and I can't afford another hard drive)

Over the years I have tested just about every audio format and almost every encoder (that are publically available).  I began MP3 testing with lame 3.95, and over various searches, hydrogenaudio always seemed to come up.  Probably around late summer of 2005 I decided to test out lame 3.90.3 and see what all the fuss was about.  I have to say, it certainly does impress.

Currently I rip my CDs with dBpowerAMP to oggenc2 lancer aotuv 4.51 -q 0 --advanced-encode-option lowpass_frequency=99 (64-70kbps), and I don't regret it one bit.  When I need to use MP3, LAME 3.93.1 -q 5 -V 9 -Z -k --nspsytune -p (100-135kbps).  These days I compile LAME myself so that I can test the latest versions without the -Y switch being forced on me.  I am a codec tweaker, and just about every day I try new settings to see what they do, and to try to get lower and lower bitrates.  It's an obscession. 
Vorbis-q0-lowpass99
lame3.93.1-q5-V9-k-nspsytune

How did you find out about the whole encoding process?

Reply #31 –
Audiograbber with Winamp then EAC / Lame / Winamp

Learned from coobird and friends (MP3 board);
Downloaded software from definitely mp3 website