MP3, Ogg and CD's

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-02-18 at 17:20 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
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> John Wheat wrote:
> >   I have noticed that MP3 support is rather limited with linux,
> > therefore, would Ogg be a suitable alternative considering I like to
> > burn CD's of mixed songs in my collection. The format used would need to
> > be easily converted to Wav so they can be burned to CDr's any
> > suggestions on this?
> 
> I am confused when you say that "MP3 support is rather limited with
> linux"  I currently have no less than 5 (maybe more) different audio
> players on my Fedora system that can play MP3s.  The legality of the
> software that encodes and decodes MP3 may be up for debate but support
> for the format is not limited.
> 
> Ogg is a suitable alternative which I would use more, if I had a
> portable player that supported.  Players that support Ogg are few and
> far between.  I have an iPod Nano (provided as a gift) but do not use
> the Apple ACC format since I don't and won't use iTunes.  My only other
> iPod supported choice is MP3.  So, I rip my CDs to MP3.
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I am not knowledgeable about these things but I definitely remember
reading that the aac format (which isn't Apple but is part of mpeg4) 128
bit compression is similar in size to 128 bit mp3 compression but it
would take 160 bit compression in mp3 to get a similar quality of sound
and that is why I am using that with my iPod (not because it's Apple or
because I do use iTunes...sometimes).

I think that mp3 has been around longer and thus had it's roots set into
concrete whereas the newer formats that Ogg and aac can achieve better
audio quality at equal compression rates.

Anyway, the obvious choice for storage is no loss and WAV and Flac can
give you that - of course the amount of storage space used is
considerably greater. Once you have stored the 'no loss' format file,
you can run conversions into most any format you need pretty simply. I
believe that on a few of the CD's that I ripped on Linux, I ripped to
wav and then converted to aac, that the aac was approximately 10% of the
size of the wav file. I have a CD/DVD combo drive in my Windows box
which sometimes struggles reading CD's that a CD only drive seems to
handle just fine.

My attraction to iTunes was really simple...it has a mode of auto rip,
save and eject which allowed me to scan my entire cd collection on my
Windows box without ever looking at the screen - which was a big plus
since I rarely use my Windows box anyway. It took a couple of weeks to
scan them all in. The result was uploaded to my iPod which was very cool
and the only issue was that iTunes stored all of the music files in my
roaming profile so the first time I logged off, it took more than 24
hours to store the profile on my file server. I have since moved the
iTunes data store to a shared drive rather than in the roaming
profile   ;-)

The single obvious benefit to mp3 is that it has been around and is
supported by most devices and software. 

Craig