MP3, Ogg and CD's

[John Wheat]

Craig White wrote:
> 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.
> 
> ----
> 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
> 

what are you using to do your ripping and conversions?

John