cpk said:
What is meant by the term lame?
Contrary to what its name suggests, L.A.M.E. (Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder) is an MP3 encoder. It is strictly a command-line utility, but most of the time you'll be using it with a graphic interface that also rips tracks from the CD like Exact Audio Copy.
cpk said:
Also I haven't decided on a player yet. I think I might wait till fall and check out the IRiver PMP. I would like to use it as a dvd player and to download from internet. Also I am not sure of the type of format it will support.
Geeks really like IRiver products because they have fairly hackable firmwares, and also because the company seems more committed to supporting niche tech on its own merit, rather than catering to just the dumb masses. Here's an example:
they upgraded the firmware of some of their players to play Ogg Vorbis.
cpk said:
I have heard alot of good things about foobar2k. Where is the best place to down load this at?
Here's the official site. It seems like many forumites at HydrogenAudio use Foobar2000, so I guess it's not that bad a player.
cpk said:
Right now I am recording with mp3 at 128 kbps. I would hate to have too rerecord my collection to make it compatible when I switch formats.
I'd advise you to choose a higher bitrate for making master copies of your collection. Then you can downgrade the bitrate for portable audio players, while keeping a high bitrate copy which sounds just as good as the CD on your better home equipment. Recording at an even higher bitrate than that will ensure that you won't be able to tell the difference even if you buy better equipment or through some other means become a raging audiophile.
Believe me when I say that you should go with the higher bitrates; I've gone through the re-encoding process 3 times since I started ripping 5 years ago. First, I did 160 kbps with an unknown crappy mp3 encoder with CDex, then lame --alt-preset-r3mix with EAC, then finally FLAC and EAC with tweaks for my specific CD drive. Now I won't ever have to rip straight off the CD's again because I have lossless copies of the tracks.
cpk said:
I have heard there is a conflict when going from vbr to mp3, but not the other way. Is there a converter online that would allow me to record in flac or ogg, then just drag it to a cd or player in mp3 format?
VBR (variable bitrate) is just a term that's used to describe audio encoding formats. It can apply to mp3's, giving you VBR MP3's that don't have a fixed bitrate (contrast with 128 kbps MP3 which uses a fixed amount of bits per second to encode the music). Ogg Vorbis also has a VBR setting. Flac is always VBR.
Anyway, the conflict is when you're converting a track encoded with a lossy codec to a track with a higher "quality". For example, let's say you encoded at 32 kbps MP3 then re-encoded that MP3 into a 200 kbps Ogg Vorbis file. If you had ripped straight from CD and encoded into the 200 kbps Vorbis, you might not be able to tell the difference. But since there was the first lossy compression stage, you'd still have all the artifacts from when it threw out some data. It's like having 3rd generation copied audio tapes-- the bad stuff can only accumulate.
Another conflict you might be thinking of is the ability to switch between WMA and MP3. WMA encoders are only available in binary format (and even then, only on Windows). The WMA decoding process is fully specified by Microsoft (otherwise, it'd be impossible to write a player plugin), so you can go from WMA to wave to MP3 without a problem. However, you can only encode something else as a WMA file if you run Windows. That doesn't seem to be a problem in your case.
In most other cases of converting between encoding formats (aka transcoding), there aren't any real problems in theory (except for that damn lossiness when you're dealing with lossy codecs that I keep mentioning). The only problem is that you need to figure out the decoder and encoder settings. It's a lot easier to find a program to do this for you. I personally don't have any experience with them, but I'm pretty sure that some exist. You'd just have to find the one that supports your choice of formats. I did a quick search and found a shareware transcoder+transfer program,
Sveta, that does just what you described. It's from the same company that made dbPowerAmp Convertor, a seemingly similar program that doesn't copy the files over to a player.
Whoops, I was wrong in my earlier comment about Foobar2000 being just a player. I did a little reading on it and I found out that it has quite an extensible system for file conversions. All you need is the encoder in binary format, and the appropriate settings line.
Here's an example at HA of how to set it up for FLAC->Lossless WMA. However, I don't believe Foobar has a system in place for doing this transcoding on the fly during a transfer to the player.
Players that use some kind of standard Windows removable drive interface (without the need for machine specific drivers) greatly simplify the process of writing a transcoder+transfer utility, so it would be more likely that someone's written a free program to do that. However, there are not many players that show up as removable drives on the market right now. As far as I know, IRiver, Apple, and Creative (with the Nomad Muvo series) are popular companies that have players that can be used as removable drives.
However, you should be aware that the decode/encode process takes time, so doing it on the fly during a transfer to the player is probably going to take longer than you'd like (and quite a lot longer than it takes to transfer all that to the player). On my secondary computer, a 700MHz P3 :barf:
, it takes about 1 minute to decode an average FLAC file and turn it into a VBR MP3 (128 kbps average). So if you're loading 1000 songs onto your player, that'd be a real drag. That's why I just have my computer do all the number-crunching at night.
cpk said:
I am also going to be getting a headphone amp, have been looking at the DYI builders for either a superdual, pocket reference or portable vibe. Also looking at getting a usb sound card for my laptop and a home vibe.
Eh.
You've lost me there. I have no idea what those are for. Good luck!
