Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

(I did get my Aiwa F660 fixed, but now I'm going to get the music
collection into bits/bytes and CDR before something collapses again).

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.

GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:
Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is so cheap
these days that the audible loss of quality with (say) 128/160/192kbps isn't
worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years time when computers routinely
have terabytes of disk space as standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have to
put up with inferior quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps rip and the
original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at 320.

Bitstring , from the wonderful person
Stimpy said
GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:
Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is so cheap
these days that the audible loss of quality with (say) 128/160/192kbps isn't
worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years time when computers routinely
have terabytes of disk space as standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have to
put up with inferior quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps rip and the
original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at 320.

That's probably true for CD/DVD rips, but this stuff is coming from
vinyl by way of audio cassette, and I suspect that even 256kbs is
massive overkill??

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.

"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote in message
...
Bitstring , from the wonderful person
Stimpy said
GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:
Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is so
cheap
these days that the audible loss of quality with (say) 128/160/192kbps
isn't
worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years time when computers routinely
have terabytes of disk space as standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have
to
put up with inferior quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps rip and
the
original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at 320.

That's probably true for CD/DVD rips, but this stuff is coming from
vinyl by way of audio cassette, and I suspect that even 256kbs is
massive overkill??

Not necessarily. If you can make as 'perfect' a remaster as possible from
the audio cassette, for instance, you'll also be getting all the noise that
is inherent in audio cassettes. To restate the "for the sake of the
future", it makes sense to make as good a remaster from a perishable (or
perishing!) medium for more than playback sake. Think of the improved
noise-removal software that will come along as a matter of course. A
higher-resolution copy from the cassette will be most likely easier to clean
up than a lesser one (which by way of compression would most likely have its
own sonic artifacts that weren't ever part of the music).

Just my 2bits.


--
Steve Goodman
* Cartoons about DVDs and stuff
* http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack

Stephen Goodman wrote:

Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come
from LP by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck
.. even a decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess
using the 160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping
is probably a waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is
so cheap these days that the audible loss of quality with (say)
128/160/192kbps isn't worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years
time when computers routinely have terabytes of disk space as
standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have to put up with inferior
quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps
rip and the original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at
320.

That's probably true for CD/DVD rips, but this stuff is coming from
vinyl by way of audio cassette, and I suspect that even 256kbs is
massive overkill??

Not necessarily. If you can make as 'perfect' a remaster as possible
from the audio cassette, for instance, you'll also be getting all the
noise that is inherent in audio cassettes. To restate the "for the
sake of the future", it makes sense to make as good a remaster from a
perishable (or perishing!) medium for more than playback sake. Think
of the improved noise-removal software that will come along as a
matter of course. A higher-resolution copy from the cassette will be
most likely easier to clean up than a lesser one (which by way of
compression would most likely have its own sonic artifacts that
weren't ever part of the music).

To be honest, if this is going to be a 'one of a kind' master copy that can
never be recreated - don't use MP3!! Master it as a raw WAV file and
compress with a lossless compression format (flac or ape) so that you can
always get back to the original master quality. That way, when a better
quaility format comes along, you haven't hamstrung yourself and
irretrievably lost something from the recording. I use flac for my
one-of-a-kind masters...

Bitstring , from the wonderful person
Stimpy said
snip
To be honest, if this is going to be a 'one of a kind' master copy that can
never be recreated - don't use MP3!! Master it as a raw WAV file and
compress with a lossless compression format (flac or ape) so that you can
always get back to the original master quality. That way, when a better
quaility format comes along, you haven't hamstrung yourself and
irretrievably lost something from the recording. I use flac for my
one-of-a-kind masters...

Nope, it's really just stuff that I have on vinyl, but want to get onto
the computer (I already have it on cassette, and in most cases it's
easier to rip from the cassettes rather than trying to get the
turntable/preamp to meet with the computer). Hardly 'unique' except in
many cases it is not available on CD (in other cases I don't like it
enough to buy it again, but do want it to be 'available' for listening
to on the PC, or for stuffing down into an MP3 player).

I know 'disk is cheap', but dealing with Terabyte music databases just
isn't much fun (even the ripping, and cleaning up, never mind the
backing up!), especially if 99% of the digitised information would be
'imaginary' because the LP/Cassettes already ate some of the resolution.

I guess I can rip it as 'CD quality .wav' files (44Khz, 16 bit) even if
that is overkill, and burn CD-Rs with it, and then just use the windows
media player 'rip CD to .WMA' to get something sensible for storing and
playing with. (?).

If I need '96 bit accuracy' (8.) sometime before I expire, I can always
go back to the original vinyl (assuming I still have a working
turntable, cartridge, and preamp) and re-rip that.

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.

GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:

Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

Use a lossless codec; that way you won't have to re-rip when you want to
convert tomorrow's latest and greatest format.

Also bear in mind noisy analogue sources (LP/tape) are more difficult to
encode than clean digital sources (such as a CD) for a codec such as WMA or
MP3. So you'll get worse sound at a given bitrate from the analogue source.

See http://flac.sourceforge.net/

I do not wish to enter in to an "LP is not a noisy format" discussion. What
I have written is correct.

--
Now Playing: No Doubt - Hey Baby [231kbps mp3]

On Thu, 20 May 2004 22:38:35 +0100, GSV Three Minds in a Can
wrote:

Nope, it's really just stuff that I have on vinyl, but want to get onto
the computer (I already have it on cassette, and in most cases it's
easier to rip from the cassettes rather than trying to get the
turntable/preamp to meet with the computer). .....

I know 'disk is cheap', but dealing with Terabyte music databases just
isn't much fun (even the ripping, and cleaning up, never mind the
backing up!), especially if 99% of the digitised information would be
'imaginary' because the LP/Cassettes already ate some of the resolution.

Your post suggests that after ripping the analogue to hard disk, you
intend to do some cleaning up. If by this you mean you wish to do a
bit of audio restoration via software (eg. declicking), then I would
strongly recommend that you record from the original vinyl, not from
the cassette dub. The limited high frequency response of cassette
means that transients caused by clicks on the vinyl become quite
rounded, and this makes it much harder for declickers to detect them.
--
Clive Backham

Note: As a spam avoidance measure, the email address in the header
is just a free one and doesn't get checked very often. If you want to email
me, my real address can be found at: www [dot] delback [dot] co [dot] uk

Bitstring , from the wonderful
person Clive Backham said
snip
Your post suggests that after ripping the analogue to hard disk, you
intend to do some cleaning up. If by this you mean you wish to do a
bit of audio restoration via software (eg. declicking), then I would
strongly recommend that you record from the original vinyl, not from
the cassette dub. The limited high frequency response of cassette
means that transients caused by clicks on the vinyl become quite
rounded, and this makes it much harder for declickers to detect them.

Thanks for that input .. I've noticed that 'automatic' de-clickers have
a hard time under these circumstances. Luckily most of the recording
were done when the vinyl was new, and there aren't many clicks - I'm
quite happy to manually clean up the few that are actually annoying
(using Acoustica and the 'interpolate' function .. seems to work pretty
well).

Most of the music is Pop/Folk etc. where clicks are not nearly as
noticeable (IME) as quiet classical passages.

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.