Digital audio experiences
 

(This is a copy of an input to an earlier thread)

Perhaps my experiences may be of interest. I have been a music lover and
Record/CD collector all my (rather long) life - and like to regard myself as
an audiophile. About a year ago I was persuaded to explore the advantages
of storing my large music collection on my PC and listening via a media
player. I haven't looked back since! Listening to music has never been so
easy and so enjoyable for me. Comments on my system are listed below:

* The media player I use is a Squeezebox made by Slimdevices Inc. See:
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_testimonials.html for some testimonials. This
is a wonderful box controlled by open source Slimserver software which runs
on your PC. It is high quality, robust, reliable and extemely easy to use.
The PC is in a separate room and connected to the Squeezebox by Ethernet or
WiFi.

* After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and everybody
else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is indistinguishable
from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my CDs and LPs to mp3 at
192Kbps.

* My music library currently consists of over 7500 music tracks and
occupies about 55Gb. The library is backed up to three other hard drives
(large external USB2 hard drives are readily available for about £100)

* It is essential to ensure that the mp3 tags are properly organised into
Title, Artist, Album, Genre etc. so that the powerful browsing and searching
facilities in the Squeezebox can be used effectively. This will require
good tag editing software. The best I have found is DrTag, see:
http://www.drtag.de/en/ In my experience tags on commercial CDs are
invariably full of errors and spelling mistakes. It generally takes me
about 20 minutes to rip and tag a CD. It takes about 45 minutes to rip,
split into tracks and tag the music from an LP - this is additional to the
playing time of the LP since this is a real time process. A good audio
editor is required, I use CoolEdit (which has now been acquired by Adobe and
sold as Adobe Audition). Incidentally there is a very large supply of high
quality music in all genres available (free of charge) from the
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* newsgroups. I use Forté Agent to retrieve these
binaries.

* In summary I am now able to relax in my favourite armchair with the
Squeezebox remote at my hand and, within seconds, select the music to suit
my mood played through my hifi system in effectively CD quality. Nirvana!

Malcolm H, UK

Monitor Audio Silver Series FR, FL, Centre
REL Strata III Sub-Bass

Digital audio experiences
 

Malcolm H wrote:

* The media player I use is a Squeezebox made by Slimdevices Inc.
See: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_testimonials.html for some
testimonials. This is a wonderful box controlled by open source
Slimserver software which runs on your PC. It is high quality,
robust, reliable and extemely easy to use. The PC is in a separate
room and connected to the Squeezebox by Ethernet or WiFi.

I like the look of those from a technical point of view. The problem I
have is that there's no "hi-fi separate" sized unit.

The current form factor is great for a second, third room etc, but no
good for integrating with your existing hi-fi.

I currently use two Turtle Beach Audiotron media players (sadly now
discontinued) which don't require any server software, they access files
through normal Windows (or indeed Samba) file sharing. My MP3 collection
is held on a media server running Samba for Windows PCs and the
Audiotrons (and for copying files to the system), daapd/howl for iTunes
streamers, and I'm trying to get streaming to work for the Pinnacle
ShowCenter.

* After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and
everybody else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is
indistinguishable from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my
CDs and LPs to mp3 at 192Kbps.

You're lucky. I can hear quite a difference (loss of detail) between MP3
at 192Kbit and WAV (played through the SPDIF output from a USB
soundcard, feeding into an Arcam Black Box 50). Get up to 320Kbit and
there's a tiny difference, although if you use the latest LAME encoder
with -q0 (which encodes at about 0.3x real time) that difference all but
disappears. With most modern processed pop though it's inaudible at -q1.

The best LAME options I've found for encoding a

lame -q1 -mj -b32 -V0

Q-factor of 1, joint-stereo, bitrate minimum 32Kbit/sec, VBR highest
quality.

Takes about 30 seconds to encode an average length track.

It generally takes me about 20 minutes to rip and tag a CD.

That long? Takes about 5 minutes here using ripit - a wrapper script for
cdparanoia and lame, modified by myself to then apply ReplayGain using
mp3gain. I can then sanitise the ID3 tags (my weapon of choice is
ID3-TagIT) whilst the next CD is encoding.

Once all CDs are ripped, encoded and tagged, I copy the MP3 files over
the network into R:\mp3\incoming (R: is mapped to a shared disk on the
media server), log in to the server and type "makemp3list" (command name
kept for legacy reasons).

The media server then sorts out the tracks dumped in the incoming folder
by moving them into the correct artist folder and renaming the track as
Artist\Track name.mp3, imports all the tag details into a MySQL
database, then generates an .m3u playlist file for each complete album.

It then creates an "atrontc.vtc" file, the Audiotron units will load
this file when they start, takes about 20 seconds rather than 5-6
minutes to scan nearly 8,000 tracks.

When I move house in the next 6-8 weeks I'm intending to install a
couple of Hifidelio client units (assuming they're available by then)
into the kitchen and bathroom (and possibly the conservatory as well)
which will stream using DAAP (iTunes protocol) from the media server,
giving me the ability to access my entire music collection from anywhere
in the house.

Kick-ass! :-)

--
Glenn Richards Tel: (01453) 845735
Squirrel Solutions http://www.squirrelsolutions.co.uk/

IT consultancy, hardware and software support, broadband installation

Digital audio experiences
 

Glenn Richards wrote:
Malcolm H wrote:

* The media player I use is a Squeezebox made by Slimdevices Inc.
See: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_testimonials.html for some
testimonials. This is a wonderful box controlled by open source
Slimserver software which runs on your PC. It is high quality,
robust, reliable and extemely easy to use. The PC is in a separate
room and connected to the Squeezebox by Ethernet or WiFi.


I like the look of those from a technical point of view. The problem I
have is that there's no "hi-fi separate" sized unit.

The current form factor is great for a second, third room etc, but no
good for integrating with your existing hi-fi.

Depends how mad your current Hi-Fi looks. Each box in my setup is
different, some items are even round! The squeezebox3 looks in place for
me within the madness.
http://www.geocities.com/alexsmartpants/squeezedin.jpg

Here are some more interesting setups.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19817

--
Adrian C

Digital audio experiences
 

I haven't looked back since! Listening to music has never been so
easy and so enjoyable for me.

That is exactly the point! Easy listening.

At the moment I use an ordinary laptop with highres screen (Dell C810,
1600x1200). Attached are some Firewire harddisks. Player software is
Steinberg myMp3pro 4.0. Soundcard is Edirol UA1EX USB connected via optical
SPDIF to a Sony DTC59ES DAT player which makes the D/A conversion. I use to
build growing number of playlists for different dispositions. In this
process one feature of such a player software is very valuable: *Searching*
for music by title, artist, year and so on and then saving the modified
playlists over and over again.

After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and everybody
else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is indistinguishable
from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my CDs and LPs to mp3 at
192Kbps.

Exactly my experience. I use the Fraunhofer codec of myMP3pro at fixed rate
of 192k.
I made numerous ABX tests (http://www.ff123.net/abchr/abchr.html) with
highest quality headphones and also found that 192k is fully ok for my old
ears.

It is essential to ensure that the mp3 tags are properly organised into
Title, Artist, Album, Genre etc. so that the powerful browsing and
searching
facilities in the Squeezebox can be used effectively.

Again, agree. Thank you for your hint to a tagger program (are there others
you tested?).

In summary I am now able to relax in my favourite armchair with the
Squeezebox remote at my hand and, within seconds, select the music to suit
my mood played through my hifi system in effectively CD quality. Nirvana!

Again...
I thought about using an USB soundcard with remote control (e.g. Creative
Audigy2 NX). Are there some experiences about this or these?

Juergen

Digital audio experiences
 

In article , Malcolm H
writes
(This is a copy of an input to an earlier thread)

Perhaps my experiences may be of interest. I have been a music lover and
Record/CD collector all my (rather long) life - and like to regard myself as
an audiophile. About a year ago I was persuaded to explore the advantages
of storing my large music collection on my PC and listening via a media
player. I haven't looked back since! Listening to music has never been so
easy and so enjoyable for me. Comments on my system are listed below:

* The media player I use is a Squeezebox made by Slimdevices Inc. See:
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_testimonials.html for some testimonials. This
is a wonderful box controlled by open source Slimserver software which runs
on your PC. It is high quality, robust, reliable and extemely easy to use.
The PC is in a separate room and connected to the Squeezebox by Ethernet or
WiFi.

* After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and everybody
else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is indistinguishable
from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my CDs and LPs to mp3 at
192Kbps.


Sad to hear that everybody you know must have questionable hearing if
they think that 192 K audio is "indistinguishable" from CD:(...


--
Tony Sayer

Digital audio experiences
 

"Adrian C" wrote

Depends how mad your current Hi-Fi looks. Each box in my setup is
different, some items are even round! The squeezebox3 looks in place for
me within the madness.
http://www.geocities.com/alexsmartpants/squeezedin.jpg

Here are some more interesting setups.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19817



Interesting to see that all the *real* audio enthusiasts seem to have
deserted Usenet in favour of the great many forums. My problem is with
'moderation' and the lip service that I see in so many of them - and who
could be doing with all that 'Senior Member' crap....???

Digital audio experiences
 

In article ,
Malcolm H wrote:
* After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and
everybody else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is
indistinguishable from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my CDs
and LPs to mp3 at 192Kbps.

Try recording a solo bagpipe and compare to the original.

Also some male speech suffers rather badly at this sample frequency.

--
*Why is it that to stop Windows 95, you have to click on "Start"?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.