9 replies to this topic

[paperclip]

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[sfbp]

My only comment is: do not assume that SS will do this as well as you have documented! There's some magic in there when the drive gets introduced to SS for the first time. Evidently it sometimes works. I know I had terrible trouble with CD->WAV rips before I started using EAC.It's always possible that a dying drive will not show up in SS, which perhaps is what happened to me. Also having various other software on your PC that handles CDROMs will (or at least may) blur the picture. Examples: Nero, Roxio (CD Creator).

[paperclip]

This is the third time I've duplicated the test results, I have Nero installed too. My guess is it's your drive. what kind of drive do you have?

[sfbp]

If everything works, you may be right. The biggest problem about the failure I have observed is that it is completely silent. The first time you know something went wrong is when you try to downconvert the WAV to (say) LP2.

[paperclip]

Now that you mention it, I haven't tried to put them on a NetMD yet. I have listnened to the wav file, via Sonic Stage, and it sounds fine. I might be starting a thread about AAL. I was amazed at the fact it is virtually lossles upon testing.

[sfbp]

AAL seems (to me) to be very impressive.

It's just possible that it was some slightly earlier version of SonicStage which gave me lousy results. However I routinely rip to AAL in any event, since it saves space and is ideally set up for conversion to MD.

[paperclip]

_{I was thinking of using AAL for all my rips too. However after having been burned by Sony's proprietary formats in the past I'm a little shy on it now. I could always upack them back to wav format I suppose. Do you have any idea on the space savings you are getting? What settings are you using?}

[sfbp]

There is no encryption in AAL. That's the good news. I use 256kbps as the lossy part, and I use the highest quality encoding (as opposed to highest speed). In size, I think it's about half or a bit less, of a WAV. It will transfer to equal or lower quality (so far I have used 256 and 132, of course) quite easily from SS. And plays back in Windows, though I strongly suspect that playback is of the lossy part only.

You've probably worked out the other advantage of AAL over WAV. It (like the compressed formats) has metadata, built into the file. WAV is a great format for preparation, editing and the like, but is a great way to lose recordings once made, by immediate typographical errors or later lapses in (human) memory.

[paperclip]

Those facts make me want to try it out. It is too bad the playback wasn't the greastest as I remember. I might have to do some more listening tests before I make a final decision.

[sfbp]

the playback wasn't the greatest

I think the default is 132kbps lossy part. So you might want to rip to 256kbps. This will still downconvert to 132 if you need it, without problems - I've tried that.