Sparky191

Fair enuff.

EAC produces a more acurate copy of the Audio on a CD than other Rippers. What other argument? Fundamentally ATRAC Lossless is broken in SS 3.4 Wheres the virtue? Doesn't matter what the source material is if the CD is mastered badly, its copied, ripped and encoded equally badly, then listened in a typical noisy portable enviroment with nasty earphones or speakers. You seem to be suggesting genre has some impact on quality. Or that modern recordings are better than old ones. http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/...6256C2E005DAF1C http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=103702

What headphones are you using? Are going through a cassette adapter or a line in on the car stereo.

Yeah. I have one of these and it not that nice as a gadget.

I agree, low bitrate DRM strangled formats are a waste of time.

Not a fan of transcoding myself. But hey if it works and your happy with it. You do know you can make Windows XP look like NT4/98 by turning "off" a lot of stuff.

I've had problems with my rips with noise and clicks if the PC was doing something else while ripping. Also files that are transcoded a few times can often have weird artifacts due to over lapping compression. Could also be Piracy Prevention dunno hwo they'd do so it only effects MP3 encoding though. Try reencoding them with a different application. Audiograbber/EAC and Lame for example. Not a fan of MusicMatch myself. Its tagging is great but I hate the interface.

I would define SQ as the most true to the original source. Obviously if you are tone deaf then a low bitrate would be fine for you. But it fairness there is a general consensus that anyone with a decent ear, transparency starts about 192 and up, depending on the material, grunge vs classical etc. I agree. I'm only suggesting going from the CD because it will make more of a difference (even if its v.small) than decoding to wav outside of SS then re-encoding to 66kps. To be honest changing your headphones/car speaker would make a vast difference compared to the differences in methods of encoding lowbitrates. To be honest I'm baffled why, if you can hear a difference between 64/66 kps that you haven't been driven to decent bitrates.

Theres an echo round here...

The problem with the MP3 play back not that it "lowers" SQ but that a high pass filter is being applied. You can counter balance the effect using the EQ. Theres lots of posts and threads on this if you do a search. However from a development point of view its not logical to write two different MP3 decoders. It is logical to hobble MP3 playback to promote your own format. The majority of people can't even tell the difference between the orignial CD (1411.2kps) and a decent bitrate 256-192kps file and thats a stright rip no transcoding. Yet you can hear the difference between 64kps and 66kps? But its mute point really Since both are terrible sound quality, it doesn't really matter which you use. Compounding this is that they are transcoded. Transcoding anything is bad, but to low bitrates like like 64/66kps is simply awful. If you insist on using 64kpbs at least do a straight rip from the CD. It still won't be good, but it will be better than transcoding.

Someone has to get a copy of the catalogue and scan it.

To be precise it only partially achieves what you want. But I know what you mean. I recorded my nieces recital with a 10yr old PC mic and a HIMD the other night.

I have SS 3.3 or 3.4 running on 3 machines without problems. But I don't use it that much. Only to get stuff on and off the HiMD. I don't keep my music library in it. Perhaps if I used it more often I'd see more problems. When older version of SS went bad they were really bad. The newer version seem much better. be nice to know from Sony who is responsible for making it better so we could thank them.

Yes. Also the analysis is kept in tags in case you want to undo. Some players have problems with the mp3tags. Its explained in the MP3Gain FAQ.

I'm stumped. Not short on resources when you are running SS on this machine? Its not unknown to have bad SS install.

No not always cool, because if you apply it to your library it will cause clipping distortion if theres a large disparity between your albums/tracks. It can up the volume too much. Which is why you should take care in how you apply it. Not because you can't undo it. But because it takes hours to run on a large library.

I was wondering was there something more to it than just looks. Why is that an attraction?

64kpbs or 66kpbs Atrac? It doesn't really matter. Your are listening to terrible sound quality at that bit rate. If Sony hobbled the decoding of MP3's it would effect their subsequent encoding to ATRAC. So thats not logical. The obvious thing is to rip from the source CD. If you can't do that then forget about SQ. Never underestimate the placebo effect.

I understood thats not possible with the current HiMD technology. It can't write to the disk fast enough

Dang. How did you find out about that? Anyone know do they have many in stock? Anyone feeling like posting me one?

How did you manage to get it for that?

Why WMA in the first place?

That seems a medieval way of doing it.

Are they CBR or VBR files?

Do they come with time shifting recording software?