MP3s for the Audiophile

MP3s available on the Internet are commonly encoded at 128 kbps. This is adequate if you're playing music from a standard sound card through a set of basic multimedia speakers, but if you have more sophisticated music equipment, you can almost certainly hear the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and the original source. True audiophile quality can really only be obtained by encoding at rates of 256k and above, but this is probably unnecessary, unless you are archiving your own original music or sourcing vinyl.

The MP3 process uses lossy compression, meaning that in order to get a WAV file down to a tenth of its original size or less, something has to be lost. The audiophile can minimize this by choosing right software.

Most of the solutions suggested elsewhere in these articles are presented as an all in one solution (ripping and encoding) which are generally fast, and easy to use and produce good results with some reservations. The audiophile, on the other hand, will want to choose a process that, whilst slower and more complicated, produces a far better output.

Ripping
Arguably, the best ripper is Exact Audio Copy (EAC): relatively complex but has excellent support documentation and plenty of advice on the Internet (see links) on how to use and optimize. Its chief claim to fame is its ability to interrogate a CD up to 80 times (if necessary) to produce an "Exact Audio Copy" in wave format (*.wav file). Most importantly, it's free.

Encoders
I think there's virtually no question that the LAME Encoder is the best there is. It's used by many of the best all-in-one solutions and as a standalone, is favored by audiophiles.

Why? Because the source code is free and open (and has been for some time), the techies and geeks have been making improvements daily (I jest not) to produce a process which surpasses the others like Fraunhofer, Xing, Qdesign and Blade Enc. LAME is a command line program and, as such, is made friendlier with a GUI front-end in the shape of RazorLame.

RazorLame is fairly complex, with a vast array of tools and controls, but is intuitive and easy once you get the hang of it. Rbmix.net, so called after the optimum command line for LAME, has a wealth of information on all these programs, the argument for their use, and it's updated regularly for new developments. So, if you want to know more this is the place to visit.

Good Quality Stand Alone Combined Rippers and Encoders

So what if you can't be bothered with separate rippers and encoders, etc.? There a couple of combined rippers and encoders which don't allow the same degree of control as the above, but do use the LAME rb3mix algorhythm and thus produces a high quality result. Stand up CDex and Winlame

CDex in its current incarnation (1.40 Beta 8 at the time of writing - Sept 2001) supports LAME, Variable Bit Rate, the R3Mix Standard and Ogg Vorbis. It has a variety of tools for ripping, which include: Jitter Correction (to compensate for errors on your CD Rom drive, which will adversely affect the music transference); scratch repairs and verification. From my experiments it seemed to produce files that were slightly larger than the EAC/RazorLame combination, but other than that, I couldn't fault it.

Click the CDex logo above to see a practical illustration of how to configure and optomize CDex for both the LAME and Vorbis encoders.

Winlame - recommended by rbmix.net, I'm sure is great, but it crashed on my PC, but that's not to say it will do the same on yours!



Analyzing MP3's

Whilst researching this article I came across a very interesting and useful tool for analyzing MP3s called EncSpot. By simply opening the Explorer-like interface and selecting folders containing MP3's, EncSpot will tell you amongst other things:

The Encoder - determine which encoder was used to make the file. The author warns that if the program has difficulty making this judgment, it makes a guess, and sometimes won't always get this right. In my test of known files, from various sources, it was100% accurate.

Quality - a rough determination of the quality of the file. Determined by the encoder used, the bit rate, and the stereo mode.

Complete - Whether a file appears to be complete.

You can see how useful this is; for checking your own files for quality, the encoder, and perhaps making a change to different software if it doesn't come up to scratch. Similarly, for checking files you download - you may be surprised how poor the general standard is. Many files on AG, for example, seem to have been made using old Xing encoders, which are particularly prone to errors and artifacts (unwanted sounds & distortions not present in the original source music). Finally, it's very useful in finding out which files appear to be incomplete after a long download session, which enables you to go back to AG to look for a better version if possible.

See a screen shot of Encspot's analysis on a sample of files downloaded from Audio Galaxy demonstating that many are poor quality - makes you think!

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