Adressing your points.......
I really don't see a point in having a 700 meg mp3
Its not a 700MB mp3....its something like 100~120Mb, remember its compressed to mp3( assuming 192kbs compression). The reason its is done as a whole mp3, is so that no gaps between tracks can be percieved. When ripped this way, there is a cuefile which indicates where the different tracks can be found. This method is used mostly for live albums and mixes, where tracks blend into each other rather than the usual fade-out.
Why is it ripped as a whole mp3 instead of separate mp3s, cos there is no mp3 player out there that can play the separate tracks, seamlessly back to back. MC comes close with gapless play but isn't perfect. The larger reason is mp3 is not very gapless play friendly.
SO the workaround for gapless play is rip as ONE BIG mp3...this removes the problem of gapless play and plays the whole album gaplessly regardless of which mp3 player is used.
Now the issue is..can i see the individual track names while the big M3 is playing. Currently not in MC, but i can with winamp+mp3cue plugin. I dont want to use winamp anymore, i would rather use MC
Now regarding portable players, none to my knowledge can understand a CUE file but they understand mp3s. So the big file is transferred over. You cant see tracknames, but as long as it plays gaplessly.
But MC is a desktop app, it has the resources available to process a CUE file.
is it so when you change the ID3v2 tag so the whole file needs to be re written?
Yes, the first time only, if you use ID3v2 tags.
could it be to make it harder to find a song in your collection?
well yes, if the track/song is one of the many that is ripped inside the BIG mp3, it is not possible to access, since MC cant understand CUE files. So instead of seeing the diff tracknames as the album progresses, you only see the album name or whatever you decided to name the BIG mp3.
A plugin like mp3cue which works with winamp allows this.
is it incase one part of the mp3 to become corrupt that the whole album is crap?
conceivably....yes. But how often does this happen.
it it so that it will be not compatable for portables who can't hold that much info?
it it to make it harder to port it around?
not sure i follow anything said here.....
Am i missing something that is exciting and that i will lose sleep over if i don't have it?
i am cos i cant use the many many albums i have that are ripped as one BIG mp3 in MC.
Now you ahve a similar scenario with APE files. Its possible to rip a mix album as one big APE file. MC does not do the ripping as one big file yet, but EAC can do it.
Now ppl in the monkey
world asked for a similar feature, ie to see the diff track names. Matt invents APLs, which are created using a utility called MakeAPL.
An APL is just a small text file that tells the player where to access tracks given an offset. if there are x tracks in an album, MakeAPL will create x APL files.
TO MC, an APL is like a separate APE file. even though in reality, its not, its merley a pointer to where the track begins in the big APE file.
I am interested in seeing this APL idea used in MP3s. Since Matt invented them and is with JRiver, i think this might be feasible.
i figure it would take 2 tools,
- a MakeAPL type tool that can create these APLs for an MP3
- a mp3decoder that is capapble of understanding these APLs and plays them.
i figure if JRiver can do audio analysis they are capable of doing the above.
Hope this clears things up for u king
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Topic: Ripping a CD to a single MP3 file (Read 3739 times)