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Author Topic: Best way to Rip audio books?  (Read 3737 times)

nick_laplaca

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Best way to Rip audio books?
« on: August 05, 2003, 06:20:36 pm »

I have an audio book which consists of 6 cd's. I want to rip all the tracks to one folder but keep the track numbers consistent for organizational purposes on my ipod. I tried renaming the files on the 2nd disc to pick up where disc 1 left off but for some reason it kept copying the same track over and over. I just don't want to have 6 different folders for each disc. Disc one has 23 tracks. I want the first track from disc 2 to be named track 24 and the same for rest of the discs. Is there an easy way to accomplish this? Nick
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Soundman

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #1 on: August 05, 2003, 08:51:33 pm »

Hello.

I rip audio books frequently.  I also do not want the discs to be in separate directories.  If my audio book is "Bonhoeffer-The Cost of Freedom", then I like my track named "Bonhoeffer-The Cost of Freedom 1-01", where the first 1 is the disk number and 01 is the track number.  Here is how I do it:

Before ripping a disk, set the Artist and Album fields to be a common thing.  That is, remove any (disc 2 of 3) nonsense from the Album name.

Temporarily set the Genre to the disc number.

In Options / File Naming & Location:
- Set Directory rule to "[ALBUM]".
- Set Filename rule to "[ALBUM] [GENRE]-[TRACK #]"

Rip the disc, and repeat for each additional disk, adjusting the genre up by 1 each time.

After all are ripped, go to the "Recently Imported" list and edit Genre back to what it really is.

Why did I use Genre instead of some unused field, such as [Custom 1], etc.?  Because only a few fields in CD properties can be used to set filename rules, and genre was the least intrusive thing I could find to use.

Encoding tip
After much experimentation, I settled on these Custom options to LAME encoder for decent quality low bitrate mono mp3's of spoken words.  You may want to try these settings too:

-m m -a --cbr -q 0 -b 24 --resample 16

Note: I use Constant Bitrate (--cbr) because my portable player gets confused by variable bitrate mp3s when seeking in the track.  If you don't have this problem, you may want to try variable bitrate, although it only makes a marginal difference in my opinion.

Soundman
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JohnT

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2003, 05:29:49 am »

Quote
I tried renaming the files on the 2nd disc to pick up where disc 1 left off but for some reason it kept copying the same track over and over.

This sounds like a bug. Can you describe in more detail what happened so I can try to reproduce the problem here?

Thanks,
John T.
JRiver, Inc.
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John Thompson, JRiver Media Center

Veazer

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2003, 05:44:09 am »

If you are looking for a good way to encode low bitrate speech, you might take a look at the Windows Media Voice Codec. I don't use WMA for music but I think the voice codec is well done.

The voice codec is not currently supported with MC and must be done from using the external encoder plugin. If you're interested I can show you how to use it. Download Window Media Encoder and convert a few files and see what you think about the quality.

If you are going to use LAME, I highly recommend you stick to the included presets. They have undergone extensive testing and fine tuning. On the other hand, I haven't tried Soundman's settings and I don't mean to imply his are not good.

You can get more info by typing "lame --preset help" from a command line in your lame folder.
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nick_laplaca

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #4 on: August 06, 2003, 06:53:12 am »

well I wasn't sure of the best way to go about doing what it was that I wanted. I'm somewhat new to this program and don't really know the full extent of its tools so I thought what I would do was manully change the name and track number of each of the tracks. It wasnt found in the database so I had to manually change the name of the album and artist. I did this by highlighting all and selecting properties. I ripped this second disc into my directory and everything looked okay but when I played the first track from the second disc I ripped it wasnt actually that fitst track from that disc and on top of that everytrack from that second disc I ripped was identical. No matter which one I played it was all the same. So I decided to delete the whole thing and come here for advise. But now what is happening is when I insert that 2nd disc all the tracks automatically are named what I renamed them to. The program must have remembered it or something so Im not quite sure how to proceed now. I'll play with it more later. Anyway thanks for knowledge everyone. I'll put it to use later. John I hope I explained what I did accurately enough.  Nick
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LisaRCT

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #5 on: August 06, 2003, 07:06:29 am »

is it thicker than a telephone book?

;D
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jgourd

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #6 on: August 06, 2003, 08:47:36 am »

I find that with audio books, MC9 chops off that last 2 seconds of the tracks. I think this is because certain publishers put content into the 2 second gap between tracks. This is a perfectly legal thing to do according to the Red Book standards, it is how "live" albums work. I do not think MC9 considers the 2 seconds between tracks as valid so it doesn't include that time in the rip.
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JohnT

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Re: Best way to Rip audio books?
« Reply #7 on: August 06, 2003, 12:08:05 pm »

Just rename the track numbers back to what they should be. Then MC will know the correct track number to rip or play.
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John Thompson, JRiver Media Center
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