Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bob in LA]

Hello everyone,

Does anyone know what the bit rate on files burned to a CD using the new rhapsody service.  Is there any problem transferring them to your hard disk after they've been burned to disc.  If they can be transferred to disk, what about sending them to a player or burning to another CD.

Thanks for your help.

Bob L.

[Charlemagne 8]

I don't know what the bitrate is. If you know of a way to test it, let me know.
You can transfer the burned disk as if it were a bought disk except that YADB or CDDB won't work ... you have to input the artists and tracks manually. I haven't tried just copying an album. That might work for the lookups.
After burning, you can deal with them just like any other CD.

CVIII

BTW, they sound very good to me.

[zevele10]

put the cd with the burned songs in MC.
You can see the format and size of each song

[Charlemagne 8]

Zevele,
That sounds simple enough. But you can record ANYTHING into 320 KPS MP3. That doesn't tell you the bitrate of the source file. And CDA's, which is what Rhapsody burns for you, are always WAV files. That still doesn't tell you what the source file's quality is or was.
In this instance (and most likely EVERY instance), the quality of the source file is critical.
CVIII

[Bob in LA]

Hello,

Good point C8!  I've sent rhapsody an e-mail asking about the bitrate.  Let's see if they actually respond.  In the meantime, I rip with LAME VBR standard.  Do you think the quality of the files would be as high if a encoded that wave from the rhapsody wav files?

Bob L.

BTW, I like the genre radio stations and the ability to program your own mix by listing up to ten artists.  You can also create custom playlists from their library.   If they keep the prices at $5/mo. and $.49/track to download, they may have a chance.

[zevele10]

I understand.
Like MP3.com cds : you have the album in mp3 and in redbook .
But the redbook-in wav- part is just the mp3 burn to wav.
The same with they player ,you can burn cds 'on the fly' like in Rhapsody ,the source is mp3 128 kps.
So ,let bet:
128 Windows format ?
Or Windows 9 lossless format?

Streaming is in Windows 128 ,this i know

[Charlemagne 8]

Bob,
Whatever the source quality, you'll lose some of it with MP3 encoding ... even from an MP3. That's not to say that it's no good. The general rule of thumb is that 128 and above is "CD quality" but in my experience, that all depends on the music. Molly Hatchett and ZZ Top would most likely be fine at 128. Rachmanninoff (sp?) Beethoven and Schubert leave something to be desired at 320. VBR is a good compromise because the difference in these tracks are the quiet parts. ZZ Top has very few where Schubert has a lot. WAV files are lossless in that they preserve exactly the source quality. APE is also an exremely good choice as it's lossless and uses about half the space of a WAV. A 128 K MP3 uses about a tenth. So it's a balancing act with quality vs. disk space. I have 4 hard drives totaling about 250 GB and three are full of mostly wav's and ape's. King Sparta's song library and his storage space make that seem small.
The bottom line is that, even if you rip Rhapsody's burns to wav, if it was 128 k to start with, it will still be the same quality.

Let me know what they say. I can't imagine that the burns would be higher quality than the streams and Zevele (Hi, Z.) is quite correct about the streaming quality.

And if I'm not mistaken, the $5 / month service price is only for the first month. After that, it's $9.95. It's still worth it in my opinion. And the burn charge does need to be never over $0.49 per track. It would make more sense to use the length of the song but being as I like long songs, I'll not complain.

Zevele,

It still comes down to needing a way to test the quality irrespective of the file type. I suspect that some CD's are not above 96k quality. And that's being kind. I've heard some very crappy quality CD's straight out of the shrink wrap.

Sheesh!!! Music Industry ... what are you going to do?!?

(That's supposed to be a uniquely American manner of exclamation but I don't think it came out right)

CVIII