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[anderdea]

I started using a trial version of Media Player 11.0 last night to put my CD collection on my HTPC's HDD.  The software seems to work as advertised and I will be purchasing it.  I noticed when my CD was ripped it was at a 192 Kilobit per second rate as a WMA file.

Q1: I have a high end AV system and would like to maintain the highest quality I can.  Under Media Player's "Options" I noticed that the rip process had  5 settings.  Two prior to Normal (which was what mine defaulted to) Normal high and Heighest.  Does anyone know what rip rates these refer to.  I noticed it also said "lossless" which I would assume is uncompressed and all data gets copied.

Q2: What is the least Kilobit rate I can use and still get CD quality close to the original CD?

Q3: Is there any audio quality advantage using wma vs. MP3?

Thanks.

[KingSparta]

Q1: Use APE

Q2: Use APE, too.  Doesn't matter what setting you use, it is loss-less, the only difference is is the amount of compression. So encoding and decoding take a tad longer but there is no loss in quality.

Q3: I feel they are about the same, I prefer MP3 with the highest KBPS And using VBR. the advantage with mp3 is it works on most if not all players.

[JaredH]

I would have to agree with King on this one.

I did some double blind testing a while back (about a year ago) and came up with what was a pretty good answer when figuring the best bit rate to use.

My answer... MP3 VBR.

You get next to perfect silence when necessary and great high end sound when necessary. I saw a great line by someone who was answering the same question in another forum a while back. He basically said why waste the bits on a song that has a lot of silence or uses basic instrumentation? By using VBR you save precious space as well. It just all depends on what quality setting you use for your VBR. I personally use this setting

-V2 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 19.7 --cwlimit 10.7 -b96 --athaa-sensitivity 1

Now some of those settings may not work in MC, but what doesnt work gets ignored to my knowledge. I've yet to have any problems or errors in my MP3s. This generally gives an average bitrate of about 265 for your normal rock song. The sound, to my ears, is crisp and clear on every sound system I've used.

Adjust the settings to your preference.
Salt to taste.
Serve lightly chilled.

[Alex B]

anderdea,

You may want to check this thread out:

Topic: How can I ensure quality of a ripped music file

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=29157.0

[Valisystem]

Let me echo the comments below but give you a bit more background, in case it helps. I've got 50-year-old ears, a big library, and I've spent a fair amount of time deciding on my compromise between sound quality and simplicity.

Lossless files (APE, FLAC, SHN, and others) take up lots of gigabytes of extra space compared to compressed formats like MP3 and WMA. There's no noticeable difference to my non-audiophile ears between a CD, a lossless file, and a high quality compressed format. Support for the lossless formats is not consistent yet; handheld devices and streaming around the house can be accomplished, but too often require a fair amount of attention to technical details and workarounds.

MP3s are truly universal, can be CD- or near-CD quality, and don't have any bits that can be used for DRM, as far as I know. MP3s can be played on all handhelds and streamed anywhere.

WMA is a perfectly nice format but it's designed for DRM, to lock down the ability to play certain files unless a license has been obtained. When you create a WMA file from a CD you own, there's probably no reason to be afraid that the file will be turned off because Microsoft goes insane, or recording industry armies invade Comcast and AT&T - but I prefer not worrying about it. And WMA files won't play on iPods.

A 192k mp3 file is near-CD quality. I have a perfectly nice home theater system and I couldn't tell the difference if I was blindfolded. Some people could.

There's good reason to create VBR MP3s, which use slightly more disk space but result in a significantly better quality file. It's CD quality for everyone but the purists. In Media Center, the setting is under Tools / Options / Encoding. Choose mp3 Encoder, click on Advanced, and choose Target Quality High or Extreme.

Good luck sorting it out!

[Alex B]

In my opinion the biggest problem with high bitrate MP3 and WMA files is not the audio quality. The biggest problem is that they are not gapless formats.

Gapless explained: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gapless

Lossless formats are of course perfectly gapless because the decoded output is identical with the CD audio output.

If Monkey's Audio aka APE files are too big to be practical I would recommend the lossy "audiophile" codec Musepack for gapless playback. Musepack has probably the best audio quality of the available lossy formats in MC. Because JRiver has just updated the Musepack encoder and decoder plug-ins the format has excellent support now.

The downside with Musepack is that it is a computer only format. Standard HW players don't support it. However, MP3 files that are converted from high bitrate Musepack files are surprisingly high quality. Usually no one can hear the difference in casual listening with portables or car MP3 CD players.