Print

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

[Bob L.]

Hello everyone,

I'm starting off putting my cds into MJ and using --alt-preset fast standard.  Quality seems good and the whole process is taking about 70-75% of real time on a 500mhz, P3 with 128M ram and with MJ 8.0.257 on W98SE.  I would sure appreciate a heads up on the following questions from anybody who has time.  

Is this a respectable throughput?

Does MJ do equivalent error detection/correction to EAC?

Would things be faster/higher quality if I used EAC/LAME?

Thanks in advance for the input.

Regards,

Bob L.

[Charlemagne 8]

Bob L.,
I'm confused by the question. What encoder are you using? Have you downloaded all of the available encoders to try different ones?
I'll try to answer some general questions, maybe that will do it.

-Both MP3 CBR (Constant Bit Rate) and MP3 VBR (Variable Bit Rate) are LAME-based. These are standard and you can choose different bitrates in CBR and different qualities in VBR. It is a more widely recognized format but tends to be slow to encode. 128 KB is the minimum I would recommend and I personally would opt for VBR High if I had to choose MP3.

-I am unfamiliar with Ogg Vorbis and, as Microsoft is so ubiquitous, try to steer clear of Windows Media. As that encoder comes standard, that may be the one you're using. There are better ones even though it does encode OK.

-MPEG Plus is showing great promise as a quality : file size encoder but I have had inconsistent results lately. I intend to try more of that encoder when I can get it to operate correctly. It may not be the encoder, it may be a loose nut between the keyboard and the chair.

-Uncompressed WAV is "bit perfect" and fast because there is no waiting for encoding but takes up a LOT of disk space.

-Monkey's Audio (APE) is the one I use most often. It is lossless, which means that it is as "bit-perfect" as WAV but takes up less space. About 50% as opposed to about 10% for MP3.
It also encodes very quickly as it can go directly into the APE file without first converting to wav like the others do.

My advice is to try different ones and choose which one you like based on your listening preferences and disk space.

CVIII

[Xstatic]

"Does MJ do equivalent error detection/correction to EAC?"

In v.8 there is something similar to EAC when MJ is ripping in digital secure mode.
After ripping you get a report stating the ripping quality, and if there have been any questionable
passages in the songs, you can play them back to see if it is ok for you.

Number of rereads, and some of the other advanced features from EAC is not (yet..?) in MJ.

[Sentient]

Is this a respectable throughput?

I think so.  I am a little slower with a PII-333, but not much.  You can get much faster if you give up the quality and reliability of Secure ripping and Lames alt preset VBR modes.  In that case just use the internal plugin encoders.  Like you, I want quality archives on the computer, so I am happy to trade off the speed.

Does MJ do equivalent error detection/correction to EAC?
Would things be faster/higher quality if I used EAC/LAME?

Secure mode is similar, I think it does fewer rereads and gives up a little sooner than EAC does.  I have had a few tracks that failed in MJ that I was able rip with EAC, but EAC really struggled and the error reports were long ones.  I prefer MJs way, it fails and tells you so.  Then I go fix the CD with my DiscDr. and re-rip, usually with fine results.  EAC is definitely NOT faster, but the quality might be a little better.  If it is, I haven't been able to tell.

Since I encode on both with external lame set to use alt preset fast standard the encodes are identical.

[JohnT]

Does MJ do equivalent error detection/correction to EAC?

MJ has similarities to EAC in secure mode, but it's not equivalent. If you select the recommended secure mode in EAC with C2 error checking turned off (which is recommended by it's developer), here are some comparisons:

1. Both EAC and MJ read each sector at least twice and only continue if they're identical. If there is a discrepancy, I believe EAC then does up to 16 re-reads until it gets 8 identical reads. MJ does up to 16 re-reads, until it gets two consecutive identical reads. EAC will retry the 16 re-reads up to 1, 3, or 5 times depending on user choice, so it may read the same section up to 80 times. MJ only tries 16 times.

2. When MJ encounters unreadable sectors, it skips over them and then reports their locations at the end. The user can listen to the sections to see if the track is still acceptable, if not they can delete the track at that point. I believe EAC simply fails to copy the track if unreadable sectors are encountered (but I'm not sure).

3. MJ does not do anything special with drives that "cache" data. EAC can optionally reset the drive after each read in order to empty the cache. This can be very slow to the point of being unfeasible on some cdrom drives, but it will definitely give more "secure" results. I don't know the percentage of drives on the market that do caching which affects digital extraction, but I think it's fairly low.

4. In my testing, the speed of extraction was roughly comparable between EAC and MJ.

- John T.
JRiver, Inc.

[Bob L.]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for the quick and helpful responses.  This is the most helpful board I've ever been on.

Regards,

Bob L.