BrucieB Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 Hello I just bought an HTC, & would like to rip my collection of CDs to my external hdd. I just have a few questions.I'm not sure on which format to rip them with. I've heard on the forums/net that I might want to go with MP3-High quality, but there is still some Audio loss. I also heard about FLAC, (Free Lossless Audio Codec) & was wondering if I can use FLAC & still have the album artwork, & if it would play through my HTC with no problems. Well Thanks for any help/any ideas*Sorry if it's not in the right area, I also did search, but nothing really answered my question. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 I'm not sure if FLAC will work but I rip MP3s at 320k using WMP 11 and they sound great. Plus they dont take up a lot of room like riping lossless would. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lippavisual Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 MP3 only. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrucieB Posted August 4, 2008 Author Share Posted August 4, 2008 OK, Thanks for the help Guys!*btw, Should I use Windows Media, or is there a better program that would work with control4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 OK, Thanks for the help Guys!*btw, Should I use Windows Media, or is there a better program that would work with control4You can use Easy Importer that comes with the HTC-500, Composer Media Edition, or WMP 11. I use WMP and found that when ripping, I can set it to rip at 320k upon disc insert, it gets the cover art and organizes everything nice, then ejects when done. Then when I'm done ripping, I copy the folders over to my USB terabyte hard drive, and move it back to the controller. Then I scan for new music and it's all there ready to go.The Control4 programs probably make it the easiest, but I dont know what the max kbps setting is.You can probably use anything you want as long as it's final product is .mp3, then you just have to move it over to where the music is stored (NAS, USB drive, HC500, etc)YMMV.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbs Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 Ahhh, the format wars. :D This is a question that's been debated on the internet as much as any other question out there. I think the right answer ultimately is a very personal one. What sounds good to your ears, and the ears of the people you care about, is really all that matters. There are people out there who claim that they can tell the difference, for example, between the FLAC that you mentioned and the 320k files thecodeman uses. Personally, I've never seen evidence of such acute hearing and I always chuckle when I read those posts.On the other hand, when I first set out to rup my collection of 1000+ CDs a few years ago, I wanted to make the best tradeoff of size versus quality. That tradeoff is more important for portable usage than it is for home usage perhaps, since my phone maxes out at 4GB storage but I've got several terabytes available on my home server.What I did was pick a few of my favorite albums and rip them at several different quality levels. I then did a blind test, randomly renaming the sound files to make them indistinguishable on my MP3 player interface and began listening. I'd go through with 96 kbps, 128 and 192 and see where I could hear the difference. I could definitely tell the difference between 96 and 128. But 128 and 192 were not reliably distinguisghable for me. I was listening using various devices on Shure E3C canalphones which are generally considered to be pretty good quality headphones.Now, I don't doubt that there are plenty of people out there who can hear the difference between 128 and 192 encoded music, and others who can tell the difference between 192 and 256. But hearing acuity, like most things about we humans, probably follows a normal distribution. Which means that the further you get from "average" the fewer people pas the bar. Which, means that as you get into the higher and higher bitrates, there are fewer people who can tell the difference.I have today roughly 200 GB of MP3s, which means I can back them up on a $100 drive, store half of them on a portable player, keep most of them on my laptop, etc etc. Would I want to have them take up 600 GB so that the 1 in 1000 person who can hear the difference is impressed when they come over to my house? Absolutely not. But if I *were* that person, then of course I'd keep them at the higher rate.All this is basically in hopes of encouraging you to take a listen for yourself, see which files sound indistinguishable for you, and choose that. 320 kbps is an exceptionally high bitrate, and even as drives become cheaper and cheaper there will always be advantages to smaller files (even as we've gone from 1 GB drives to 1 TB drives in our computers, the prevalence of compression has gone up!)As for tools to use, I use Music Match Jukebox mostly out of habit and because it's fast, and then I use MP3 Tag Studio for metadata hygeine.--Jason Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Good post jbs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbs Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Thanks. You actually inspired me to go and revisit my ripping tools and last night I downloaded and installed EAC (Exact Audio Copy) which seems to be generally much-loved by the audiophile community for the fidelity of the rips.I decided to make the switch from 128 kbps CBR which is what my collection has been in thus far, to 128 kbps minimum VBR for new titles going forward (doubt I'll go back and re-encode anytime soon unless I grow better ears :-) Baby steps, right? My main reason for going CBR way back when was that when I started ripping my collection most portable players didn't handle VBR, but I tried a few VBR tracks on my Treo under TCPMP and they played fine. I'm guessing that as processing power has increased over the last few years most or all portable players are probably fine with VBR tracks.--Jason Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Thanks. You actually inspired me to go and revisit my ripping tools and last night I downloaded and installed EAC (Exact Audio Copy) which seems to be generally much-loved by the audiophile community for the fidelity of the rips.I decided to make the switch from 128 kbps CBR which is what my collection has been in thus far, to 128 kbps minimum VBR for new titles going forward (doubt I'll go back and re-encode anytime soon unless I grow better ears :-) Baby steps, right? My main reason for going CBR way back when was that when I started ripping my collection most portable players didn't handle VBR, but I tried a few VBR tracks on my Treo under TCPMP and they played fine. I'm guessing that as processing power has increased over the last few years most or all portable players are probably fine with VBR tracks.--JasonAwesome I know that the quality of the rips definatley exceed those of, uh, aquired .mp3s. And with over 220 CD's ripped at 320k, I'm (I think) about 1/3 way on the terabyte drive as far as space goes. Right around 2,500 songs. So yeah, could probably go down in quality and never now and free up some space... but... why? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
query Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 What is the best ripping software that has volume normalization built in? My installer has suggested itunes. Does anyone have other suggestions?I find that the volume differential between different CDs ripped with Windows Media can be disturbing when shuffling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 What is the best ripping software that has volume normalization built in? My installer has suggested itunes. Does anyone have other suggestions?I find that the volume differential between different CDs ripped with Windows Media can be disturbing when shuffling.Seems like AudioGrabber might be good:http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.html?forumID=7&threadID=279491&messageID=2676845 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbs Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 What is the best ripping software that has volume normalization built in? My installer has suggested itunes. Does anyone have other suggestions?I find that the volume differential between different CDs ripped with Windows Media can be disturbing when shuffling.I'm very anti-itunes to be honest. Last time I downloaded it for someone I think it was like a 50 megabyte program. Very bloated to use just for ripping tracks.Per the post above I'm quite new to EAC but it's small, very fast, and does have a tab for volume normalization.There are also tools out there that will losslessly normalize volumes across a music collection that's already been ripped. I wrote about one here:http://www.c4forums.com/viewtopic.php?pid=8938#p8938 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Also, something else about iTunes are the annoying updates, and the fact that Safari is bundled in (or it once was) whether or not you wanted it. Yes I know IE comes with Windows... Also iTunes MP3 ripping kbps doesnt go as high as WMP if you want higher bit rates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tumult Posted August 22, 2008 Share Posted August 22, 2008 I thought control4's official stance was that the system was not compatible with ripped music that is less than 192kb/sec. don't quote me on that, but that's what I heard from my dealer.tum Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slemay Posted August 25, 2008 Share Posted August 25, 2008 I don't believe that to be true... I've seen 128 playing just fine on systems before. IMHO - I don't like anything lower than 192 - and prefer 320. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrucieB Posted August 30, 2008 Author Share Posted August 30, 2008 Thanks for all the Help Guys!So I went with WMP, MP3 @ 320kbps. So Far I'm a few weeks in & have over 140 Gigs ripped. Still going strong...lolAnyway I connected my Hdd to my HTC & scanned it, But Nothing is right. I have No Genres, Everything is meshed together. When I tried it with only 20 or so cd's it was fine, showed art work & the right labels. Not sure what I did different besides add a few more thousand cd's. Any ideas on why? (So I was just thinking of using Control4 Monkey Plugin, Any thoughts)Thanks again for the help!Edit: (Link) http://control4blog.businessnetonline.com/2007/10/29/control4-monkey/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MSI Posted August 30, 2008 Share Posted August 30, 2008 You should try MediaMonkey !Organizing and updating your music is easy and importing to C4 is much faster than the C4 scan. Just make sure you edit the C4.config file -> <add key="NoWebServiceDuringScan" value="true" /> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbs Posted October 18, 2008 Share Posted October 18, 2008 Awesome I know that the quality of the rips definatley exceed those of, uh, aquired .mp3s. And with over 220 CD's ripped at 320k, I'm (I think) about 1/3 way on the terabyte drive as far as space goes. Right around 2,500 songs. So yeah, could probably go down in quality and never now and free up some space... but... why? I just wanted to clarify something here . . . if my math is correct you should still be a LONG way from filling a 1TB drive.At 128 kbps a 1-minute track takes (128 x 60 / 8 / 1024) = .94 MB or just under a megabyte. Basically you take the sample rate such as 128 kbps or 320 kbps which is in kiloBITS per second. You divide by 8 to get kiloBYTES per second because there are 8 BITS in a BYTE. You then multiply by 60 to get kiloBYTES per minute and then you divide by 1024 to get MEGABYTES per MINUTE because there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte.So the "multiplier" to get from ANY bitrate in kbps to the Megabytes that a minute of music would use is ~0.0073 (60/8/1024). Thus for 320 kbps encoding, you'd use 2.34 Megabytes per minute. 1 TB, which is 1,000,000 MB (it's actually 1,048,576 MB but the drive manufacturers all cheat and call it 1 Million megabytes just like they treat 1 GB as 1000 MB, anyhow) those 1,000,000 MB divided by 2.34 MB / Minute means you could store more than 427,000 minutes of music. With an average track length of 4 minutes, that's still more than 100,000 songs or maybe 10,000 albums.Does that all sound right?--Jason Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted October 20, 2008 Share Posted October 20, 2008 Well the cover art is on the drive too and so are some pictures for the screen saver Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckelker Posted November 7, 2008 Share Posted November 7, 2008 If you have a lot of discs, you can rent one of our automated CD ripping robots for two weeks: http://www.moondogdigital.com/ripping.html#rentIt will do MP3, WAV or FLAC using AMG data with FreeDB secondary lookups. Here's a simple guide to ripping for the Home Controller: http://www.moondogdigital.com/Control4_Media_Controller_Instructions.pdfCraig Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EDDY7 Posted February 20, 2010 Share Posted February 20, 2010 Hi guys. Can anybody help me? I can't see nor able to play my songs from C4 media. I just updated the system from 1.73 to 1.74 and not sure this is the reason why i can see my songs on the c4 HDD. ( Hc- 300) Does the composer media Edition 1.73 compactible with Composer pro. 1.74?Also, i need help on how rip and able watch my DVD movies without having to spend a fortune. i just bought 1 terabyte WD HDD and Nero 9 software but i can seem to figure out how to do it. And i think i might also need a media player. any reasonable media player to tie to this project ?i will appreciate any help. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
henniae Posted February 20, 2010 Share Posted February 20, 2010 Hi guys. Can anybody help me? I can't see nor able to play my songs from C4 media. I just updated the system from 1.73 to 1.74 and not sure this is the reason why i can see my songs on the c4 HDD. ( Hc- 300) Does the composer media Edition 1.73 compactible with Composer pro. 1.74?You should always use the same version for Composer ME as that of the system software on the Controller. Upgrade to Composer ME 1.7.4.Also, i need help on how rip and able watch my DVD movies without having to spend a fortune. i just bought 1 terabyte WD HDD and Nero 9 software but i can seem to figure out how to do it. And i think i might also need a media player. any reasonable media player to tie to this project ?i will appreciate any help. Thanks.You of course will need a media player. C4 makes a media player that works well with the system. You can also use the Netgear units. There are many, many posts on this forum that discuss ripping and media players. Search is your friend here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EDDY7 Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Thanks Alan. concerning the the composer ME 1.7.4, I just spoke to my Dealer today and he told me to download at my C4 account website. I looked, but only composer ME 1.7.3. I have also search for it but no result or success on upgrading to Comp. ME 1.7.4. Is there a link anyone can send me? thanks.regarding the Movie repping, My dealer also discussed all the options I have; from Fusion, c4 media player + HDD w/ ripped movies, kaleidescape and Blu Ray payers with Netflix, sony 777es and many others. Considering all these options i think my best bet is the blu ray player w/ Netflix subscription since it is cost effective and less time consuming. or the next on the list is C4 media player and HDD with a ripped movies which is a reasonable price but more time consuming since i'm not that savvy with the ripping part.what do you guys think? is any body using Blu ray players w/ Netflix subscription? than a lot for all your help out there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
henniae Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 what do you guys think? is any body using Blu ray players w/ Netflix subscription? than a lot for all your help out there.Done this many times. Last time I checked there was not a lot of HD content but it works fine.BTW. When your dealer upgraded the system for you didn't he check to see if the music played? I would get your dealer back out there to verify that the upgrade was done correctly and have him fix it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecodeman Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 what do you guys think? is any body using Blu ray players w/ Netflix subscription? than a lot for all your help out there.Yes, I use my Samsung 3600 with Netflix all the time. Love it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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