@mikem132 wrote:
I’ve had a bunch of mp3 players over the years. Several have been Creative. Those of you who find WMP a clunky program or interface must not have experience with Creative Centrale. If you had, you would hold WMP in much higher esteem.
I still don’t understand making a copy of a CD in FLAC, then shrinking a copy for a player. In my case, that’s one copy too many. I have the CD and don’t need a FLAC copy. I have listened to high-bitrate stuff on several players using “better” earphones, and can’t hear the difference, so all that effort is lost on me.
In fact, studies have shown that the majority of users are satisfied with “lossy” music–to the dismay of the record labels (and other “niche” formats like SACD–hey, I have a player and a bunch of those CDs, too—I’m only kidding about using “niche” again, since it seems such a touchy subject).
At any rate, does either WinAmp or MediaMonkey do a better job ripping a CD to mp3? I am trying to standardize my media to mp3 so I don’t have to worry about converting it for the car, motorcycle, Bose Wave Thing, etc., that can’t play any other compressed format. Thanks.
There is a very valid reason I rip my CDs to FLAC; then transcode to a lossy format for portable use…that is, CDs are not indestructible. I’ve been collecting CDs since their introduction and some of my collection are suffering from a condition commonly called “CD rot”. This is where there was a void in the substrate material and let atmospheric air come in contact with the playable content of the disc. After a time, these CDs will become unplayable. So, with hard drives being as cheap as they are, I always keep an “insurance copy” on hard drive in FLAC format, if (I should say when, as CDs have a finite life) this condition occurs with any of my discs.
I’m not saying this is what you should do, all I am saying is what I do. When you have a collection as massive as mine, and a good chunk is very rare, you want to do everything possible to keep it in playable shape.
If you want as good of rips as you can possibly get, there are two choices; EAC (Exact Audio Copy) or dBPowerAmp. About any other program will yield slightly inferior results. But, there are many capable ripping programs out there, and a lot of the differences are mainly due to the interfaces, rather than the quality of the rips. I personally like dBPowerAmp; I have used EAC, but it’s slow and dBPowerAmp does everything that EAC does, at a faster speed.
The bottom line is: Use what program you like, and that gives the quality of files that are enjoyable to you. This isn’t a contest, the only person any software program has to please is Y-O-U.