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Bad quality mp3 rips
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| Stanza |
I've noticed a mp3s that have been poorly ripped and are floating around on the net, AG , etc. I was wondering what constitutes to a bad rip, like if it is the fault of the source, encoder or hardware.
Often you can can tell an mp3 has been poorly ripped by the sound being hissy and some parts of it being distorted. I believe there is no way to fix the problem. |
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| tranceDJ |
Well..there could be a variety of problems with a "bad" rip. The vinyl could have been old, loose connections, bad encoder, the list goes on.
Fact is, you get a bad rip...delete it and try to find a good one...if the rip is done by a group that does ripping, its almost guaranteed to be good.
Slight hissing and pops are from the vinyl itself and that really isn't the ripper's fault especially if the vinyl is a couple of years old.
No way to fix the sound either...download the track from a different site or if you can, buy the vinyl and rip it yourself
TranceDJ |
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| Stanza |
Sometimes I rip from CD and I get the volume of the resulting mp3 file to be too loud. I use Audiograbber to rip cd's by the way and I also tried the Normalising feature but this doesn't seem to make a difference.
For example I ripped the cd Tranceport 1 by Paul Oakenfold and the resulting mp3 rip always seems to be too loud. What happens is that thw sound becomes very muffled and distorted (because of the high volume signal) whenever the track approaches heavy drumrolls.
I think it's the volume each cd that determines the volume of the rip. I tried lowing the volume of my soundcard but this didn't seem to have any effect.
I'm trying to find a way to minimise this loudness to prevent the distortion. |
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| hypronix |
if U DL stuff from a place (like a ftp or somethin') it's generally good. on AG many are not full, low quality..
oh, try AudioCatalyst.. heard it's better for rippin'...
peace |
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| Stanza |
Nah dude. I'm afraid Audiocatalyst is considered a poor encoder and it's been tested by audiophiles on the net.
They all recommend Blade or Lame encoder. |
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| biznology |
| well i use CDex to encode, rip, everything pretty much. it prolly isnt the best, but its free and rarely fails unless the CD is scratched or the MP3 is corrupted. ALSO, if you rip, rip as high a bitrate as possible >192 itll sound better...late/ |
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| Juricimo |
i use MusicMatch jukebox to rip my cds...hehe dont laugh now...
i set all the little numbers straight and check the select boxes so i get the best possible quality rip at 192kbps...
the rips actually sound good to me....
i tried a few others like audiocatalyst <---piece of junk, and MMJ seemed to work very good and easy....
I HATE bad quality rips, they piss me off...
>JM< |
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| Lars Northrop |
The way you describe it, I'd say the problem isn't due to encoding but rather due to poor recording. It looks like those MP3s have been recorded at too high levels which results in digital clipping. While it is usually all right to clip an analogue source (ie. an audio cassette), digital clipping introduces very harsh distortion as soon as you hit the 0dB level. Imagine a sine wave (representing your sound source) with its top part flattened - that's what happens when you go past 0dB when recording on a digital medium. To see this, start WinAMP, switch to Oscilloscope visualisation, turn on the EQ and crank your gain to the max. Look at the waveform. Sounds ugly, doesn't it =).
Regarding the ripper/encoder - check out www.r3mix.net - very good resource with some intelligently discussed articles. They suggest the LAME encoder in conjunction with Exact Audio Copy ripper and I can only second that suggestion. |
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| DJ_D|ABL0_ |
| quote: | Originally posted by Juricimo
i use MusicMatch jukebox to rip my cds...hehe dont laugh now...
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Mate, nothing to be embarrased about there! Why use a cut down version of a program when there is a team of highly skilled programmers who use the same encoding techniques as the rest of the world making something that looks pretty! As long as u haven't set the application to 'automatically read' every file type under the sun, it's not a bad program. If for nothing else than to use its CDDB resources that are second to none.
I always use Blade encoder (using dBPowerAmp along with others) and have done since AudioGrabber version 1.0. There's never been a problem there.
As long as the source is high quality, the cables are *good* quality, the soundcard's good and the machine can keep up at real-time (good spec), you should have a perfect rip everytime :)
The trouble with using audiogalaxy (now this is just audiogalaxy) is that is searches for multiple copies of the same file (name and size only) in order to download it to your machine. If one source fails for any reason, one of the other sources cuts in and continues downloading. The AG client does not check the bitrate (Kpbs) so in theory, if people have the same file name and size with different bitrates (quite uncommon but it happens), you end up with a **** quality file. |
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