Ripping and Playing

[satfrat]

Has anyone noticed a difference in sound using the different media players ? Say rip one with EAC and one with J. River as opposed to others. Convenience with the artwork is cool but isn't the quality of sound most important ?
   The biggest difference came about when AIOS was installed bypassing windows. I must say never has streaming sounded this goods to me.



charles

I use J.River Media Center 13 for everything,,, playing/ripping/burning and I have zero problems in close to a year of being turned onto this user interface friendly Media Center. Using Asioforall for Windows XP is a breeze with J. River but what I like most is the ability to change the bit depth and sample rate (24/44.1) switch benefits my Empirical Off-Ramp 3 which outputs 24/44.1.
 For me, I balance quality with convenience so I guess you'd call be a compromising audiophile.

Cheers,
Robin

[_Scotty_]

I finally figured J River out,mostly. But I don't trust its ripping protocols. It does everything behind closed doors. I use dbpoweramp to rip with in secure mode and have both my internal HD and my external HD set for C2 error detection. Now for the bad news Vista sounds better running J River than XP does,no kmixer problem and probably better code to handle audio. I am going to look at Ubuntus media player or wait until SEVEN is released before I replace my XP OS though.
Scotty

[satfrat]

Likewise I'm bypassing Vista for Windows 7 as I'll need to have my HTPC completely rebuilt to handle the upgrade. Something that I'm really not looking forward to,,, unless I can find another job that is. I'm pretty happy with where I'm at now tho and that's a good thing. Doesn't have to be the best to please me,,,, luckily.

Cheers,
Robin

[hometheaterdoc]

Windows 7 is MUCH better than Vista... I'm doing work with the release code right now.  Sooooooooooo much more stable, not quite as much of a resource pig, and some nice features.  A lot of code underneath seems to have started with Vista and certain peripherals are 1:1 match driverwise with vista drivers.  Others not so much....

I'm a foobar person myself.  I use EAC for ripping most of the time.  I keep meaning to try out some of the other rippers....

[richidoo]

Scotty, how do you enable C2 detection on optical drive? It's not in properties of the drive. Is it in BIOS?  I think mine is already enabled because I see C2 errors in dbpoweramp but I wanna check for sure.
Thanks

I just got a Lenovo laptop yesterday with Vista. First time I have ever used it. My 11yo son said he would teach me how... Seems OK so far.

[hometheaterdoc]

I just got a Lenovo laptop yesterday with Vista. First time I have ever used it. My 11yo son said he would teach me how... Seems OK so far.

Part of the hate of Vista is that it was released according to Microsoft's corporate timetable to meet profit projections, not that it was ready and should be released.  Shortsightedness at its finest... because it was FAAAAR from being ready for prime time when it was forced on folks.  I got a Dell for the office when they first turned off XP and would only ship with Vista.  14 days of BSODs, 8 complete re-installs because it wouldn't even boot after some BSODs.  Drivers completely non-existant for months because peripheral manufacturers weren't ready.  It was absolute hell for a while.  Microsoft developers I know were not happy they released it and some left the company on principle because of them pushing forward in the face of many folks saying it shouldn't be released.  Of course the interesting thing about Vista is that instead of folks going out and getting new machines, a lot of folks held onto their old ones longer so as not to be forced to make the switch... i.e. less sales for them and more folks jumping onto linux and macs as alternatives. 

Now, a few years later, and *many* patches, etc. and manufacturers catching up, Vista is significantly more stable and does in fact work reasonably well.  It's still a resource hog, though and it's automated file indexing still drives me batty.

I like the approach they are taking with Windows 7.  I think it will be a smoother release when it goes live officially.

[mdconnelly]

My experience with Vista is the same as Shane's.   It wasn't until SP1 that Vista gained some stability but that was what, like a year or more after release!   MS really hurt themselves there.

For ripping, I still use EAC.  DbPowerAmp is very good as well, but I did find a CD in poor shape that EAC handled better than anything else.

MediaMonkey is my tagging and playing app of choice.  It's gotten much better.   I've always liked Foobar but haven't spent much time with all the plugins that take it to the next level. 

[_Scotty_]

If the drive you are using supports C2 error detection it will show up in dbpoweramp when you test for it during the setup of the secure ripping options. Of course this capability is not considered a selling point so you don't know if the drive you are buying has it or not until you test for it.
Scotty
Here is a link to the setup tutorial for dbpoweramp The program does not automatically set up C2 error detection it has to be enabled during the configuration process. http://www.dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper-setup-guide.htm

[richidoo]

Thanks guys

[_Scotty_]

mdconnelly,testing by myself and others between J River Media Jukebox 12 and MediaMonkey showed MediaMonkey to be slightly congested overall,with a slightly less vivid presentation. MediaMonkey also was kinder to sources with sibilance but it did this by smearing things together in the high frequencies and loosing high frequency resolution. MediaMonkey isn't bad per se but does not have the resolution and transparency of J River. In comparisons between Foobar 8.3 and J River in my system it was a wash and I chose to use J River because of its media management capability.
Scotty

[mdconnelly]

Scotty,  good to know!  Thanks.  I don't do a lot of listening directly from the computer (yet).  Mostly my use of MediaMonkey has been for tagging and album art.  I'll give J River a try.

[Bigfish8]

Guys:

I have ripped most of my music, at least for the past year, using EAC with metadata checked into Flac files.  All of my music is stored in a folder on an external hard drive (backed-up on another external hard drive) that I have named 'Music.'  There are no subfolders.  Squeezebox Center organizes the music by artist, new music, genre, etc., etc.  However, my music folder is a mess if you do an explore and take a look at the files.  Some of the files are listed under artist and some are not.  At least the entire drive is in .flac. 

My question is can I use one of the above mentioned programs to organize the files?  Should I put different Genre's in separate folders and if I do will it impact Squeezebox Center's ability to find all of my music files?  Obviously I need advise and it would be greatly appreciated.  Darn, the more I think I learn the more I realize I have to learn about this hobby!

Thanks,

Ken

[mdconnelly]

Ken, I've got a bit of the same mess... I've got about a thousand albums ripped and most the album tags and artwork are in good shape thanks to EAC and MediaMonkey, but music folder names and organization and, to a lesser degree, genre tags, leave something to be desired.  I'd love to know if there is a tool to help with this but I suspect it's just a lot of work with Windows Explorer.  Since SqueezeBox Server does such a great job of organizing by tags, I don't really worry much about it.  I figure that will be a task for when I retire 

[bpape]

I've been trying in my limited time, to start exploring the underlying database that the SB server side uses.  Once I get that figured out, it shouldn't be a big deal to write scripts to move things, create folders, etc. based on the metadata.

Bryan

[richidoo]

With classical music, standard tags don't cut it. So I just do the best I can with the tags, and then I rely on my own folder sytem to organize the tracks, then I browse by folder.

My Beethoven directory has >1000 tracks and Bach God knows what. So I have to do Beethoven>Piano>Sonatas>[Artist]>Moonlight Sonata...  Then I have 5 artists playing it, there's 15 tracks right there. There are 32 Sonatas. Then quartets, symphonies, trios, concertos, overtures, etc. Standard tags can't handle it all. Sonos only uses standard tags.

I want to use folders as the main organization then add tags to fill in the extra info. But I can't change the Sonos app to display composer instead of album artist tags, etc.  Eventually a more configurable player like foobar will take over when I go from Sonos to PC based.

I like having the music in folders so I can find it easily if I want to rip from flac to mp3 or apple lossless for a portable player.

Good idea backing up the music on a separate drive. My NAS is making funny noises. I think it's the fan but I gotta check it out today.