The Catastrophic Loss

When I first ripped CDs to MP3 a few years back, I had to pick and choose which tracks to rip, and rip them to radio quality 96kbps MP3’s because my state-of-the-art Pentium II-300 only had 2 4Gb SCSI drives in it. Those drives were a steal at $150 each…

A couple of years later, falling hard drive prices allowed me to lay my hands on a nice, fat 120Gb drive, which gave me the space to start ripping full discs at 192 kbps (Constant Bit rate) without having to pick and choose individual tracks. Eliminating my indecisive nature from the process might’ve shortened the process, but it did nothing to speed up things for my 2 semi-outdated PCs, which took about fifteen to twenty minutes to rip each CD. Even running 4 drives at once left me in front of a couple of PCs for a solid couple months, popping discs in and out. And in. And out…

Finally, last year, the 80+Gb of MP3’s that I had spent so much time ripping were lost in what I can only describe as a catastrophic drive failure. I can only describe it that way, because I’m a melodramatic nerd who relates better to PC’s than people. I had no backups because I had been procrastinating on buying a second drive, because my friend the PC had assured me that friends do not crash on each other. To make a long story short, the whole thing ended with me crouched over the PC’s innards yelling, “Don’t you die on me, you bastard. Don’t you DIE ON ME!”

The Road to Recovery

After building a replacement PC with nearly a half terrabyte of storage and 2.21 Gigawatts of power (2.21 GIGAWATTS! 2.21 GIGAWATTS!), I’ve finally found the initiative to investigate the various audio formats, methods, and options relating to the re-digitizing my collection.

Compressed or Lossless?

I really wanted to rip the files to a lossless audio format like FLAC for the better quality, but I couldn’t justify spending 400MB of disk space per CD when human ears generally can’t distinguish them from 192kbps files that take up one-tenth of the space. So, FLAC was out.

After reading a bunch of audio forum posts (that I can’t even begin to provide a paper trail for) with opinions ranging from “Fuck it, all codecs are the same” to “only reading the 0’s and 1’s directly from the CD with a microscope and imagining the music will provide the acceptable tonal warmth“, I decided that I’d stick with encoding the files in MP3. From what I can tell, at higher bitrates all the formats become very similar, and although MP3 is not the best codec out there, it’s still the heavyweight champ when it comes to compatibility. I also decided that I would use LAME’s V1 preset, which produces variable bit rate files in the 200-250 kbps/s range. This was a little higher quality than my original 192kbps files, but the variable bitrate keeps the file sizes about the same as the old files. Higher quality for the same size is a win-win. With headphones, these are supposedly indistinguishable from CD, and I spent 10 or 15 minutes making sure that I couldn’t hear a difference.

Testing For Speed And Accuracy

To encode the files, there was no real reason to move away from
CDex, which has been my little encoding bitch for the last 6+ years, but I wanted to try something new. I found a program called Exact Audio Copy (EAC), and gave it a shot because of its $0 price tag and reported ability to make error-free copies of CDs. After a little reading, I found that it also has a few features to help speed up the encoding process: It can queue the encoding of the files (allowing a second CD to be started while the first is still encoding in the background), it allows the user to set the number of encoding threads to spawn, and if that’s not enough, two instances of the program can be opened to rip 2 drives simultaneously.

Given the number of CDs that I’m going to have to rip and encode, I spent a little time testing which configuration would minimize the time I have to spend popping in CDs and staring at the wall. I compared ripping 2 drives simultaneously versus ripping with a single drive, and found that even though ripping 2 CDs simultaneously was about 45 seconds faster than ripping 2 CDs in one drive, the resultant files have a lot more errors than those ripped from a single drive. I also found that using any other programs in the background was possible, but produced timing errors in the resulting files. 45 seconds will definitely add more time over ripping my CDs, but the extra time involved in using the single drive is worth it to me if it cuts the number of errors that will drive me crazy later.

The Results: Exact Audio Copy

I played around with the number of threads to use, and found that two test CDs took 5:21 to rip using one thread, 4:42 with two threads, and 4:38 with four. Because the LAME encoder will eat 100% of the processing power of the box, the threads just end up dividing the processing power among themselves, making me think that the drop in encoding times may be just savings from the time that it takes EAC to close and re-open an instance of LAME. As long as I’m not using a single thread, I really don’t think it matters if I use two or four.

So, anyway. I’m going to be using EAC with the settings recommended in the EAC Tutorial and LAME 3.97 beta to encode my MP3’s from a single drive using the LAME V1 preset as recommended by Hydrogenaudio’s recommended LAME settings.

It only took me three hours and the jazz section is pretty much done. And I’m seriously happy with the speed at which the new machine is encoding. I have Microsoft’s SyncToy running to backup the MP3 files between 2 drives. The only weird thing about the whole process is that when I open some of the CDs, I can smell the cleaning solution that I used when I salvaged them from my house fire a number of years ago (I did my own salvage). Smells primitively link right up to memories in our brains, and that smell links up to a pretty lonely and miserable time for me. Then, I feel weird. Then, I feel weird about feeling weird about it.

Anywho. Hope you found something useful in there. Sorry I’m such a spaz.

Posted in Geeky, Music