If you’re a Windows user and you are still relying on the lame (and I don’t mean the Lame mp3 encoder) software that came with your portable MP3 player to manage music transfers, run to dBpoweAMP.com and see if their Sveta Portable Audio software will work with your device. If so, get it!
The Rio Music Manager that came with my Nitrus is actually one of the better tools I have seen, but with a lot of MP3s it is dog slow at refreshing the file listing and not particularly customizable. With Sveta you can do on-the-fly conversions, rip CDs directly to your portable player, and generally maneuver faster and better.
Check out this screenshot to see the interface. The left two columns are my portable, the right column is the file browser to find and load MP3s.
Two tips: use the beta version and drivers, available in the Beta Forum and install the optional file selector so you can browse, tag all the files you want to transfer and then do them all at once.
Not coincidentally, these are products by the makers of the dBpowerAMP Music Converter, one of the most versatile tools available for music conversions and the dBpowerAMP Music Player which has worked quite well (though I remain a FooBar 2000 user for the most part).
I have a Iriver H340 - does the Sveta Portable Audio program A: serve this player B: have an appropriate driver?
Your help would be very much appreciated as I cannot find their own website to ask them.
Not as far I know or can tell. Here’s a link to the Sveta web site, perhaps something there will help!
Speaking of conversions, do you know if it is true that audio quality can be lost if you convert a file from say, WMA to MP3, or from a lower MP3 bitrate to a higher MP3 bitrate?
And how do you go about translating stuff, or obtaining music, in the SHN. format?
Yes, you can (and almost always will) suffer loss of quality when “transcoding”– whether from format to format or from one bitrate to another… especially if you are talking about moving from a lower bitrate mp3 to a higher bitrate!
Generally you want to generate whatever files you want from a lossless copy: wav is lossless, but there are compressed file formats… SHN was once the most popular (and still is in some trading circles), but FLAC seems to be the most popular.
There are plenty of trading sites where you can obtain FLAC or SHN (and MP3) music of high quality, but most are invite only so you have to find someone who already has access.
The tools are pretty easily found on the web depending on your platform… for FLAC use the official FLAC tools + EAC (exact audio copy). For good MP3, use EAC + LAME (mp3 encoder)…
Cool, Thanx.
By the way, do you know what bitrate a regular cd is equivalent to? I have heard that a regular cd is equivalent to 192 kpbs MP3 but have also read that a regular cd is over 1000 kpbs!
To my knowledge, most MP3 players will not play wav files so it would seem that wav would only be good to trade with people so that they could later convert them to MP3/WMA. Is this correct? What do you consider to be “good MP3″? 320kpbs… 256 kpbs…
I downloaded that EAC and the lame encoder. How would this program be different from the Creative Mediasource program that came with my Zen player? Mediasource converts CDs into MP3(up to 320 kpbs) and WMA. Would EAC do a better job encoding and does this mean I would have to recopy all my CDs?!
First, let me recommend you the best forums on the planet for this kind of discussion: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php
A CD’s bitrate is around 1400kbps. But you don’t need to rip at that rate because lossless compression makes the files a lot smaller without ANY audio lloss (FLAC, SHN) and when you compress the files you want a bitrate that you won’t be able to hear any difference. If you use Lame, the “alt preset standard” setting or “aps” has been shown to be “transparent” to most listeners for most music– it is a “variable bitrate compression” or VBR, so it coompresses some parts of the music more than others… generally it averages around 220-280kbps. There is a higher setting, alt preset extreme (apx), which a lot of people use just to be on the safe side. Anything higher and you are likely just wasting disk space on your portable unit!
The new LAME has a second way to specify settings using -V0 (same as APS) to -V7. -V2 is the same as APS. I generally use APX or -V1 for all of my own ripping.
EAC and Lame are different from other encoders in that EAC– when setup correctly– guarantees no ripping errors of even the smallest kind and LAME is well-known as the best encoder around for creating high quality MP3s. A little time learning to use them both is time WELL spent. I say this after having to redo a LOT of music that I encoded using other systems.
I recommend persuing the hydrogenaudio forums and doing some searching there to learn more, though I am happy to answer the questions that I can
I have EAC on my computer and I suppose LAME works inside EAC.
In Exact Audio Copy, under EAC, then under Compression Options, then under External Compression, then under program, including path, used for compression it says
C:\Documents and Settings\Michael\Desktop\lame4.0a14\lame.exe
so I suppose I am using LAME in Exact Audio Copy.
I can’t, however, figure out, how to encode MP3s (from a CD) the right way under alt preset extreme- I can’t figure out how to get to the settings (aps or apx) and start doing this.
I think I have EAC and LAME set up in the right way but I can’t be sure. Can you direct me how to start encoding a CD into MP3 correctly? Thanks so much!
Lame will compress the WAV files which EAC produces. Some people chain them together using the external compression feature. I typically use Lame and the RazorLame front end. I rip a bunch of CDs to WAV with a folder structure like this:
artist>album>tracknr. title.wav
Then I use the Razorlame to convert them as a batch to mp3
Finally, I use mp3tag studio to tag the mp3s– it uses the folder structure and filename to do those tags and I add others.
However, you can skip many steps by chaing the tools together as shown here:
http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eac-qs-en.htm
I would just use, simply the –alt-preset extreme or -V0 or –alt-preset standard or -V2 Or the compromise -V1 — all the other dithering around isn’t worth it unless you are extremely low on space. With the high quality settings you can listen on any system and even burn decent sounding CDs…