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Saturday 3 August 2002

MP3 Masterclass [Am]

I'm an audio junky - love it. Just neeeeed to fiddle when it comes to audio and it gives me much satisfaction to spend time in Cubase VST composing obnoxious ditties. Anyway, one of the losses in the Great Meltdown of '02 was my personal mp3 collection - approximately 80 cd's ripped from my own collection onto hard-disk. As a result now Guiness Mk II is up and running, I needed to get my ripping prog back and running. Audiocatalyst has been bought out by Real and of course the website is now a foul kludge yielding circular menus, suffocating pop-up and no fucking information of any worth whatsoever.

As a result I had no way, it appeared, of getting my key back for AC. This in fact turned out to be a very very very good thing indeed.

Lurks is insanely helpful...when he wants to be ;) .... and today I picked up an absolutely awesome set of tips and tricks from him which I *have* to share with y'all.

First out - there is an absolute beaut of a *free* mp3, wav, mpeg encoder out there called cdex - www.cdex.n3.net/. Yes free. The process is as follows;

Get CDex, next find yourself a copy of force aspi - the necessary driver behind this in essence www.afterdawn.com/software/cdr_software/cdr_tools/frcaspi.cfm. Install forceaspi, check the installation is correct using the utility on that page. Then go to www.r3mix.net where you will have access to what is frankly guru-standard information about the ripping process and mp3's - check the ripping & quality tabs for a start. This is a goldmine.

The upshot of this is a free, totally configurable ripper which allows you to code quickly on the fly or to use intensive algor...err.. ripping processes like the r3mix one which encode to a quality which is indistinguishable from cd but at heavy savings to wav filesize.

Lurks owe you a beer - that's a fantastic set of resources. And the rest of you lot? Stop using that piece of crap grabber and get out there and 'dex.

3 comments:

  1. I'm still reeling in shock that you didn't know about the DAB stuff as well :)

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  2. Don't need to read the remix site, just set the preset on the encoding tab to -r3mix and have it all done for you. And don't forget to change the naming convention to something useful. AND SET ID3 TAGS!!

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  3. Actually I've buggered off to alt-preset-standard. Expert word is that this outperforms the r3mix preset but is more costly in bitrate. Well I don't see it being much bigger, if at all. It takes ages to encode though as it's using the new VBR method instead of MTRH.

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