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What Do I Need?

Another way to put it, is that there are two ways to make a digital audio file smaller: lossy compression and lossless compression. It's a matter of terminology... Anything that makes the data file size smaller is "compression." But only lossless compression will let you restore the original data unchanged. However, you can shrink a file much smaller with lossy compression, e.g. low-bitrate MP3.
 
So, you want analogies?

WMAL = 400 pound fat lady greased up so 5 guys can get her stuffed into a phone booth. When they take her out, she's still 400 pounds, and eats the same amount daily.

MP3 = 400 pound fat lady with various limbs, and protruding objects removed via machete, so one guy can put her in a phone booth. When he takers her out, all the parts are still missing, smells bad, and won't eat ever again.

Rope
 
I'll be on my deathbed and I will still remember that analogy...
 
I would be concerned that you are getting a lossless recording. What is the bit rate of the final recording? Some older recordings ported to cd tend to have lower bit rates and smaller file sizes, but I have never seen a 3 to 1 compression scheme that was lossless.
Rob
 
Huey said:
I would be concerned that you are getting a lossless recording. What is the bit rate of the final recording? Some older recordings ported to cd tend to have lower bit rates and smaller file sizes, but I have never seen a 3 to 1 compression scheme that was lossless.
Rob
Click to expand...

That's about what I get from FLAC... a 750MB CD usually goes down to maybe 300MB. Varies a little; maybe not quite 3 to 1 but close.
 
PaulyT said:
Huey said:
I would be concerned that you are getting a lossless recording. What is the bit rate of the final recording? Some older recordings ported to cd tend to have lower bit rates and smaller file sizes, but I have never seen a 3 to 1 compression scheme that was lossless.
Rob
Click to expand...

That's about what I get from FLAC... a 750MB CD usually goes down to maybe 300MB. Varies a little; maybe not quite 3 to 1 but close.
Click to expand...

I just checked a few of mine, and they are all at least 350mb to as high as 472mb for one that I checked. I could be wrong, but I would guess most commercial cd's are 700mb, although I'm not positive on that. I'm using level 8 for compression, which is supposed to take the longest, but leave the smallest lossless flac file.
Rob
 
I get between approximately 3:1 and 1.5:1 depending on the complexity of the content. Music which has lots of silence in it or music with lots of long repetition (dance music) tends to compress better than music which is non-repetitive or varies greatly.

The Lossless compression technique is about looking for repeating patterns in the data file and replacing them with a shorter description - like instead of having 88,200 bytes of all zeros representing one second of stereo silence, it can have just a few bytes that say, "Repeat an all 0 byte 88,200 times".
 
Huey said:
I just checked a few of mine, and they are all at least 350mb to as high as 472mb for one that I checked. I could be wrong, but I would guess most commercial cd's are 700mb, although I'm not positive on that. I'm using level 8 for compression, which is supposed to take the longest, but leave the smallest lossless flac file.
Rob
Click to expand...


700MB is the max amount of space you can get on a CD/CDR. That equates to about 80 minutes. Most albums probably still clock in at around the 60-70 minute mark, so if Zing is ripping CDs that come out below 350MB in WMAL, that's completely normal. Smaller sized albums will be smaller sized files when it's said and done.

I've got a few CDs that are 300MB and smaller in size after ripping/encoding to Flac and I leave my compression at 5 (the default). I average about 2-2.5 CDs per GB, sometimes 3 per GB depending on the album.
 
May depend on software... I've not heard of a PC SACD reader though I suppose it could exist somewhere; but if course if the SACD is a hybrid with a CD layer, you can rip it same as a regular CD.
 
PaulyT said:
...but if course if the SACD is a hybrid with a CD layer, you can rip it same as a regular CD.
Click to expand...
That's what I meant. It seems I can extract the 2-channel stereo tracks from SACDs but not the 2-channel tracks from DVD-As.
 
If your SACD's are hybid, you'll have no problem ripping the stereo track. The only way it's possible with DVD-A is DualDisc.

Rope
 
I had no problems ripping the CD layer on all my SACD Hybrids. I don't own any Dual Discs (DVD-A on one side, CD on the other), but I had no luck at all trying to copy a friend of mine's velvet Revolver DD. The CD layer would not play in any of my players or computer.


What a piece of shit that format was.
 
It's official: I HATE RIPPING CDs! :angry-cussingblack: It's no wonder why you guys get angry when you have to re-rip your collection!

I'm about 80-85% complete which translates to 370 different artists on 757 CDs for a total of 248 GB and I've got about 200 discs left to rip.
 
Best thing to do is take a break and enjoy what you have. I have about 1500 CDs and maybe have about 800 of those ripped. When I get tired of it, I take a break. When I do come across something I want to hear that's not yet been added to my collection, then I at least try to rip it along with 3-4 other discs. Sometimes that along gets me in the mood to try to knock out a few more discs.

Some can force themselves to rip their entire collection because they want to hurry and get it done. I have to have breaks or I get frustrated.
 
Yesfan70 said:
Some can force themselves to rip their entire collection because they want to hurry and get it done.
Click to expand...
That's me. I set a goal of rippping an entire shelf in one day. Once that shelf of CDs has been ripped, I think "If I rip a few more, that's a few less to rip tomorrow". Once those few are done, I think "If I rip a few more..."
 
LOL!, I'm right the opposite. I'll try to do 50-100, then I'm don't want to mess with it for a while unless I want to hear a disc I've yet to rip. Then it's like, "since I'm ripping this CD, might as well rip another 30-40 discs."
 
Pauly pointed out that I haven't been posting much. Since I'm sitting at my PC trying to accomodate him, I may as well do some ripping.
 
Or is that...since I'm ripping CDs, I may as well post a few things and make Pauly happy in the process.
 
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