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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Using your computer for CD storage ?
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Brian Michael Weidemann
Expert cat molester
Posts: 944
From: Costa Mesa, CA United States
Registered: Feb 2004
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posted 04-17-2006 02:46 AM
quote: Joe Redifer
WinAMP only takes up about 32x8 pixels of screen space.
Yep, that's one of the reasons I love it! Just a small handful of skins (courtesy of the Winamp website) and it's all it ever needs to be. Definitely not a resource hog, either, which I suspect iTunes might be.
It won't rip CD's, though. I use MusicMatch for that. It's straightforward in specifying format and track directory ... although it annoys me when it attempts CD lookup and labels all the tracks/artist/album by itself. Too often there's a typo in a song, or something's not capitalized, and even if I fix it manually, it still encodes the file with the looked-up information tagged on.
When iTunes labels everything by itself, from whatever database it uses, is it usually accurate?
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Alexander Smith
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 128
From: Walney Island, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted 04-17-2006 05:26 PM
If, for whatever personal preference reasons, you don't want
to use iTunes _but_ you want a lossless compression system
then you should consider using FLAC after you've ripped your
CDs.
Get FLAC here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/
quote:
When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses.
FLAC has codecs for Linux, Windows, MacOS, WinCE as well as
a whole bunch of operating systems you've probably never heard
of.
Due to it being completely free to use, you can use it on your
site's non-sync jukebox, without any risk of making your employer
liable to pay any kind of fee for the use of FLAC.
For what's worth, a P3/600MHz box will do the trick nicely, with
a vanilla Ubuntu installation and XMMS as a simple player.
This is not, in any way, disparaging of Apple's own lossless
codec, but FLAC compresses to a similar in:out ratio. It's so
similar it's not worth being concerned over.
Alex.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 04-20-2006 05:29 PM
I use MusicMatch for ripping and playing, but the program has had warts that have never been fixed after many years and many messages to Customer Support. When they were bought by Yahoo, all bets are off, as it looks like MusicMatch is fighting a losing battle with Yahoo Music Engine and they're just going to take the MusicMatch subscriber list and dump the rest in due time.
I also have iTunes installed, but it's more of a curiousity than anything else. I installed it to check out podcasts, but the novelty wore off quickly.
Both iTunes and MusicMatch have the annoying characteristic of installing monitoring programs that are running on your machine whether you want or need them to or not. iTunes has iTunesHelper.exe and iPodService.exe. MusicMatch has a couple that all start with mm*.exe
If I don't have an iPod, why the heck do I need to have a helper application running at all times? I also don't need my music player to be automatically monitoring my hard drive for playable media. I will tell it what I want it to catalog, and if I want it to automatically monitor something, I should have to tell it to do so, or at least tell it not to.
MusicMatch has become such a bloated piece of software that I can no longer recommend it to people as I once did. It does do a very good job of tagging, and I really like the MusicMatch Radio (at least the first hour, which is free at the higher quality), but the shoddy software and lack of customer support makes me not want to sign up for the Radio service because it's just not worth the hassle.
Exact Audio Copy is highly regarded by those who do ripping as a passion, not just as a hobby. Error correction is important when you're talking about audio CD's, even though you would think that digital should be digital, it can be different based on the tolerances of your drive. I've found it to be pretty fast in the times I've used it, but haven't done much ripping lately, so my memory fades on its feature set.
I've not tried to do this yet, but my holy grail would be a setup where I could have my CD's ripped to a large hard drive in a lossless format, whether that be WAV, FLAC, WMA Lossless, or Apple Lossless. Whatever I use to do the ripping would need to assign the tags at this time, as I would want to make sure that the tagging was done correctly (too many errors in CDDB and other db's to be trusted completely).
From that large stash of lossless files, I'd like to then be able to convert the lossless files into a compressed format for use by whatever application I have. If I want to cram a bunch of 192kbps MP3's onto my portable player, so be it. If I need to create a version of my collection that my years-old Audiotron can play, that could be done with this ideal approach.
This approach would allow me to invest the ripping and tagging time once, and then convert the files for whatever format I need.
The problem is, I don't know if this ideal is possible without jumping through dozens of hoops. Has anyone tried this?
I think something like this would also be exactly what would work great for Greg's original quest.
At 2:1 lossless compression, 300MB per CD would probably be an accurate estimate of disc space requirements.
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Also I don't know about it being a resource hog. I've had iTunes playing tracks from the drive or streaming continuous music using a new technology called "the internet" while I've been laboriously animating stills in Photoshop, working in After Effects and lots of stuff like that. No noticeable difference. I do have iTunes on my Windows machine and it works fine, but my Windows machine is not permitted to do anything cool so I can't say if it's a different story on Windows. Try it and if it sucks, uninstall! iTunes uses the CDDB, just like the majority of other programs out there to get the track names, etc.
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