Ripping and transcoding recommendations for rookie

[fourteen]

So I am a newcomer in the digital audio area. I have embarked on my first project of bringing my CDs onto my computer(s) and studied up a little bit about a sane approach. Among other things, I read Damion Chaplin's article "My Experience with WMA Lossless and the Implications Thereof". So I downloaded EAC and the Windows Media Encoder pack (to get the WMA Lossless encoder) and used EAC to rip my CDs to WMA Lossless. EAC tagged the .wma files with artist, album name etc. Now I have ~200GB of lossless audio files as an archive and hopefully I never have to touch the CDs again.

For a couple of reasons I would like to convert/transcode the archive to a lossy format for "daily use". One reason is that I can then move the lossless archive to a different storage media. Another reason is that it will be easier/quicker to move all the audio files to different computers since they will be much smaller. And another reason is that (perhaps) it will be quicker to download music to any portable music player I may buy if the format is ready to be downloaded. At this point I think I will use wma lossy as the lossy format. I am not planning on deleting the archive and lossless files - I will keep them as a source for future conversions/transcoding.

Does this make sense - I am a newcomer in this area so I am very much open for comments.

I did try one sample batch run of transcoding using Windows Media Encoder's WMCmd.vbs utility. It did convert multiple directories of files from lossless to lossy wma but the conversion did not properly tag the lossy files with artist, album, song etc. so when I later pointed Windows Media Player's Library at the folder, all the songs were "unknown". Also, WMP was unable to automatically download some of the album arts for some of the albums. I guess I need to use a different transcoding utility that is able to bring over the tags/metadata from the wma lossless files to the wma lossy files.

My first question is about a good tool to accomplish this mass conversion? Is dbPoweramp a good/recommended tool?

Another question is whether I should do additional tagging of the archive I have, of the wma lossless files, before I convert them? If I have to do another conversion in the future, e.g. to mp3 or another format, it would be nice if I had done any tagging etc. on the "source files", i.e. of the lossless files so I wouldn't need to do it again on the resulting lossy files. Since I am a newcomer in this arena I don't know what kind of tagging is nice to have, what kind of tags is useful etc. E.g. does one use the "ratings" tag? Suggestions of any other tags that might be useful to have in my audio files are welcome. And, what is a good tool to add these tags?

Yet another question is about album art. Should I arrange to have album art downloaded into my WMA Lossless archive before I convert it to WMA lossy?

Any other suggestions about good practice starting out in the digital audio area would be appreciated.

[Damion Chaplin]

First of all, Fourteen, welcome to DMT! We're glad you're here.

I'll try to answer your questions one at a time...

I convert all of my lossless WMAs to lossy WMAs using DB PowerAmp - if I've already ripped the files. I find it almost easier to just get EAC to rip a second set of lossy files to a different location. So, if you're about to rip a CD, rip it both ways. If you've already ripped the CD, use DB PowerAmp.

Having both an 'archival' and 'daily use' collection is wise. I've said it before and I'll say it again: as long as your DAP uses the headphone jack to output music, using lossless files is waaay overkill. You'll never tell the difference between the lossless file and the 256-kbps file using headphones (or outputting to your stereo using the headphone jack).

Again, use DB PowerAmp to convert your lossless files. You can select an entire directory of files and just right-click and select convert to. It will keep all of the metadata intact so your DAP (and WMP) can read it.

The only tags you really need in your files are the ones that your DAP actually displays. For example, there's a place to insert lyrics in an ID3 tag, but so far very few, if any, players actually take advantage of it.

Album art. There's an area where EAC just falls short. I use MediaMonkey to embed the album art in my files and yes I recommend you embed the art into your lossless files before you convert them.

Thanks for the comments. Keep 'em coming!

[fourteen]

Thanks for the welcome and thanks for your reply. And thanks for your well written article that got me started on my ripping project.

Yes, I have already ripped them all using EAC to WMA Lossless.

I will download dBpoweramp and use it for the batch conversion to a lossy format, I don't know if that is free piece of software or if I have to pay a little, but I'll find out.

I read a little bit about MediaMonkey too... haven't installed it or used it yet. If I understand it right, MediaMonkey is (perhaps among other things) a media library and I can use it for a couple of different purposes. But please correct me if I am wrong.

One way is to use it to just update the music files themselves with metadata, e.g. as you mention with album art. I think I am only interested in maintaining the metadata in what I call the archive, in the "real source music files", i.e. the lossless files. Then batch convert/transcode the archive and ensure the conversion process automatically transfers the metadata as well. Although the conversion may take a little time and processing power it is fully automatic (I hope) with dbPoweramp. And if I have to re-convert/re-transcode later it is very simple to kickstart.
Although using MediaMonkey to update some metadata in the music files, I wouldn't necessarily have to use MediaMonkey as my music library and player for daily use, I could still use Windows Media Player for that. I could just point WMP to the folders where the lossy files ended up from the conversion process.

But another way would be to use MediaMonkey as the music library and player as well. And perhaps maintain additional metadata in the MediaMonkey library that cannot be embedded into the (lossless) music files. But wait... then I would want to use one MediaMonkey library to maintain the archive (with the lossless files). I wouldn't use that MediaMoonkey library for daily use or playing music, just to maintain my archive. Then I would use ANOTHER MediaMonkey library and point it to the lossy versions and use that library for daily use and play.

Does this sound about right, and if so, which way is to prefer?

Maybe I am overworking this, but I just want to be careful doing it "right", so I don't have to redo something later. I for sure don't want to re-rip all my CDs again, that took quite some time. And I don't want to having to e.g. tag everything twice or download album art twice. It would be nice if you can do it once, in one place in the archive on the lossless files, and then simply transform/convert/transcode that to a lossy version and have all the info follow.

More and more it seems like I have a decision to make about which "media library" to use. WMP, MediaMonkey, or perhaps something else?

[Damion Chaplin]

Yeah, I think you're overthinking it alright. :) That's OK though, I welcome the 'fresh' perspective it gives me (we often forget what it was like when we were just starting out).

You're definitely on the right track. Ripping your CDs to WMA lossless is the most important (and time-consuming) part. Once you've done that, the rest is just 'frosting' so to speak. After you've got nice archival-quality files, the next step is to 'finalize' them by tweaking the metadata files to your liking and adding the album art. This step is easily done with MediaMonkey (which does offer a free product). You may not feel the need to change any metadata at all, in which case just embed the album art. Sort the files into whatever folder arrangement you prefer and your main library is complete.

Use db PowerAmp to convert the WMA lossless to WMA lossy. Db PowerAmp is a free product, but you'll need to download the WMA codec for it. You'll need to pay a $14 licensing fee if you want to use it to convert your files to MP3. Anyway, I convert my lossless to lossy, duplicating the folder tree I have the main library in. dbPowerAmp should duplicate all the metadata, including album art. The main lossless library exists on my NAS and the lossy library locally on my hard drive. It is the local lossy library (gad :roll: ) that I point all of my player programs to (and what I sync to my Zune). My Xbox in particular (in MCE extender mode) has a hard time with the NAS, so I tell it to read and play the lossy files on my PC's HD (and ignore the files on the NAS).

As for library programs I'm afraid you're on your own. The library programs I use I only use because I have to. I use the Zune library software because I own a Zune. I use the Media Center library function because I want to use Media Center, and want my files to be seen by my Xbox. Beyond that, I really don't like library programs, whether they be for music, videos or photos. I say try a bunch and see what you like to use on a day-to-day basis. You can always switch back to another if you change your mind. For playing my files, I prefer WinAmp, and its library functions pretty well with no fancy gimicks. It is not, however, very flashy. To impress guests I use Media Center, preferably over the Xbox. :)

[fourteen]

Again, thanks for your comments... it is nice to have someone pointing one in the right direction.

After your article about ripping to WMA Lossless, and a couple of other articles, I realized the importance of getting a good "archive" in place with good (i.e. lossless) quality music. And I think I have that.

The last couple of days I have worked on annotating those lossless files with (good) album art. That has taken a little longer than I expected. I have used MediaMonkey for that as you recommended. I downloaded the MediaMonkey "Batch Art Finder" script and used that initially. But I still had to go over the "archive" and manually adjust the art after running that script and in retrospect I think just getting the album art manually, still using MediaMonkey but with copy&paste, would had been better and quicker. In the end I used rateyourmusic.com for most of the art. It would have been nice if EAC allowed one to specify the album art during the ripping process - during that process one deals with one album at a time and have the album "identified".

I toyed with the idea of using another MediaMonkey script, GenreFinder, to automatically annotate the wma files with genre but (for now) decided to let the genre that EAC assigned during ripping be.

I marked all my files in the "archive" read-only to avoid messing with them accidentally. And next step is to use dbPoweramp to convert it to a lossy format for daily use. Perhaps a backup of the archive would be a good idea too.

[fourteen]

I was side-tracked a little but and still haven't converted my lossless library to a lossy, daily-use version. So far I have been playing the lossless files using MediaMonkey.

OK, so although I may use db PowerAmp to convert my lossless library to a lossy version, for fun I have toyed with the idea of use WM Encoder (wmcmd.vbs) to do the conversion. The thing WM Encoder doesn't do well is copying the metadata over, so I wrote a little utility that will do that. My little side trip into Windows Media Encoder brought up a few questions...

First, (unrelated to converting from lossless to lossy) it seems like one can specify some settings for the WMA Lossless codec, e.g. sample rate. How does various settings come into play when encoding into a lossless format - intuitively I thought since the lossless codec encodes the music bit-for-bit without loosing any information, there would be no settings affecting the encoding. Does it matter e.g. which sample rate one uses when encoding to WMA lossless?

Then, a question about the WMA 9 codec vs. the WMA 10 Pro codec. Is the Windows Media Audio 10 Professional codec mostly useful with surround sound playback? And music CDs aren't recorded "with" surround sound, are they? So if I am encoding music CDs to a wma lossy format then I would be more interested in the "regular" WMA 9 codec as opposed to the WMA 10 Pro codec?

My source music is music CDs that were ripped to WMA Lossless. What is a good WM Encoder profile or WMA codec and settings to use to encode to wma for playback on a computer and portable music players?

Finally, do you know if there is a codec available allowing Windows Media Encoder wmcmd.vbs encode to mp3?

Thanks again for shining some light on this topic of ripping music, encoding it, etc.