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Roger "Roj" Ramsey in collaboration with Victoria "Chastity" Brooks delivers a Newbie Guide to MP3s |
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A Newbie Guide to MP3sRoger "Roj" Ramsey - Last updated July 11, 2002
Prologue Let's start this off with a blunt but honest statement: Most folks don't have a clue about how to produce good quality MP3s. Want proof? How many times have you listened to MP3s only to find them ruined by clicks, pops, skips and overall poor sound quality? Now, this is curable. There is a lot of information about MP3 on the web. Unfortunately, it's also largely scattered hither, thither and yon and worse yet, some of it is old and out of date. What I want to do here is collect some of the valid and useful information into one place, add some helpful tips thus giving you a starting point for creating and playing back quality MP3s. That means I'll be pointing out some of the better tools and utilities as well as some Key Tips on how to use them as I go. What I won't be covering is how to find or share music on the Internet or which hardware MP3 player to buy – those are topics I'll leave you to explore at your leisure. Finally, to make things easy for you I'll have the links to all the tools and resources I'm going to mention in a single place right at the end of the article – that way you won't have to search through page after page to find the things you want to check out. So, the first step on the Yellow Brick Road to a better MP3 experience is...
Making sure you have the right hardware Making MP3s is essentially a two step process. The first is using a CD-ROM or DVD drive to perform Digital Audio Extraction which I'll refer to from here on in as DAE since I'm a lazy typist. That step is commonly called "ripping" and a couple of things affect how well this process turns out, namely the quality of the software used and the hardware as well. Most people think that any old CD-ROM drive will do DAE well but this simply isn't true. Not all drives are created equal and DAE capability isn't officially a part of the specification for that equipment either. It's a "nice to have" feature and most of the manufacturers of the less expensive brands (and even a few of those who make the more expensive ones) skimp on that capability. The most obvious signs that a drive isn't up to snuff in the DAE department are clicks and pops in the resulting .wav file. However, the reasons for that particular problem aren't limited solely to an inadequate CD-ROM or DVD and I'll get to that later. So, how do you know which drive is worthwhile to get? The CD Speed homepage provides some concrete test results on how various models perform this function – just check under the Test Results tab on that site. Assuming you have good hardware, the other piece you need to do DAE is...
Ripping Software Let me correct a common misconception: Rippers do not produce MP3s; they produce .wav files. "But programs like MusicMatch Jukebox rip AND encode MP3s at the same time – why not use one of them?" The reasons to not do so are very straightforward: All-in-one programs do not have the variety of options or failsafe checks that a good dedicated ripper does. Also the quality of encoders used in those solutions range from good to very poor – but never excellent. That honour falls to one encoder I'll talk about in a bit. The bottom line: Will all-in-one software be easier to use? Some of it definitely will be. Will the quality of the MP3s it produces be as good as the best dedicated ripper / encoder combination? No. That being said, the three rippers I am going to recommend are generally considered to be the cream of the crop for reasons of functionality, ease of use or both. They are:
But, before we get to them, there's another factor that's critical to ripping: The ASPI Manager What is ASPI? It is the protocol used by programs to talk to SCSI devices. "Hold on a second - my CD-ROM / DVD drive is IDE". Yes it is but all versions of Windows see IDE devices as SCSI. A rudimentary version of the ASPI manager is built into all Windows 9x versions (98 / 98SE / Me). The NT-based operating systems (2000 / XP) do not ship with this layer of software built in but do have low level operating system calls to perform the same function that can be tapped by properly written software. Where do you get an ASPI manager from then? The best one is available from Adaptec's web site and I'll have a link to it at the end of this article. Why does ASPI matter anyway? If you're running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, two of the rippers (EAC and CDex) require an ASPI layer of some kind to be installed on your system before they can be used. AudioGrabber on the other hand is one of the applications that can tap into the operating system calls I mentioned above. It is true that EAC does have an implementation of this function as well but the author admits that it is flawed and does not recommend its use except as a last resort.
Now let's have a quick look at each ripper...
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