Hi JayDub, You have some good positions, which are shared and expressed by others. Like you, I had some of my collection in WMA lossy originally (prior to making the all-online leap), and then moved to WMA-lossless because it was "easier". I read other's comments about FLAC and thought, too much work to bother with. And here's the big *however*, I decided to test some of the claims for myself, esp. regarding EAC because of the following:
I had already ripped into WMA Oingo Boingo's Anthology (two disc set, pretty fun I might add). I knew several WMA tracks had some pops and clicks, and no wonder, the disc was sufficiently marred (it was my fault, I left the disc on my desk and the housekeeper was happy to move it around like she was sanding old varnish from the desk). WMA was happy to rip the tracks without incident. But the pops and clicks were maddening. With that in mind, I suddently didn't trust anything that WPM had ripped. And I now use J. River's Media Center (which I think is fantastic piece of software), but I won't use it to rip, as I describe below. I set up EAC (which was really very simple following other's directions), and with one click, the rip was off. EAC found many unrecoverable errors on this disk. EAC was unable to accurately rip the disc on 4 different units. It was clear to me that WMP, and home CD players, happily do their best to play damaged tracks, and mask out errors, often inserting clicks, pops, or other interpolation. And chances are, you'll not even notice (because we're often not paying attention to every note of the music). >From a listener's point of view, it makes sense for the players to operate in this fashion rather than interrupting playback or ripping with a "this track has problems and can't be played/ripped accurately" dialog. WMP is a consumer-grade product, and is geared towards that don't-care audience. It does a fine job in that space. With EAC and AccurateRip, I was able to definitively learn that the Boingo disc, and several others, were sufficiently damaged that they needed to be replaced. Its not that EAC by itself does this amazingly perfect job - that's malarky. It occasionally reports errors when there are none, and fails to report errors when it should. The main benefit, with the combination of *very good* error reporting, track rip testing via CRC comparisons, and AccurateRip comparisions, is that confidence level in the accuracy of the rip approaches 100%. This rip confidence is missing in WMP and J. River, and I will no longer base my rips on "trust", but rather will base them on my ability to confirm and verify the results in as many ways as reasonably possible. The combination of EAC/AccurateRip/CRC track testing makes this very, very easy. JayDub Wrote: > WMA comes out slightly smaller on my tests... which isn't that much of a > big deal, but 'a' factor. Yup, no big deal. JayDub Wrote: > WMA runs in media center perfectly which is a factor. I could look at > the flac plugin as well i guess, but it's another fiddle. The WMA/WMP combition is pretty good, yet WMP, like any software, has its share of foibles. I've experienced plenty of screwups with it, its tags, auto-movement/renaming of files, playback, etc. The FLAC plug-in works pretty well, but clearly does not integrate into Windows and WMP like WMAs. This is one reasons why I stopped using WMP to listen to (and another tool to catalog) my discs and tracks. JayDub Wrote: > > WMA is just the easiest route, WMP just does it with one click, sounds > lazy but there's no reason not to take the easy route here... Apart > from the apple issues, but i could create a parallel library as you > say. > Easiest, like I mentioned above, is very relative. For me, it would have been easier had I know about EAC, AccurateRip, and FLAC a long time ago. WMP does not rip with one click any more than EAC does. You need to configure the rip settings in both cases. The default rip with WMP is low-medium quality lossy, includes DRM, and sends "usage" info to Microsoft (the latter two are pre-checked preferences at installation unnoticed by many). All in all, the time to configure WMP correctly and EAC was about the same for me. Once set, just insert disk, and click a button to rip. JayDub Wrote: > > Somehow I feel a little guilty... why should i feel that, I've never > really been bothered about open source, everyone always goes on about > how open source will last longer because it's got a community, etc, but > personally, I can't see microsoft going anywhere LOL. the tagging is > good in WMP in my opinion as well, so why do i reel I should try FLAC > instead of the easy route... hmmm? You shouldn't feel guilt in the least. If you've made your WMP/WMA decision, sleep nights confortably knowing it works for you, be happy and enjoy your music. Not everyone on the planet needs to fight every possible social cause or perceived injustice. I've given you my reasons why I switched, not to convince you or others, but just to share my considerations and experiences. A recent "glad I switched" moment was discovering that high bit rate WMA no longer plays correctly on the Squeezebox (as of about firmware 27, see bug http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3002) and that WMA-Lossless isn't natively transcoded, requiring transcoding on the server. Thus, all my WMA's were being transcoded to play correctly anyway. Bummer. Enjoy the music. -- MrC ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MrC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=468 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23028 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
