Well, I went kinda nuts and bought one these units after reading all about them for many days. I also went and listened to and played with my installers trunk based unit(Alpine) and it made me reconsider using high bit rate MP3 for serious listening.

Anyway, I have a small car which I am resurrecting with regard to audio and will be passing the output of the Riocar into my HU's analog input and out to an amp to the speakers.

The unit I just bought.... and probably paid too much for on Ebay, is an unmodded and relatively unused 60Gb, Mk2A model.

Should I immediately do a firmware/software upgrade on this unit prior to loading any of my CDs?

Also, although I have been making copies of the CDs and DVDs I've bought for years, I haven't recently ever copied anything to a server for playback purposes.

Since I want to use the RioCar in my car and in my primary home rack, I'd like to use the best sounding, within reason, format as possible. Should I use wav, 320kb MP3, or somehting else?

Also, I usually use EAC for my CD copies. What software should I use to rip my CDs for copying to the RiaCar?

Thank you all very much for all your help!!!

I wouldn't worry about paying to much remember these units were well over 1000.00 USD originally and many people gladly paid that.

I would encode at the lowest bitrate that sounds good to you with the type of music you listen to. Dillinger Four sounds as good at 192k as 320k to me .

I don't think you will get any complaints about EAC on this board but there have been many threads about what the best program is. I personally use the Rio music manager software that came with my Karma.

I would recommend you get and load the latest software, 2.0 on your player, and the corresponding version of Emplode on your PC. You can find both at the link on the top of this page that says "Latest Software."

Welcome, you'll have to let us know if you think that you paid too much after your player is all setup.

You should verify that the firmware and software are up to date. You can find links to the latest software using the Quick Links at the top of this page. If you haven't already done so, check out the Empeg FAQ. It is very well done and a huge help (thank you Mr. Fabris).

For the player software, you'll want to use the latest developer image (v2.0 final). This will allow you to add 3rd party software to your player. You'll also need to download the latest version of Emplode for PC or jEmplode for multiple OS. For 3rd party software, download Hijack. It provides a myriad of tweaks and modifications to the player that you are going to want.

I'll wait for those more capable than myself to answer the question on encoding. Different strategies exist for encoding. There is a great FAQ entry on this. There have been several discussions on the topic of lossless vs lossy encoding on the BBS. You may find them by searching for OGG or FLAC.

Personally, I rip using audiograbber with the latest version of LAME. I encode to mp3s at 320 kbps VBR or CBR.

One thing to remember, the player software really shines when your music is tagged properly so tag early and tag often. I use Tag&Rename and its allmusic lookup for this.

Thanks Matt.

Are you saying that Rio still makes and sells a dash mounted and moveable music server? If so... dangit. Anyway, I've use EAC for years so I'll probably just keep using it. As for what I can hear, I previously had an inexpensive home MP3 music server and I could clearly hear the difference between a relatively high bitrate MP3 and an EAC one. With 60Gb of space to fill, I guess I can pick whatever the RioCar will play best?
I am also thinking of building some sort of home system docking station which includes a tubed output stage...

BTW, thanks for your help and suggestions!

Michael and Mach,

Thank you so much. Great info.
Although I read as much of the FAQ as I could before I bid and bought this unit, I know I missed a whole heck of alot of stuff which would probably answer most of my newbie questions. Thank you for your patience with me.

I do have a history with computers, as I used to solder old celeron processors to make them mu.tiprocesser capable, and I;ve been in home AV for so long that I always do firmware upgrades on my new DVD or STB units...

I am new to the MP3 car audio stuff. So, everything you advise me is much appreciated.

BTW, I'll be using the Rio Car, not as the primary headunit in my car. The car preamp which I just bought too is a clone to the Denon DCTs which has both an analog and digital input. Of course, the RioCar will connect to the analog RCA input.

Thanks again!

Matt mentioned that he used the software that came with his Rio Karma, which could be said to be dash mountable if you add some velcro... It's a 20GB harddrive portable.

As to digital inputs - you could get a digital out for the empeg from Eutronix, see link at top of page...

/Michael

merc, like Matt said these retailed for well over $1,000 and too many here it would be the first thing they'd grab if their house was burning down!

What ripper & encoding to use is almost a religous argument, there are many good choices out there, though if there is one thing that most will agree on is that LAME is on of the best encoders - of course that just opens another can of worms as LAME has more settings that you can shake a stick at.

Welcome to the board

Thanks Michael and Phoenix.

In my car, I have to use the analog connection to my HU since my HU doesn't do MP3 or WMA or much of anything besides CD. It doesn't even play CD-Rs. That's what got me looking at the RioCar to begin with.
However, the digital output might be a cool ised for using the Rio in my primary system since it would allow me to use a nice tube DAC or something like the ackDac.

So far, I have and have used EAC, EZ CD Copy Pro for copying CDs and DVD Shrink and Nero 6 Ultra to rip and burn DVDs.

What ripper do folks like to use along with the LAME encoder?

I'll throw my vote for EAC on the pile. Congrats on your new toy.

-Zeke

I use EAC for anything with a scratch (or some whacky copy prevention stuff) and AudioGrabber for disks in good conditions.

Tag&Rename to manage/fix tags and rename to standardised format.

/Michael

Unless you have a real love of your current head unit i think it should be consigned to the bin as you won't be using it much for the next while.

Buy a seprate amp and run the empeg through that unless you already got one.

EAC is a nice ripper that works fine with lame but if you want a quick and dirty solution use something like music match just be prepared to redo it at some point but the quick and dirty will get you running

Welcome! Looking at recent ebay auctions, and guessing which one is yours, I'd say you did not pay too much. The 60GB model went for well over twice that originally (of course, for about 2 weeks it went for half that, but that was a strange time ).

I'll also vote EAC/lame. I prefer MP3 Tag Studio, though, for fixing bad tags. I believe you can also set EAC up so that you can have it quickly rip all your CDs, then leave it going unattended while it encodes the MP3s. This is very useful when you've got a lot of albums.

Also, like everyone here, I'd recommend upgrading to the latest software for your empeg and PC, though to answer the question I think you're asking in your post, it's not necessary to do it before you load music onto the player.

So again, welcome to the community, and congratulations on one of the best purchases you've ever made!

i ripped all of my cd's into wma format at 160'ish kps....i am also running my empeg into the aux in of a clarion hu...beleive me it sounds sooooo much better then when i was running it straight into the amps....i am sure the clarion does some sound shaping and i do like the individual bass and trebble controlls...the EQ in the empeg is nice...but not practicle for minute to minute tweaking.....

enjoy...its really lots of fun!

I could clearly hear the difference between a relatively high bitrate MP3 and an EAC one

Huh?

EAC extracts the uncompressed data from the CDs. It then needs to be compressed into an MP3, high bitrate or not.

Yeah... that didn't make alot of sense, did it?

What I meant is between an exact copy of my CDs on to CD-Rs and a high bitrate MP3, on my primary system. I'm currently planning on using 320kb VBR MP3s unless I change my mind or get convinced otherwise. I think that even at this high bitrate I still should be able to fit quite a few albums into the 60Gb of HD space.

edsmiata,
Thanks for telling me about your success with running the Rio output through your HU.

I run mine through my HU in both vehicles and it sounds great, and I don't give up my CD or tuner functionality.

Well, I went kinda nuts and bought one these units after reading all about them for many days

Not nuts at all. They're cool. Still the best MP3 car player available, after all these years. Congrats on your new toy.

Others have already commented on the FAQ, but I'll go through your posts and point out specific FAQ entries that relate to your questions, just so you have the easy links at your fingertips.

Should I immediately do a firmware/software upgrade on this unit prior to loading any of my CDs?

Yes. Install the version 2.0 final, developer, of the firmware, and version 2.0 final of the empeg software. Detailed instructions and tips are found here. If you are using USB as the connection to your PC, make sure to read this.

Since I want to use the RioCar in my car and in my primary home rack, I'd like to use the best sounding, within reason, format as possible. Should I use wav, 320kb MP3, or somehting else?

MP3 creation is discussed at length here. But really, the most important thing to remember is that tagging and organization is just as important as audio quality, click here and here for more info.

Also, I usually use EAC for my CD copies. What software should I use to rip my CDs for copying to the RiaCar?

EAC is great, continue using it. Make sure you've got the latest version of the LAME encoder to go with it.

Are you saying that Rio still makes and sells a dash mounted and moveable music server?

Nope, the RioCar was it.

I'm currently planning on using 320kb VBR MP3s unless I change my mind or get convinced otherwise. I think that even at this high bitrate I still should be able to fit quite a few albums into the 60Gb of HD space.

Keep in mind that the hard disks can be upgraded.

Thanks Tony.

I had already downloaded the files you listed. I also already have EAC and LAME, although I might not have the latest versions, yet

Since I think I can fit about 500 albums(?) at 256, I doubt I'd be upgrading the capacity any time soon.

Trust me, you can never have too much space...

By the way, if you're going to upload 500 albums over a short period of time, you might want to get ethernet working. Finally, you might want to consider doing it in batches.

320kb VBR MP3s

There's not really any such thing. 320kbps is the highest bitrate that mp3 will do. So in order for all the frames to average to 320, they'd all have to be 320.

In all honesty, I'd do a blind comparison. Find the one with the lowest bitrate that sounds no worse than any higher bitrate, then use the next higher step. Personally, I use lame's --preset average, which averages around 190kbps, which is a hell of a lot smaller than 320.

As you all can tell by my mistakes, I am truly an RioCar newbie. Time for another, probably dumb, question.

Since I can upgrade my hard drives to something like 160Gb, I am wondering if it would be easier and better to just do what I've done for years... that is, simply make a copy of my CDs content onto the RioCar? Even with only 60Gb capacity, I can still fit 90 albums on the RioCar. I'd also guess that this would provide the absolute best sound quality when used in my primary system. But, this also brings with it some questions.

First, can the RioCar even playback the CD's original content as it sits on the CD?
Second, would the unit get too hot from all the HD thrashing since each song would be reading much more data to play?
Third, can you put the ID tags on these files needed for the RioCar to search and categorize these songs?

Once again, thank you for all your help and patience with my newbie questions!

The player can play WAV (RIFF) audio files, which roughly correspond to what's on the CD, and are what every CD ripper I know gives as output by default.

Not only do you generate extra heat by reading more from the CD, you will also decrease the lifespan of your drives due to keeping them running continuously. They are more likely to be affected by bumps in the road, for example.

I don't think that adding tags to WAV files works for uploading onto the player - you would need to add the tags in (J)Emplode after uploading. Searching, etc, would all work correctly once you have done so.

Caveat: I've never felt the urge to try uploading WAV files, so others may be more authoritative.

I'd be surprised if you could tell the difference between a high-bitrate mp3 and the "original" WAV. Combining that with the fact that folks claim that the empeg has to keep the drives spun up all the time when playing WAVs, I think you definitely ought to go the mp3 route.

Seriously, just take an hour, rip a complex track (preferably one that has a wide range of sounds, bass, treble, quiet, loud, etc.) and encode it a number of times with different settings. You can even try WMA if you want to, but I'd be wary of it for non-technical reasons. I'm sure that you'll find a limit at which higher-bitrate encodings sound no better. And I bet it's no higher than about 200kbps.

Maybe I'm just tone deaf, but I can't tell the differance between a CD and a good MP3.
While you can fit 90 CDs in WAV on a 60gig HDD, and 160gig will hold ~240 CDs you'll quickly find that you want to load more, you'll start finding CDs under the couch, in the basement and in the freezer and wanting to put them one, but now have no space.

If you do have golden ears and can tell the differance, at least use FLAC, that will give you the same quality but take half the sapce.

If your willing to slum it give "LAME --alt-preset standard" a go, it averages out at about 192kbs or about 75megs per album.
Actually an even better thing todo would be to rip a song you know really well, and encode it into several different formats, then convert it back to WAV, burn to CD and then see if you can pick out the different formats.
No real point in taking up more space then you really need is there? Well except for bragging rights!

Is there any way to copy the same track to the same CD in uncompressed wav, 192kbs, 256kbs and 320kbs formats? This would allow me to easily switch between the different encoding to see if I can tell the difference on my primary music system.

If It can be done, can I use EAC/LAME to do it and how can I do it?

Thanks!

Sure. First, rip the track off the original CD in whatever manner you usually use, writing to WAV.

Then use your mp3 encoder of choice (lame, if you don't already have a choice) and compress the WAV to whatever bitrate you want. It shouldn't delete the original, so do it again and again with all the bitrates you want to test. I'm undecided on if you should intentionally encoded one at what you'd know to be a low bitrate so that you know what things to listen for, but it's an idea you may want to consider.

Then use your CD burner software of choice to burn it back onto a CD. Make sure to burn it as audio, of course, and not data. I'd be surprised if any modern CD burner couldn't interpret mp3s and reconvert them to the correct bitstream for the CD, but just in case yours doesn't know how, you might have to reconvert the compressed mp3s to WAVs. Winamp has a builtin feature for this (select the Disk Writer output), and would probably be the easiest thing to use. There are many other ways to convert back, too, if you can think of one that's easier. But, again, your CD burner software will probably do it for you.

Oh, and it may be hard to do it, but you might want to see if you can randomize the tracks in an unknown order so that you're not expecting certain things from certain tracks. Those sorts of expectations can subconsciusly fool you. Maybe you could get a friend to mix them up and burn them instead of doing it yourself.

Is there any way to copy the same track to the same CD in uncompressed wav, 192kbs, 256kbs and 320kbs formats? This would allow me to easily switch between the different encoding to see if I can tell the difference on my primary music system.

If It can be done, can I use EAC/LAME to do it and how can I do it?

You should turn the various MP3 files back into WAVs (this simulates their playback by a decoder), and then get a friend to burn the test WAVs plus the original WAV to a CD but get him or her to randomise the order (recording it somewhere you can't see). Then do the tests with the friend absent and, only when you've evaluated the various tracks to your satisfaction, go and find out which was which.

Possibly you could find a program to take the rather thankless part of the "friend", but I couldn't immediately find one: WinABX and friends emit their tests out of your PC's sound card, not onto an audio CD.

Peter

Just to be painfully clear, Merc...

What Bitt and Peter are suggesting is a double-blind listening test so that you can tell whether your MP3 encoder is good enough for your desires.

But I have to say that, for your purposes, I wouldn't bother doing that. I'd just take everyone's advice and use EAC/LAME to create very high quality MP3s and be done with it.

What was said earlier about WAV files was correct: You don't want to do your entire collection in WAV, it would burn out your player's disk drives and cause other problems that would make the player hard to operate. WAV should only be used for occasional test tracks and such. For instance, many people use the WAV format for certain test tones and pink noise tracks for system calibration. Otherwise, stick to high bitrate MP3s as suggested earlier.

Thanks again for all your help and suggestions. I may actually end up simply using 256kbs MP3 but as suggested, I need to prove it to myself. As someone who works with clinical trials everyday, I understand and occasionally use SBTs when evaluating components or tweaks.

First though, I need to figure out how to make the test disc???

Well, I ripped two songs and then encoded it into a wav and into a 256kbs MP3. When played back on my PC, I can tell no difference between the two. I'd like to see if I can tell the difference on my real system, but I'm not so sure how to burn a CDR so that the files remain in their current format?

I tried simply burning an audio CDR but all the files look identical with track1, track2 and all the files being shown as 1k or 44b in size regardless.

Did I make a proper copy of these files or did my burn program convert the files all into standard CD resolution?

Could someone tell this rookie how to step by step burn the encoded files from my hard drive to a CDR?

Audio CDs have their data in a specified format that's the same for every track. They don't understand mp3s (or WAVs for that matter). In order to test your mp3 files on an audio CD, they need to be uncompressed. But don't worry. Once you uncompress an mp3, you don't regain the data that was lost during the compression. You're just turning that new "worse" audio into a copy that a normal CD player can understand.

Thank you all very, very much!

After doing some relatively unscientific and quick, blind switched comparisions of Wav, 160, 192, 256, and 320kbs MP3 files, played back on my best disc player, I have concluded:

160 is the only format I don't want to use. I also had a very, very hard time telling 256, 320 and wav apart from each other. Probably, if I am honest, for the material I tested using Steely Dan's AVA and Nora Jones albums, 256 is probably plenty good for my car and also probably indestinguishable from the wav for most serious listening.

So, since I can always just put the actual CD on if I care in my primary system and my car, I'm gonna use 256kbs (with VBR?) for recording my music on the RioCar. This serves both the music server and audiophile wannabe in me nicely.

Thanks again for all your help!!!

VBR is pretty nice as it expends more bits on complex parts of the track while it "saves" bits on the simple (to encode) parts instead of using the same bitrate, however complex or simple the various parts of the track are.

With VBR you can also, if you want, set a minimum bitrate that the encoder will never go below, even if it would still provide acceptable results for that part of the track with an even lower bitrate.

You can also use ABR - Average bit rate - where the encoder juggles things so that the file size, while the encoder still uses variable bitrate, still comes out to the same size as if you had encoded it with a fixed bitrate (it just expends more bits on the complex stuff and less on the simple). Useful if you want more control over the resulting file sizes.

/Michael

Michael,

I didn't test VBR in my listening tests, but I can set LAME to default to 192 w/VBR. As mentioned earlier, 256 w/VBR isn't an option for my setup of EAC/LAME.

Is there a potential sonic advantage for using 192 w/VBR versus straight 256? I'm guessing that the advantage is that the 192vbr option takes up less space, possibly, without a sonic penalty. Is that the idea?

Thanks.

Basically, the idea is that lame can determine what sections of music require a lot of bandwidth to sound good and which require less. This means that if you want your music to come out at 192 or so, it can encode some hard sections at 320, but other easier ones at 64. This means that you potentially get the benefits of encoding at 320, but keep the file size lower. This is VBR.

Then ABR, as described, does sorta the same thing, but tries to make the average come out to be at a specified point, making the file size a known quantity, instead of having the encoder determine how good the sections need to be to fit some arbitrary (and much harder to quantify) notion of quality.

Most folks eschew ABR, as it does little more than CBR. If you're concerned about disk space, I'd go with CBR instead of ABR. VBR, though, is the more common setting. You don't know what size file you'll get out of the encoder. If the entire piece of music is really hard to encode, it might end up averaging to about 300kbps, whereas a simpler piece with the same encoder settings might average to 100kbps. (Note that those numbers are made up, and unlikely in reality, but the idea is valid.)

I'd suggest using lame with its -preset options. They will generate VBR files with hand tweaked settings to make them sound the best for most tracks, rather than you guessing or using plain-jane defaults. I personally use the -preset standard, and the ouput seems to average somewhere around 195kbps.

Note that there are a couple of drawbacks to VBR. One is that lame, which is the most common encoder, had a bug that prevented nogap from working properly, which means few people did work to make VBR files play back seamlessly properly. The 2.0 empeg software doesn't do it properly. (For that matter, I don't remember if it does CBR nogap properly.) The 3.0 was supposed to be better, but I haven't checked it yet. Also, FF and REW in VBR can be tricky, though I've never seen the empeg software screw it up unless the mp3 had incorrect data.

The 100% safe option is CBR. The just-as-good-quality, but saving space option and potentially slightly troublesome is VBR. I don't think I'd ever suggest ABR.

Yep, the idea is to expend a lot of bits - even 320kbps on complex stuff (ie sounds even better - if you can hear the difference - than straight 256kbps), and less when not needed (ie where 192 or 256kbps would be "wasteful").

I typically use --alt-preset standard with LAME with means VBR that typically works out somewhere around 200-210kbps on average, for what I listen to. Probably quite close to what VBR/192kbps would give you.

IIRC the --alt-preset stuff has changed in the latest LAME releases - I haven't had much stuff to encode lately, so haven't looked closely at the latest releases of LAME.

/Michael

As mentioned earlier, 256 w/VBR isn't an option for my setup of EAC/LAME.

Its worth mentioning that all VBR options with lame won't give you the same quality. I'm not sure how to setup EAC, but you probably want to use either "preset standard" which will give you a VBR file averaging a bit over 200 or "preset extreme" which is the next step up. These presets have been tweaked to give the best possible output by combining a variety of lame options and it is worth figuring out how to get lame to use them.

-Mike

EDIT: Hmm, I think there is an echo in here...

Keeping this simple is important to me. That said, how can I select a different LAME default other than the ones listed in EAC? Right now, I have my default set on 256kps.

By using this setting, I can simply select the CD files I want, correct the IDs if necessary, and then click once, and go to bed.

When I wake up, I guess I'll start Emplode and just transfer those files to the RioCar via my network connection.

I don't think I want to go lower than 256kps since I don't consider space a problem right now at that bitrate.

256k is also what I settled on when I did a full re-rip of my collection. I think you'll be happy with that. I still have a few 128s and 160s in my collection because of downloads, stolen CDs, etc. (I've had Steve Morse: Southern Steel stolen twice now and all I've got left are my old 128 rips of it), and I'm happy with the 160's too, but I really wish I could get rid of all my 128s.

Tony,

If you knew me from a few other forums, you'd know that I am a fervent protector of fair use, including personal and private copying of our own legally purchased media. IMO, that includes all broadcast media such as digital TV and radio, which the RIAA and MPAA is trying to restrict via broadcast flags.

Don't get me started on this...

I'm not on a windows machine right now, but in the encoder preferences, there's a way to select an external decoder. Select that option and it'll let you enter a command-line encoder. You should be able to enter something like "c:\path\to\lame.exe --preset standard" (you might have to specify some variable to be replaced, like "%s" or something, but I don't think so). It'll then pop up a DOS window for each encoding. It looks slightly untidy, but it works well.

For planning purposes, I have a very large CD collection (about 3000) which I have converted to mp3 at 256 CBR. I average almost exactly 100mb/CD.

Jim

Are you using the dll version of lame? It allows eac, to control it with the gui switches. Use lame.exe, then you can fill in an option-string, in my case "--preset standard" like most of the eac/lame-users.

It used to be that EAC only supported a few settings with the LAME dll. Has that changed?

No, don't think so. Only a few switches. That's why i recommended the exe, where you can give commandline arguments in one string.

Oh, I'm sorry. I misread your previous post.