If you are in Holland, why don't you drop round for a beer and a chat?

And while you're at it, are you coming to the 3rd European Owner's Meet* in June?

*This relates only to the location, not the nationalities permitted to attend

Emission compliance and crash regs make it difficult to shift them, no matter how fast they drive or how good they look. Given the relative strength of the dollar, you could always try importing one....

I must admit, this was almost exactly what I was going to say... AG (and also, surprisingly given the bandwidth limitations of the DLL they use for the compression, Audio Catalyst) have always done me good, and the great benefit of AG is the CDDB access and the ability to just "drop in" compliant DLLs for the compression dogwork.

It's definitely on par with the quality of the HSX-109 RIPs, which I am now tending to use as my comparison standard.

You can pick up a Caliber 80+4 4-channel amp, 55 RMS per channel, for about GBP 100, new. If not, I can buy one here for you at about that price locally and if you are prepared to pay the shipping costs I'll send it to you.

No, hang on, you're in NL - you could come round and buy it yourself!

Its fairly easy to change the tags in audiograbber, and it does write id3v2 tags. I find it easier to use than EAC. AG will also tag the year if its available from freedb. Download the trial version and give it a try.

Sean

There's actually a total of 6 MUSICMATCH employees with Empegs, two of us are on here pretty regularly.

I would like to address one thing about ripping. Software is obviously going to be subjective, HOWEVER, using a sub par drive while ripping will result in bad rips with any software. Also, the customer problems that we have encountered in the ripping areas have most often been attributed to operator error, crappy drives, low memory configs, and trying to rip while running 50 other apps at the same time. Use a little common sense and most software will get you the results you want. I happen to use MMJB exlusively (not just cause I work there) for all my MP3 stuff and I have NEVER had a problem. Oh, and we asked our CD drive guru about it and he said the the Plextor Plexwriter 16x is the absolute best drive there is for digital audio extraction (you should take his word as that of a God....his entire job is to deal with CD drive support). This was before the latest firmware release for the Plexwriter 24x...so that drive, which had big problems, might be fixed now.

Oh...as for getting the CDDB info out of MMJB and into another program...good luck. Gracenote (CDDB) is one of the most evil companies in the world. They sued Roxio for trying to use a competing service...you think the're going to let us export thier data out of MMJB into another app...you're a funny guy ;0)

...he said the Plextor Plexwriter 16x is the absolute best drive there is for digital audio extraction...

Maybe so, but I stil think the Ultraplex 40max is the best drive you can get. Of course, tastes and colours....

There are discs and tracks that the 40x will positively not handle - or can only handle when the DAE speed has been throttled down to 4x. I know because I have one. Perhaps the 16x doesn't have a problem with those items and can still do a multi-speed extraction.

That said, I wouldn't trade this drive for another. When you get a proper disc, it's amazing to see the speed go from 18x up to 40x - and the rip (complete disc) is done in 2 to 3 minutes.

Bruno

How about renaming it the 3rd [Empeg] Owners' European Meet?

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I haven't encoutered a single CD that won't get ripped at full speed on this drive. (though there undoubtedly are such discs around)
I absolutely love this thing! It has ripped approx. 2000 cd's now and it still performs like a champ. Like you say : ripping an entire disc in 2-3 mins is SWEET!

Okay, I take back my initial glowing review of Media Jukebox. It still has a lot of potential, but a few gripes:

1. The general bugginess of the thing. If I ever cancel a CDDB lookup, it crashes the program. This isn't a beta, so it had better be more stable if they expect me to pay to register.
2. The html ads and windows trying to sell me cd drives and everything else... this had BETTER go away if I ever pay the $25 to register.
3. The CDDB look up is no where near as slick as MusicMatch. Every 5 minutes it is trying to look up the CDDB for a CD even if it has failed the first 3 times (and I can't just hit cancel because it will crash). So I have to wait 20 seconds for it to realize that I'm STILL offline. And then, sometimes, it will erase the CD info I typed by hand.

But, I do like that it uses the LAME encoder and it is way faster than MusicMatch. The HIGH VBR files with True Stereo are smaller than the MusicMatch CBR files at 192kps. I want to find a way that I can rip to WAV say...10 cd's and then have it later encode those to mp3's and have all the tag info correct. That way, I can quickly rip to WAV and set a bunch to encode over night.

But still... if there was some way I could get MusicMatch to use LAME (which I paid for the lifetime updates for), I would use MusicMatch because it is stable, has deferred CDDB lookup, is generally a more pollished product and is easier to edit id3 tags......

So, I realized that wanting MusicMatch to use the LAME encoder is probably a pipe dream (I imagine that there a contractual agreements ?) but maybe oh well.

I want to find a way that I can rip to WAV say...10 cd's and then have it later encode those to mp3's and have all the tag info correct. That way, I can quickly rip to WAV and set a bunch to encode over night.

AudioGrabber.

Bruno

Your point about the quality of the drive is more true than most people realise - we tested many different drives for the HSX109 and discovered serious bugs with most of them. These bugs reduce the featureset available to the ripping application, with a resultant loss in performance or quality.

The end user is usually hidden from these issues and will often blame the front end application.

Rob

So what drive is being used in the HSX-109?


-Aaron

>>So, I realized that wanting MusicMatch to use the LAME encoder is probably a pipe dream (I imagine that there a contractual agreements ?) but maybe oh well.

Something like that...

yes.. it is a beta. version 7 is pretty stable. it keeps getting better with every revision though!

It's a Teac CDW58E CDRW although this has now been replaced with a new model.

Rob

if there was some way I could get MusicMatch to use LAME

As Daniel (redbutt2) said, it ain't gonna happen. I think Fraunhofer would kill us.

I want to find a way that I can rip to WAV say...10 cd's and then have it later encode those to mp3's and have all the tag info correct. That way, I can quickly rip to WAV and set a bunch to encode over night.

Check out the latest version of EAC. There's a setting which allows you to specify an external encoder. Then, there's another setting which allows you to say how many encoding sessions to run in parallel.

So, I have it set to 1 background encoder. This way you can continue to rip your CDs while it's encoding in the background. Or, you could just rip to WAV and then start up an encoding session when you're all done. I'm pretty sure EAC stores the ID3 info somewhere with the WAV.

svferris: Is there any reason to think that ripping and encoding in one step produces better quality files than ripping a bunch and then encoding them over night? I can't think of a reason why that would be the case, but I'm neutrotic, so I have to ask. Also, what specific tools do you use to rip and then encode seperately? I used copy file - uncompressed and then compress files. Is there a better way?

Is there any reason to think that ripping and encoding in one step produces better quality files than ripping a bunch and then encoding them over night?

Ripping and encoding is always two separate steps.

Your particular software might appear to do them as a single step, but that's only because it's hiding what's going on under the hood. The sofware doing the ripping is a different piece of software than what's doing the encoding. Even if the encoder software is a realtime .DLL or codec, it's still separate.

The only difference between the one-step/two-step arrangement is timing and convenience, it has nothing to do with the quality of the resulting files.

The only difference between the one-step/two-step arrangement is timing and convenience, it has nothing to do with the quality of the resulting files

Unless of course doing the two in one go causes the ripper to make bad quality rips, which you have to be careful with on low end machines.

For example when I used to use AudioCatalyst if I selected the option to encode on the fly as it was ripping it often caused the rips to end up bad (even through no ripping problems were reported).

Oh, didn't realize you could do that with AudioCatalyst. Far as I'm concerned, that's a bug in the program.

It works great on machines that can handle it. It results in the fastest ripping/encoding I have ever seen. I think my record was about three minutes for a whole CD.

I stopped using AudioCatalyst though, as I wanted to switch to a better quality encoder, the AudioCatalyst encoder is fast for a reason...

Ok, I ripped a few cds first, then had them encoded overnight, but the ID3 tag data was not saved. Is there a way around this?

Depends on the program...

I'm a new "AudioGrabber" convert and it has a box you can check that asks the program to append an ID3 tag to the uncompressed WAV file for later use when encoding (it will take the info in the WAV's id3 tag and create an ID3 on the mp3).

I'm using the latest version of EAC. Is there a way to have it save ID3 data to wav files with that program?

I don't hate you for the question, I hate you for the car.

Stupid TVR ... won't send me a Speed 12 to the USA. One day that car will be mine, whether US Customs and TVR like it or not.

Greg

Go to the UK. Buy one. Rent a container. Throw it on a ship. Send it to the US. Pay the duties. Now getting it on the road (legally) will be the struggle. You'd also want to order it left-hand-drive. Or buy it from a dealer in Italy that already imports them this way.

Bruno

Nae, ID3 is not containable in the industry-standard.wav file. I'm sure someone has made proprietary extensions, but obviously not done well enough :P

The ID3 tags that Audiograbber adds to WAV files are probably proprietary (because they know you wouldn't be using their program unless you are ripping with the intent of later encoding) but considering that they successfully popular the proper fields in the ID3v2 tags of all the mp3's I make with it, I say they ARE doing it well enough! :P

And thanks again to Bruno for helping me set it up!