CD music file formats

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Fri Jun 25 03:24:00 UTC 2004


On Thursday 24 June 2004 22:05, Erik Espinoza wrote:
>Oh, I see. You also want to know how to rip. I guess I didn't finish
>reading the entire message. For ripping I use old school cdparanoia.
>It does a decent job and spits things out in wav format. Then I use
>k3b to burn.
>
>Erik

I think this poster may be confused by the '.wav' label applied to the 
ripped music file.  To answer that question, the data on a red book 
cd is a .wav format already, with no compression pre-applied to what 
is basicly a 16 bit definition digital audio data stream, and applied 
with relatively little regard for the niceties of a real filesystem.  
Burning the .wav files that result from ripping with cdparanoia 
should normally make a disk that will play in your "ancient" player.

The mp3 format is a patented, commercially available compression 
method that can shrink a 40 megabyte song down to 4 or 5 megs of 
data. And it sounds pretty close to the original sonicly, with what 
I'd describe as a bit of blurring on transient sounds.

Because mp3 is patented, and not free, licenses going for $15K-$25 to 
use it, the free "ogg" encoder was developed, and which uses none of 
the patented methods that the mp3 format uses.  The compression 
achieved is quite comparable to that achieved by the mp3 encoders.

But those of us with what we like to call "golden ears", will pick the 
ogg version as the better sounding version of a piece of music a 
surprisingly large percentage of the time.  I've tried both, and its 
the ogg format thats better here, pretty close to 100% of the time.

Note that since either method is a lossy method in that some 
information the ear doesn't use all that much of is thrown away, but 
because the two methods differ in what they throw away, re-encoding 
an mp3 to an ogg, or vice-versa, will result in some pretty obvious 
distortions, so one must start with the original material to make 
either format of file.  Those files won't play on the regular audio 
cd player of course as it hasn't the required brains to uncompress 
the data back to an approximation of the original.

I hope this clarifies things a bit for the original poster.

>
>On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 20:01:43 -0500, Bob Hartung <rwhart at mchsi.com> 
wrote:
>> Erik,
>>   That sounds great but I could not figure out how to rip with k3b
>> and found no useful information on the k3b web site.
>>
>>   Back to google.  Thanks!
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> Erik Espinoza wrote:
>> >Why not just use k3b or one of the graphical burning software
>> > packages that comes with Fedora?
>> >
>> >Erik
>> >
>> >On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:45:15 -0500, Bob Hartung <rwhart at mchsi.com> 
wrote:
>> >>Hi all,
>> >>  I am a newbie to this so here goes.  I want to rip some very
>> >> old CDs and then rerecord the songs onto CDs that will play in
>> >> an "ancient" cd player.  This player is able to play the
>> >> original CDs, I just want to cut out the crap that I always
>> >> have to skip over.  So far I see lots of references to MP3
>> >> encoding using Grip and Lame.  Also references to Ogg Orbis
>> >> (sp?) and WAV formats.  However, I see no references to the
>> >> original CD format.  Do I just rip them to a "raw" file format
>> >> , collect the raw files into an iso and then burn the iso to CD
>> >> with cdrecord dev=0,0,0 [filename}?
>> >>
>> >>  Help, directions all appreciated.
>> >>
>> >>TIA
>> >>
>> >>Bob Hartung
>> >>
>> >>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
There are 4 boxes to be used in defense of liberty.  Soap, ballot, 
jury, and ammo.
 Please use in that order, starting now.  -Ed Howdershelt, Author
Additions to this message made by Gene Heskett are Copyright 2004, 
Maurice E. Heskett,
all rights
reserved.





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