Here’s a question to (all) my readers:
What do you use to play digital music? I am currently in the process of burning all my CDs (about 500-600) onto my 400GB firewire drive. I am ripping them in the WAV format (lossless uncompressed CD format) because I want to keep them as direct off the CD as possible. I don’t want my computer “processing†the signal by downsampling, converting, mutating, and compressing or anything!
Right now I currently use the latest version of Winamp to rip the CDs and I just put the whole HD as a playlist as well as creating album playlists for every album I rip.
The reason I am questioning my method is ITunes. The theory behind it is good, and it seems to organize music rather well. I also like the idea of being able to buy albums and songs directly online and with bands releasing singles and videos and such direct to ITunes, it seem very attractive. The main problem I have with it is that it rips (as well as downloads) to only MP3 or AAC format. I’ve never listened to anything in AAC format but since they say right on Apple’s site that you can fit twice as many AAC format songs on a CD versus a standard CD, there is obvious compression even though they claim it is lossless. I will not use MP3’s for any song I really want to listen to. Granted I have a boatload of MP3s around from my file-sharing college days but anything I really wanted to listen to I bought on CD. Actually most of my MP3s are from live shows or songs that were never released on a CD to begin with. For all intents and purposes – I will never pay for a MP3. The only use I can think of I have for MP3s are if I ever get a CD player in my car that can play MP3 CDs, I don’t need audiophile sound in a car. I CAN hear a difference between CD quality and MP3s and it’s not matter how high the bit and sampling rates are set at. That is also my concern for AAC. I obviously don’t have an IPOD or MP3 player!
Also, is it possible to rip DVD-Audio or SACD discs? What format do they get ripped as?
In any event, I was just wondering what programs you all used and what you thought of them. I know not everyone is as anal about their music as I am, but I know some of you are!
I use iTunes to listen to my subscribed podcasts, although I was thinking about checking out Juice for those purposes.
Most of my music listening is done at work, where I use XMMS pretty exclusively to listen to the MP3/OGG collection that I have. I use Grip to rip my CDs to .ogg.
I watch all my time-shifted Lost episodes using VLC.
Were those any help?
Juice looks cool, I’ll have to try it.
XMMS - doesn’t look like this is for windows…the computer that is doing all the ripping and playing runs on win2k. What does this offer over winamp?
Grip looks OK - the database/submission database seems kind of scary..although CDDB by Gracenote (what Winamp uses) isn’t perfect, at least I am used to it.
VLC looks OK too but has no database for windows.
As for using OGG files, the FLAC codec looks like what I need, how does it compare to:
WavPack - http://www.wavpack.com/
TTA - http://www.true-audio.com/
Apples Lossless - http://www.apple.com/itunes/import.html
WMA - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/codecs/audio.aspx