Saving audio to the computer

[discohunter]

What do board members think would preserve audio recorded from vinyl the best...saving as a WAV file or Windows Media Audio (WMA) file?

Also, if you must save as an mp3, what would be the minimum bit rate you would save a file as? ie: 128, 190, 256, 320 bit rate.

Jamie

[BrunoRepublic]

Originally Posted by discohunter

What do board members think would preserve audio recorded from vinyl the best...saving as a WAV file or Windows Media Audio (WMA) file?

Also, if you must save as an mp3, what would be the minimum bit rate you would save a file as? ie: 128, 190, 256, 320 bit rate.

Jamie

WAV, which is lossless and universally supported. It can easily be converted to MP3, AAC, or whatever format you choose later on if you want a compact file for your iPod or whatever.

WMA is lossy (although I do believe a lossless variant exists), and proprietary too.

[Noman]

Record to Wav - There is no alternative.
Archive to Wma-lossless, Flac or Ape (Lossless formats that gives you tagging and saves a little disc space) (What you choose depends on the software you use.)
If you want to use mp3 for portable units its up to you but 192 is generally regarded as minimum bitrate for "cd-quality playback"

If you listen through a Hifi use 320kbps
This is my personal opinion (I have ripped over 2000 records.)

[canadiantire]

Originally Posted by Noman

Record to Wav - There is no alternative.
Archive to Wma-lossless, Flac or Ape (Lossless formats that gives you tagging and saves a little disc space) (What you choose depends on the software you use.)
If you want to use mp3 for portable units its up to you but 192 is generally regarded as minimum bitrate for "cd-quality playback"

If you listen through a Hifi use 320kbps
This is my personal opinion (I have ripped over 2000 records.)

And just to make it a bit more complicated, the encoder type used for compression plays a major role in the overall bit crunching. Lame and Fraunhofer (for MP3 encoding) will produce a noticeable sound reproduction difference. Even within the same encoder type, the sound quality often varies from version to version.

[djscream67]

Me personally, I am SOOOOOOOOO middle-of-the-road when it comes to PC audio because I can't seem to understand what all the hype is about.

I converted ALL my WAV files to MP3s with 128 bitrate, and the reason I do it is simply to have more space to burn them on CD-R discs. So far I have saved over 25 discs with over 3000 mp3s and each one just as clear as a 320 or 192 bitrate. When the songs are uploaded to my MP3 player and I listen in my earphones, they sound crystal clear to me, all stereo quality sound with no flaws whatsoever.

But that's just me. LOL! This is a debatable issue.

Whatever you do though, NEVER go below 128, You will notice an irreplacable difference.

[BrunoRepublic]

Originally Posted by djscream67

I converted ALL my WAV files to MP3s with 128 bitrate, and the reason I do it is simply to have more space to burn them on CD-R discs. So far I have saved over 25 discs with over 3000 mp3s and each one just as clear as a 320 or 192 bitrate. When the songs are uploaded to my MP3 player and I listen in my earphones, they sound crystal clear to me, all stereo quality sound with no flaws whatsoever.

If you ever listen to them on a decent system, the shortcomings will become *very* evident.
128kbps MP3 is cassette quality. It strips out so much of the signal, and there's no way to get it back.

Memory, storage, and blank media are dirt cheap these days. Why ruin good recordings?