How many CDs do you have? If you can fill up 20 GB with 96 kbps WMA, it must be in the thousands...
But why don't you buy a nice 250 GB drive, rip to FLAC and not have to worry about ripping again? :-) --- Brian Ritchie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I did it all the wrong way round. > > I bought a Zen Touch, and (eventually) settled on > ripping in WMA at > 96kbps, which felt like a reasonable size/quality > tradeoff to me. All > the same, I soon filled up those 20GB! > > Then I bought an SB3. (Well, actually, I bought a > DSM-320 first, but > that's another sad story :-).) In my haste to get > things going, I > simply put the Zen's contents into the music folder > (well, OK, they > were there already, as backup). > > Now some (but surprisingly not all) of those 96kbps > rips sounded pretty > poor through the hifi. So of late, I've started > re-ripping them. I'm > still too mean to want to rip losslessly (yes, I > might regret this > later, I know!) and chose to re-rip still as WMA, > but now at 160kbps. > > I completed a batch of Strangelove re-rips last > night (for some reason, > the original wma-96 rips sounded particularly bad > even on the Zen). > Then I settled down to listen to some of them. > Imagine my shock when > the first track played OK for a few minutes, then > suddenly the SB3 > skipped to the next track! I re-played the track; > it skipped at > exactly the same point. > > I played another track; same thing happened. > > Damn, I thought: something's wrong with my new > ripping process. I'll > have to do them all again. > > I tried another (new) album that I'd ripped using > the same process. > Sounded fine. Eh? > > It was only after quite some time that I realised > that the "new" bit > above might be significant, and wondered whether I > ought to do a > re-scan after replacing wma-96 files with wma-160 > versions... and sure > enough, that fixed it. Before the rescan, I could > see that in the file > info for each track, SS still believed them to be > 96kbps. I've yet to > check whether the SB3 was always skipping to the > next track 96/160ths > of the way through, but maybe it's not that simple. > > So the moral is: be kind to your SlimServer! If you > change things under > its feet without telling it, don't be surprised if > it trips up now and > again! > > Meanwhile, new stuff was getting ripped, still in > WMA but now at > 160kbps, and was transcoded (by Notmad) to 96kbps on > transfer to the > Zen. Bzzt! I soon discovered that transcoding was > too lossy. > (Sometimes I didn't realise this until I was stuck > in the middle of > nowhere (usually Oxford :-)) with an awful-sounding > version of a track > I loved. Argh.) So I've now hit on the idea of > ripping to flac, > adjusting the tags to my satisfaction, then > converting to wma-96 (for > the Zen) and wma-160 (for the SB3). Then I throw > the flac away. Doh! > Maybe it would be better to not bother with wma-160 > and just leave the > flacs around until (== if!) space starts to become a > problem... Then > again, changing formats means changing lots of > playlists... > > -- Brian > > > -- > Brian Ritchie > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Brian Ritchie's Profile: > http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 > View this thread: > http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20356 > > _______________________________________________ > ripping mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping > __________________________________________________________ Find your next car at http://autos.yahoo.ca _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
