Hmmmmmm. Might be worth a look. It's not so much the bitrate that is the concern, though, but the decisions the encoder makes about what to throw away as it shrinks a 50mb file down to a 5mb one. Xing, for example, makes bright, tinny sounding music. Some people like that and don't mind what's thrown away. I can't stand it! The original Fraunhofer encoders sounded to me somewhat thin and muddy, which is why some of the other formats (AAC, WMA, REAL) took hold in the early days. All MP3 encoders result in music that sounds a little thin, but LAME, to me, does the best job of maintaining much of the original sound, especially at high bitrates. It's certainly a matter of personal preference, though, and also a matter of what one can actually hear. My brother, for instance, can't tell the difference among any of them. He went to a few more loud rock concerts than I did...
One relevant note to the Treo forum: it matters much less when encoding music for the Treo, since the Treo isn't as good at reproducing music as, say an iPod or Zune player. It's good enough that I find the practicality of keeping music on my 8gb card to be compelling. I really don't want to have to carry an iPod, and charger, etc. I don't know what MP3 encoder Microsoft includes in WMP nowadays. Haven't looked in years since I trust LAME to produce MP3s that sound at least as good as any other. It would be slightly easier to just do the ripping in WMP, though. I might take a look, but as I say I trust CDEX/LAME. Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mean Drake Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2007 1:07 PM To: Don Ferguson Subject: Re[2]: [Treo] Re: Create MP3s From A CD Hello Don, Windows media player 11 lets you rip MP3s at 128, 192, 256 and 320 kbps. The quality is as good as any I have tested. The only plus point is now there is no need to install a ripper software. WMP output is as good as LAME output (at least to my ears). You can give it a try just for a test drive. Sunday, May 13, 2007, 12:02:30 AM, you wrote: > I want none of those -- I want clean, high bitrate MP3s. -- Best regards, Mean
