(no subject)

[dryfter]

MP3s encoded in the bad old days usually sound rather bad. Not only were they often encoded at 96, 112 or 128 kbps, but the encoder software wasn't very smart either and didn't use those few kbps as efficiently as later software would.

After being annoyed by listening to one too many mushy, warbling tracks, I decided to write a script to go through my collection and identify all the albums where the average bitrate over the whole album was too low. (initially the script reported every album where at least one track had a low bitrate, however that resulted in false positives, due to the tendency of artists to have long, mostly empty tracks inbetween "hidden tracks", where modern encoders will justifiably encode all that empty space at the minimum bitrate.)

Using the revised script, I still had well over 400 albums with bitrates of 128 or less! There's another 180 or so which are at 160. :(

I've spent an entire night ripping and encoding my CDs, and only managed about 20 albums. It just takes ages to rip them, at least on my DVDROM drive with high levels of cdparanoia enabled to avoid scratches or glitches. I've also taken to looking for albums on thepiratebay and mininova, since it's a lot easier to just queue them for download rather than hang around ripping them!

However I just checked the latest results from the script, and there's still 385 128k-or-worse albums to go, and I haven't even started on the 160k ones.

I guess if I just try to whittle down a dozen or so every week, in slow moments, I'll gradually work through the lot in a year! I guess I'll target the albums I like and want to listen to a lot first.

I also worry that I should be using FLAC rather than MP3s from lame with preset=extreme, except that to be honest, I can't really hear the difference between the two, and MP3s are far more portable.. If I used FLAC, not only would I need to buy a couple of new harddrives to fit them and the backup copy, but I'd then need to maintain an entire other tree of them in MP3 anyway, so I can play them in the car stereo or on my ipod.


Has anyone else solved this problem (of needing to re-rip everything) before? How did you solve it?

Comments

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

My drive exploded and I had to rerip everything.

With slow slow slogging; I basically had a routine; wake up, rip a disc, have breakfast, rip a disc, go to work, rip a disc; etc, got me through around 5-10 a day; didn't take too long.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

waffles.fm will solve that issue. But you'll need an invitation, of which I'm afraid I have none.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Coming soon, the greatest recipe site the internet will ever know!

Mmmm, waffles..

[nicky-j.livejournal.com]

A combination of last.fm, Spotify and SimplifyMedia, which lets you stream from your friends iTunes.

Screw music I have to keep and carry about and worry about - a few key things on a portable. The rest .. when I want it. Until they all go bust. Ahem.

[merlinc.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall jwz making a post along these lines a few years back, complete with snarky commentary.

[monted.livejournal.com]

Interesting. On a simpler, slightly off topic note I had to something similar to identify duplicates in a big Ball Of Mud music collection that had accumulated over the years.. due to all the metadata associated with mp3 and other music files I think I ended up creating md5 hashes of the output of the sound device or decoder to identify individual tracks (which all had random filenames and id3 tags and the like) - however the bit rate differences would always get me in this approach so the outcomes of this problem would help with this too methinks!

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Hmm, for your case I'd recommend using MusicBrainz to automatically re-tag them all.. It uses some kind of magic audio fingerprint to identify and tag music, but it doesn't matter about different bitrates.
Once you had identical album names it should be trivial to identify the dupes?

[xfesty.livejournal.com]

these days I seem to buy a CD, download a high quality rip, don't even open the CD. takes less time!

[xfesty.livejournal.com]

an interesting solution might be to buy a bunch of IDE and SATA CD drives (they're cheap as hell these days), and stick them on various PCI cards. second hand you could probably source a dozen drives + supporting cards for under $100.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I could use a spare DVD drive anyway, so I suspect I will indeed be popping over to CPL tomorrow to buy one, plus some sort of 2.5" or 1.8" portable harddrive to replace the monster 3.5" based one I have now.