In a nutshell, get a good card (akin to Turtle Beach) with digital
I/O, and an amplifier with digital input. Anything else is No Damned
Good.
2) The rule is 1 MByte/min CD quality audio. Do not throw the original
CDs away, since mp3 is not surely not the latest word on the
matter. You will want to do the destillation into mp3s overnight. DO
NOT LOAD the machine you're ripping on.
3) cdparanoia III is a good quality ripper imho
All of this applies to Linux, of course.
Now, has anybody digitized his private book library? I would like
to. People say it's possible to do 2 h/book.
Joseph S. Barrera III writes:
> Hi guys,
>
> So I recently had my house wired with cat-5 so now I have 100Mb/s Ethernet
> running everywhere. I also just a couple days ago started playing with mp3.
> I'm currently using RealJukebox Plus to convert (rip?) my CDs into mp3.
>
> My first question is, what sampling rate do you use? I'm currently using
> 192Kb/s variable bit rate (RealJukebox doesn't offer a higher VBR rate). How
> does 192Kb/s VBR compare to 320 Kb/s constant bit rate (the highest CBR that
> RealJukebox offers)? I know, I should just listen for myself, but I don't
> trust my sound card and I haven't had time to hook up to my stereo with the
> good speakers.
>
> Second question -- advice on sound cards? What are the best, highest
> fidelity sound cards? I don't care about how many fancy digital features are
> on the card; I do care about the D/A with high quality on the analog side.
> This may mean that the best sound card for, say, games may not be the best
> for a dedicated hifi mp3 player?
>
> I should probably explain what my grand plan is. Disks and PCs are amazingly
> cheap these days. You can buy a 17 GB Ultra/ATA 66 drive for $200 (see
> http://www.pcconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?product_id=98185). So
> my plan is to buy a case and motherboard and processor ($200 to $300), four
> 17 GB drives ($800 total), and a sound card ($100). This gives me a box with
> 67 GB for mp3s (subtracting a GB for the OS & misc). At 100 MB per converted
> CD, that would be enough space for about 670 CDs, which would fit most of my
> CD collection (well, at least the stuff I still listen to)... for $1100.
>
> Last question: what mp3 ripping/jukebox software should I use? Is there
> something significantly better than RealJukebox Plus? (Free is a plus, but
> not that important.)
>
> Has anyone already done this? (Undoubtably yes...) If so, I'd love to
> hear/read about it.
>
> - Joe