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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, February 13, 2004

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WMA, AAC, MP3 and ripping audio

Jeff Key recently posted on WMA/AAC/iTunes etc etc. I personally don't care about any of this and here is why:

  1. I have an iPod
  2. I have a Windows Media Center PC
  3. I have a few Windows XP machines
  4. I have a few Macs

I want to be able to listen to my music everywhere. I also want to rip my music ONCE in my life (unless massive hard drive failure occurs in which case I have to do this all again). I don't buy DRM'ed music because I cannot purchase WMA and listen to it on my iPod and I can't buy iTunes music and listen to it on my Media Center PC (which is the hub of my living room and bedroom entertainment centers).

So, here is how you get the best of everything:

  1. Get a big hard drive. I have two 200 GB drives in a RAID mirror for redundancy. I have a third 200 GB drive that acts as a backup to the RAID.
    1. The reason I do this is that I've lost my entire music collection once due to hard drive failure.
  2. Using a PC, rip all your audio using WMA Lossless. This results in about a 50% lossless compression. So each CD takes up on average 250 - 300 MB of data. Lossless compression ensures that your audio is encoded digitally bit for bit.
  3. Transcode all the audio to MP3 using the Windows Media Plus Pack Audio Converter for $19.95 and an MP3 encoder (you need an MP3 encoder to convert from WMA to MP3). It took my PC 2 days to convert about 150 CDs to MP3 (running 24/7) w/o any user intervention.
  4. Use Napster 2.0 to stream/download any music I want and listen to on any PC device (Macs not included). Anything I like I and want to listen to on my iPod I purchase the CD of using Amazon.com One Click. Napster holds me over till I get the real bits, and encode losslessly and then transcode so I can enjoy on my iPod.

The nice thing about encoding using lossless is that I can transcode to any audio format that has a direct show encoding plugin (hooks into Windows Media Player). This means that I'm not tied to any single audio format, so the end result is I don't care if it's MP3 or AAC or whatever lossy codec is popular.

The only downside to my system is that I cannot purchase music online and enjoy on all my digital devices. However, if I'm going to pay .99 cents for a song I sure as heck don't want lossy music. I just get the CD from Amazon and wait a few days to listen to the music on my iPod. I can live with that for now till there is a good enough WMA based device to replace my iPod (and right now there isn't a good enough device that matches or beats the iPod).

Software
Posted Friday, February 13, 2004    Permalink    Comments [4]  View blog reactions

 

Friday, February 13, 2004 2:15:58 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I think the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra kicks the iPod's bootie. Just my opinion, though.
Louis Parks
Thursday, April 29, 2004 1:31:12 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Have you looked at the iRiver?

I ditched my 5GB iPod for the 20GB iRiver device and could never go back.

It's a *little* thicker than the new-gen iPods, but slightly smaller than my original-generation iPod.

The battery lasts 15+ hours, about twice what the ipod did on its best day (and toward the end I could barely get 3 hours out of it). It uses USB 2.0 for transfers and is significantly faster than my firewire iPod ever was.

And my favorite feature is that it's recognized as a standard USB hard drive in Windows. It supports two modes of cataloging your music... it can do it the iPod way... using a database of all the ID3 tags. OR my preferred method, using a simple folder structure. Since I already have all of my music organized the way I like it in a big "music" directory, all I had to do when I purchased the iRiver was drag and drop my music folder to the iRiver's drive.

Actually, it was a little more complicated... only because I had to weed out some files to fit on the 20GB drive (my lossy music folder is about 30GB right now). The interface on the device just lets you browse that folder structure, which is exactly what I wanted.

Prior to the iRiver I tried the Nomad Zen NX 20GB player, but returned it to the store after a couple days when I decided it just wasn't going to work for me. I'd actually planned then on getting a 20 or 30 gig iPod, until the iRiver caught my eye. There's even a 40GB model now, and it's priced the same as the iPod.
Brandon Paddock
Thursday, April 29, 2004 7:59:14 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I'm dogfooding something new that I can't talk about yet, but it's dammed cool and gets 15 hours of battery life ;-).
Omar Shahine
Tuesday, February 22, 2005 6:06:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Share a guide (convert between aac, itunes m4p, mp3 and wma): http://www.topvideopro.com/mp4-m4a-converter/convert-m4p-mp3-converter.htm
michael
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