Mp3

JERSEYTEX7

JERSEYTEX7

Joined
Dec 3, 2005
Messages
405
A while back I posted about recording digital music. Mr. Gollnick was very helpful. Well, I broke down and bought a Dell system with Windows XP and a media center. Ok, so I recorded a large number of my CDs to the hard drive, in MP3 format, thereby using a lot of my harddrive. Then tried converting those to WMA to save space. I messed up somewhere, because the conversion duplicated and in some cases triplicated the insdividual music files. So by manually deleting each file, I have moved from 40GB of space to 17 GB of space for the music on my hard drive. I now own an Mp3 player of 512MB, just to test the waters. I like it, but dont think I use it enough to buy a more expensive model. ??What did I do to screw up the conversion process? Thanks.
 
I cannot tell you what went wrong, as I do not use .wma-files and I am not familiar with the specific programs used for their creation. But from my experiences with other audio formats/programs my guess is that, somewhere in the options, your program was set to keep the original files. Depending on the type of usage this is a sensible setting - many people will rip their CDs to large, lossless audio files (like .wav or .flac), and then create compressed versions of these for actual listening on a portable player. As compression methods/encoders improve, this makes it possible to scrap a collection of files compressed with an obsolete encoder and to create new compressed files with a more efficient program, without having to re-rip all the CDs again. Re-ripping CDs is a lot of manual work, while re-compressing can be handled over night by the computer on its own. The downside is that vast amounts of hard drive space are necessary in order to store the lossless audio files.

Generally speaking it is not recommended to convert compressed audio files (like .mp3) into another type of compressed audio (like .wma). Each compression method has its own 'ideas' of what to cut away from the audio and how to store the rest efficiently; by employing multiple compression methods the losses in quality add up. It is better to create compressed files either by ripping from the CD or by encoding the large, lossless files mentioned above.

Kristofer
 
Don't know what conversion program you used, but they don't normally delete the original file automatically as soon as they finish creating the file in another format. Most people wouldn't want that.... You might be able to set up the program to do that, if you want, but you might prefer to listen to the new file and make sure you haven't compressed it so much the sound suffers before you delete the old one.
 
If you converted everything to MP3 and then converted those MP3's to WMA you compressed the music twice. That can have a drastic effect on sound quality. MP3 or WMA should only be converted from the original .wav file or some othe type of lossless file.

for enough information about various types of audio codecs and compression etc. to make your head spin check out

hydrogenaudio.org

It's the bladeforums equivalent for people who are obsessed with digital audio.

hope this helps

Jamie
 
IMO , you would have been better off just listening to those Cd's on your PC instead of breaking them down inside your HD at all. The second you take those files off of a cd sound quality begins to degrade , although unless you have an incredibly nice sound setup (or darn good hearing) you probably wont notice.
If I were you I would buy a second hard drive , 200 gb drives are dirt cheap now http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=864919 then you could use your second drive for media (mp3 , vid etc) your main drive for your OS and apps.
The main reason I attempt to disuade folks from putting thier entire catalog onto thier pc is , one trojan , one bad virus , one faulty hard drive and you get start from square one and , that is no fun at all :D
Good luck.
 
Good advice, that is what I am going to do. Thanks for the link. And thanks to all for helping me drag my digital butt from the stone age of eight tracks!:D
 
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