newbe needs help with ripping and format choices on a sony NWZ-S764

[mtbmtb]

well my cd player in the back of the wife's mercedes sl 500 has died. it ejects, but i get the no disc message on the command unit. it's a 2003 so i have the 3.5 mm aux jack in the glove box.
i bought a Sony Bluetooth Video MP3 Player – (NWZ-S764) for $79 off groupon. It's the Sony 8GB S Series Walkman Video MP3 Player with Bluetooth Wireless Headphones in Black. i got this instead of a used ipod touch i was thinking about. I also picked up one of these for bluetooth:
Britelink Bluetooth Audio Receiver: Portable, Bluetooth Music Receiver with Stereo Output (3.5 mm) for Home and Auto Stereo Systems
http://www.amazon.com/Britelink-Blue...=5336055023-20 anybody use one of these?
i will use the sony the download my ripped collesction of cd's to.
i sort of lost touch with the new music formats. back in the stoned age i had 8-tracks, cassettes and ripped some cd's. i have an extensive cd collection (even had my dogs members of bmg) and don't want spend a ton on itunes or other new formats, so i went with a windows based mp3 player. looking at it now i might should of went w a 16GB. anybody know if the memory in the sony is upgradeable?

anyway to finally get to my questions...
i started to try and rip some of the cd's i own. i was going to try EAC (Exact Audio Copy), but it did not read the artist or track names for first cd i put in (bowie singles).
so i switched to windows media player (11) and it seems to work well for me. i went with the mp3 format. i started out at a 320 bitrate and then figured out this was going to be too big for my 8GB, i have switched to 192.
since i don't have the player yet, i'm hoping this will work ok. i was planning on loading the sony just using the drag and drop in windows.
the ones i ripped at 320 are being downsized with mp3 quality modifier.
can anybody help with any suggestions or tell me what i'm doing wrong?thank. nice forum.
p.s. thanks to WalkGood for leading me here.

[CrowdAds]

[WalkGood]

Welcome to abi, loads of great information here and good regular members, hope you enjoy

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

… anybody know if the memory in the sony is upgradeable?

I’ve never seen any sony mp3 player with an expansion slot, so I would say no.

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

… i started to try and rip some of the cd's i own. i was going to try EAC (Exact Audio Copy), but it did not read the artist or track names for first cd i put in …

If you decide to go back, the set up on EAC is the hardest part, follow the guides here once set up the rest is easy. Once ripped I use mp3tag to tag all tunes the way I like and embed album art, we have a simple tutorial here but I find their site and help files to be more than adequate.

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

… i switched to windows media player (11) and it seems to work well for me. i went with the mp3 format. i started out at a 320 bitrate and then figured out this was going to be too big for my 8GB, i have switched to 192.
since i don't have the player yet, i'm hoping this will work ok. …

That should be fine but only your ears can tell for sure. Personally I use 192VBR for portable as it's hard to tell the diff on portables and saves most space for my needs. Before you get too deep into ripping everything, I would suggest do some reading thru the forms and make a final decision. Many like to rip to FLAC to archive and use at home since storage space is relatively cheap these days but it’s far too big for portable use and really not needed. You batch convert from it to your favorite mp3 format with something like foobar2000, you should find info on that too here in the forums …

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

… i was planning on loading the sony just using the drag and drop in windows. the ones i ripped at 320 are being downsized with mp3 quality modifier. can anybody help with any suggestions or tell me what i'm doing wrong? …

Not sure what you are asking can you try to rephrase the question?


Edit:

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

… p.s. thanks to WalkGood for leading me here.

I didn’t see my “referrals” go up (only kidding), happy we can help you out …

[mtbmtb]

i was planning on loading the sony just using the drag and drop in windows.

is this the best way to do it? i see sony has their own software that comes with the player

the ones i ripped at 320 are being downsized with mp3 quality modifier.

is this what i should use. the time is about the same so i could always delete the 320's and rerip to 192

can anybody help with any suggestions or tell me what i'm doing wrong?
seperate question - help me for i know not what i'm doing

sorry about the refer, can i at it now?

one thing i have notced with wmp. sometimes the first track will give me unknown and not show up with the rest of the group in the cd folder. any ideas on that?

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

i was planning on loading the sony just using the drag and drop in windows. is this the best way to do it? i see sony has their own software that comes with the player

Drag & drop is the way I’d do it, I don’t like most included player software but I’ve never used sony’s or owned a sony mp3 player. There’s lots of sony owners here, give it some time and they’ll start responding as well …

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

the ones i ripped at 320 are being downsized with mp3 quality modifier. is this what i should use. the time is about the same so i could always delete the 320's and rerip to 192

Why not try one of each and see which one you prefer, everyone’s ears/hearing is a little different …

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

can anybody help with any suggestions or tell me what i'm doing wrong? seperate question - help me for i know not what i'm doing

Help with what?

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

one thing i have notced with wmp. sometimes the first track will give me unknown and not show up with the rest of the group in the cd folder. any ideas on that?

I don’t use WMP to rip but it sounds like it’s not getting the proper freedb titles/tracks/info. If that is the program that you are going to stick with, I’d look for some tutorials and use their help files to figure out the best way to set up the “options" so your rips come out consistent. Although there are many other great programs, most for free … look here for some of the most popular ones.

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

mtbmtb wrote as part of a post:

Originally Posted by mtbmtb

i was planning on loading the sony just using the drag and drop in windows.

is this the best way to do it? i see sony has their own software that comes with the player

In the past, an issue I've had when using drag-and-drop with my Sony players is that the year shows up as "Unknown" despite the year being in the MP3's ID3 tag. This issue may have been resolved with the more recent players. I haven't had that problem when using music management software to load music on my player.

I have used Media Go (Sony's music management software) for a time to load the following on my player: music, podcasts, pictures and videos. I did have an issue with it changing the extension on my video files when loading them on my player. Overall, I like the simplicity of the program. I can just select and then send songs/pictures/videos/podcasts/playlists to my player without the need to sync.

Unfortunately, Media Go isn't able to easily generate the elaborate autoplaylists that use on my player. Due to this, I use MediaMonkey (MM) to manage the music on my player and on my computer. MM works well with my player and it takes care of all of my music management tasks.

Although there's a bit of a learning curve with MM and it takes time to set it up with your player, once it's accomplished it works very well. A minor irritant I've had with it is that it does take a while to complete a sync with my player.

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by CDMP3PlayerFan

... I use MediaMonkey (MM) to manage the music on my player and on my computer. MM works well with my player and it takes care of all of my music management tasks.

Although there's a bit of a learning curve with MM and it takes time to set it up with your player, once its accomplished it works very well. A minor irritant I've had with it is that it does take a while to complete a sync with my player.

Good point on MM, I only use it for managing my inventory lists now but our son uses it for his ipod and it works great for him ....

[McDougal]

I agree w/everyone's points here.

What I do is rip my CDs to FLAC using foobar2000. After I check the FLAC files, I then use foobar2000 to convert them to LAME MP3, either V2 or V0 VBR. Once I'm done with everything I move my FLACs to my external hard drive for archive, and keep my MP3s on my computer and iPod.

And yes, IMO, drag & drop is the best way to sync .

[skip252]

Looking at your post 1 thing jumps out at me. You have an extensive CD collection and are just starting to rip it. Bear with me on this because this will get fairly long but there's are ways to rip your collection once and never have to put those CDs into the tray of a drive ever again.

You will then have the exact audio information that's on those discs and be able to encode it to any format and bitrate you chose with no quality losses from transcoding. That's what Mp3 Quality Modifier does. You may or may not hear the loss in quality but it happens. If you want to maintain the best quality it's better to encode from lossless.

WMP doesn't have the capability to rip at the level needed to create a top quality lossless archive that but there are other rippers that can. EAC, dBpoweramp, foobar2000 and Musicbee along with a few others do secure ripping and have Accuraterip verification.

Accuraterip can verify the audio information so you can check that you have exactly the same audio information that's on the disc. If you store those files properly you never need to rip again. You can also verify your rips against the disc using foobar2000's file integrity verifier but I haven't found a commercially available disc that wasn't in the Accuraterip database in a while now.

FLAC is most widely supported lossless codec. FLAC file sizes are large and won't play on your Sony but you can use those files in ways that are much more convenient than using the disc itself.

You can use a decent file converter to encode to the lossy format you choose in a fraction of the time re-ripping would take. My old WinXP machine with a single core 1 Ghz processor can convert a FLAC album to high quality LAME mp3 in about 90 seconds vs. 12-15 minutes to re-rip. My more up to date multi-core processor machine does the same encode in under 45 seconds. That makes experimenting to determine the quality settings for the files you place on your player quick and easy.

Each of the rippers I mentioned will produce the same lossless files but each has a different learning curve. dBpoweramp is the easiest to setup IMO. It's a paid program but the 21 day trial is fully functional once you add the codecs needed. dBpoweamp on the default settings automates most of the same setup that you get with EAC.

It's metadata lookup was the best of all the rippers I tried when I had my own little shootout a while back. I was already set up with EAC so I didn't buy the full lifetime version but if I were just starting to rip a fair size collection it's what I would look at first.

I didn't use dBpoweramp much to encode the FLAC file to other formats much but dfkt says the shell integration and flexibility makes it the best. That's a recommendation I take seriously. My experience has been when he says "best" I pay attention.

EAC properly setup comes in a close second for me. There's quite a few that are put off by the often repeated claim it needs extensive setup. A very good guide on how to that is here. The need for elaborate setup was true a few years ago but the last few times I've setup EAC I just ran the Configuration Wizard and the results tested bit exact to the setup guide. The longer setup took about 30 minutes to verify everything was according to directions. The configuration took about 5 minutes. Guess which one I use now.

Now that EAC fetches and embeds album art I use it most for ripping. I'm not sure why the metadata lookup didn't work properly for you. When I use the built in metadata plugin along with the CTDB plugin provided by it's found some fairly obscure albums the standard CDDB database didn't have.

It also found some album art that other databases didn't have. I'd try using the database options menu and changing your preferences. One thing that might prevent a lookup might be the lack of an email address. "nunyabiz@nunya.com" works for me.

MusicBee is a up and coming freeware that is worth a look. Very fully featured including very good metadata lookup across multiple databases. I used to recommend MediaMonkey until the 4.xx update. That changed MM to the point where I found it much more difficult for a new user to accomplish simple tasks. Not that it went bad. I just find it to be just slower and more cumbersome. That's made my recommendation for a full fledged music manager for MTP devices MusicBee now.

MusicBee rips securely with Accuraterip verification, converts to any common format you might want and plays your music as well as any other player available. That it does all that for free (Donations accepted!) is remarkable to me. Once I got the hang of the Tag Editor I found that it also tags very reliably .

The part I really like is that it works with my Sonys very nicely. Music transfers, album art and playlists all work smoothly after a intuitive setup. I don't create playlists with very complex criteria very often but when I have they work properly according to the criteria I've set.

One thing that MusicBee does that MM can't is deal with the files on the player directly. It's not often you need to do that if your files are properly tagged before you send them to the player. However if you ever want to change something being able to do that without taking the files off the player first can be very handy.

I use MusicBee to transfer mp3 files because I have older Sonys. Everything but the Date tag transfers with mp3 files when I drag and drop mp3 file to those. When I use AAC files, mp4 or m4a, all the metadata transfers with drag and drop. Other members have told me that's been fixed on all formats with the newer players so if your mp3 files are properly tagged you should be able to drag any type files to your Sony and have all the info show up.

I haven't forgotten foobar2000. I can't, it's what I use to deal with my music files more than all the others put together.

It does all my converting and when I don't use EAC to rip I use the foobar2000 Converter component to rip. The results are the same as every other secure ripper. The ability to use foobar2000's Title formatting to move, rename and copy files using presets make it the only tool I use to move and organize my music files.

The one thing foobar2000 doesn't do is address a player in MTP. It needs a drive letter to work with. Sonys mount as MTP players by default in Windows so I can't use it for file transfers to them. I use it for everything else including tagging and embedding album art. Then just drag and drop the files on the player or use MusicBee for the transfer.

BTW Sonys can be made to work in MSC. The playlists need files transferred in MTP so that doesn't work very well for me. I like my playlists.

Even if I use a secure ripper that tags well I always use a good tagging app to check those tags. MP3Tag serves that purpose for me. It's been very, very rare that I've found any problems but the few times I have the few minutes I've spent checking with MP3Tag have saved me from headaches I used to have before I started cross checking. Since I starting checking the never information on my portable players and my PC library is always the same which makes keeping things in sync simple.

Told you to bear with me, didn't I?

You asked if 192 kbps mp3 files ripped with WMP were OK. My answer would be they're probably just fine as far as audio quality is concerned but they aren't the best overall choice. Files encoded using the LAME encoder from your secure lossless rips would be a much better choice to me.

WMP encoded files probably will sound the same at that high a bitrate but they won't be gapless. Gapless isn't a concern on a Sony player, they only play .wav files gaplessly. However if you ever use a decent media player on your PC you'll get the same experience as the CD if your files are encoded gapless. If you have any live CDs or something like Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon it can make a real difference.

Even more important is that LAME settings are based on quality not bitrate. That means that files of comparable quality will almost always be smaller using LAME. I've found that depending on the complexity of the music encoded the files can be significantly smaller and sound every bit as good.

The Variable Bitrate (VBR) files LAME produces will have a constant quality. The Constant Bitrate (CBR) files the FhG encoder in WMP produces will have a predictable file size but the quality will vary. The LAME encoder will usually produce a smaller file at a more consistent quality. If you want better quality at a smaller file size LAME is the way to go.

The quality setting you use is best determined using your ears. You could also just go with the recommended guidelines. You can go with the quiet listening recommendation

-V0 (~245 kbps), -V1 (~225 kbps), -V2 (~190 kbps) or -V3 (~175 kbps

or the portable recommendations,

-V4 (~165 kbps), -V5 (~130 kbps) or -V6 (~115 kbps)

The highest setting -V0 (~245 kbps), is almost certainly overkill. The lowest setting, -V6 (~115 kbps), may be too low. -V2 (~190 kbps) is usually accepted as being perceptually transparent but still may be more than what you need to be hearing the same as the lossless source.

There's a way to find what setting is right for you using your ears and equipment if you care to do that. foobar2000 has a ABX Comparator component you could use to find what's right for you. It's fairly easy to set up and use and let's you determine using your ears and equipment what works best for you.

You could spend a bit of time with ABX testing but if WMP 192 kbps files sound good to you and the file sizes are right you won't go wrong with just using the LAME -V2 quality based preset.

Wow, wrote a real wall-o-print there didn't I? I'll try to summarize.

I would rip to lossless with a secure ripper. Using those archive quality files I would encode to LAME files at a quality setting that is transparent to my ears. I'd then experiment to check if all the metadata transfers to the player with simple drag and drop.

If it doesn't I'd use MusicBee to transfer the files. If I wanted playlists I'd make them with MusicBee or by right clicking on the files and folders in Windows Explorer. That should bring up a context menu that includes "Create Playlist". Name that playlist and you can add files, remove files or change the song order in Explorer. A MTP enabled music app, MusicBee, MediaMonkey etc. can also edit those playlists.

I no doubt make it sound more complex that what it actually is. Once you get started with it's not bad as long as you establish a flow that results in the file types and quality you prefer. The choices in software are wide enough to create your lossless archive fairly easily. As you're doing that you can use those files to make your decisions on how to load the player without slowing down to rip the files again.

For me the core of it is to create a lossless archive so you never have to rip again. Then you can encode to whatever format you chose in the future without quality losses due to transcoding.

---BTW, I've changed your thread title to something others can find in the future---

[McDougal]

Wow....impressive post, skip252! You explained it much better than I could ...

My advice to the OP now is to just use -V2, and MusicBee (forgot about that). In fact....-V2 should sound better than 192kbps WMP.

You may also want to consider fre:ac for your coding needs. It's completely free, will rip to FLAC (make sure to enable cdparanoia mode), and convert to LAME MP3 (the codec is included).

Good luck!

[skip252]

I'd like to clarify one point. dfkt said that dBpoweramp was best as a converter. AFAIK EAC is still his ripper of choice. I'm pretty sure if that changes he'll make that known.

[McDougal]

Having nothing else to do the other day......I spent quite a lot of time trying to see if I could hear the difference between music at -V2 and -V0.

I did not do this as an ABX test, I simply listened to both settings on all the equipment I have. Surprisingly.....even with more complex music, I couldn't guess the difference between the two presets.

So.....I spent the time to re-encode (from FLAC, of course) all the music I had in -V0 to -V2.

I have saved some significant space on my iPod (even though my collection is small), and now have settled on -V2 as my preferred setting.

Of course, I'll still accept higher quality downloads (256 Amazon or iTunes)....but for my own rips, -V2 only .

[skip252]

You sure you want to get me started to typing again?

I'll just say the recommended settings for transparency aren't just for "good enough". The people that put those together mean just that. Transparent to the lossless source.

I've found that all the quality rippers and converters are usually set to those recommendations as the default. You can set your folder and file naming to what you want and leave the encoder settings on the defaults and be very confident the results will be almost always be indistinguishable from the original disc. That setting in foobar2000 -V2 for mp3 files.

[McDougal]

lol now I think that Amazon MP3 and iTunes should switch their content to -V2.

Of course that's not going to happen ......

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Originally Posted by McDougal

lol now I think that Amazon MP3 and iTunes should switch their content to -V2.

Of course that's not going to happen ......

If there's enough demand, why wouldn't they?

[trip^]

great post, skip252!
thx a lot for your effort.