B-day gift to myself and encoding question..

[hbar98]

Hey all-

I purchased a Fuze as a b-day gift to myself, and so far it is great! It replaced the aging (and slowly dying) Creative ZEN Micro.

Now, I'm not one to say that I'm an audiophile, but I can tell a marked improvement in sound quality with the Fuze over the ZEN Micro. It may also be due to the Creative EP-630 earbuds I got with my Dell XPS, but the thing is, I'm hearing things in songs that I've never heard before.

Fer'instance, at the end of Hell by SNZ, somebody says, "I broke the chandelier"...I've never heard that before! Even with the Zen Micro and the Creative earbuds.

But this also means I'm hearing artifacts in the ripping/encoding that I've either never heard before, or it has exacerbated the ones I have noticed.

Since the last time I ripped my CDs was ages ago, what's a good codec/program to use now? I think the last time I ripped them it was a mix between VBR MP3s and lossless WMA.

Thank you for your help, and have a great day!

(edit: speeling chezk)

[Lacene]

I have most of mine as 192 kbps vbr using EAC and Lame......

[Skinjob]

If you're going to go to the trouble to rerip your CDs, I would strongly suggest using an accurate/secure ripper like EAC or dBpoweramp and rip to a lossless format like FLAC. Then you can transcode to whatever you want for portable use.

If you rip straight to a lossy format then you are pretty much stuck with whatever bitrate and format you chose since you can't transcode from a lossy format without significant additional loss. Once you've got everything lossless, you can transcode as much as you want and never have to rerip again.

As for a bitrate reccomendation, I agree with Lacene that LAME VBR 192kbs is good place to start. You might be able to get away with 160kbs, but anything below that degrades noticably.

FYI, Ogg and FLAC support are both coming to the Fuze in the very near future, in case that influences your decision.

[hbar98]

Yeah, I've used EAC before with LAME...but this time I think I'll rip to FLAC (hoping that SanDisk will release a firmware to enable FLAC playback on the Fuze...).

So, what kind of media managers do you all use?

Thank you both for your quick replies!

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by hbar98

So, what kind of media managers do you all use!

I use Winamp as my main playback, playlisting and syncing tool. I also use MediaMonkey for many library maintenance tasks. Tag&Rename is a killer tool as well.

[hbar98]

Originally Posted by Skinjob

I use Winamp as my main playback, playlisting and syncing tool. I also use MediaMonkey for many library maintenance tasks. Tag&Rename is a killer tool as well.

Okay, so I've started to use EAC and flac. Does Winamp now do transcoding on the fly? I really haven't used it after the debacle that was version 3. Of course, this would be a non-issue if the Fuze supported flac (as some have hinted that it would...until the firmware comes out it might as well be vaporware).

Thanks for the info about Tag&Rename. I'll be sure to check it out!

Have a great day!

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by hbar98

Okay, so I've started to use EAC and flac. Does Winamp now do transcoding on the fly? I really haven't used it after the debacle that was version 3.

Yes, the transcoding and portable syncing features of Winamp are really nice. MediaMonkey is probably even better, but I like the simpler interface of Winamp. I think you need the "Pro" version of either to get full functionality in transcoding and syncing, but both are very inexpensive.

As to the FLAC support, this seems to be real. At least it was announced by a Sandisk exec, so it's not just a rumor on the forums: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06...sk_fuze_flash/.