Hello,
I've been ripping to uberstandard flac and mp3 (http://www.uberstandard.org) for years now and am very happy with the results.
How does the vortexbox ripping compare in terms of ripping and encoding diligence?
Which version of lame does it use and can this be freely chosen?
Many thanks for sharing.
regards.
Ralf
Hi Ralf,
What is the question?
Does Vortexbox make better flac or mp3 files? No it makes the same.
Flac and MP3 are ripped to the standard you set, you can do the same process with a dozen of more different tools on a Mac, Windows or Linux platform and it would be difficult to tell them apart (from an audio perspective is they all use the same settings). If you make an MP3 at 128k and on at 320k then yes big difference. Lame is a tool for doing this and works on a number of platforms. The one you are using is going to be almost the same as the one used in Linux.
The concept behind the platform is to make it simple to store your music, use tools like Sonos, Logitech and others to play music.
It has a number of delivery systems built into it like DAAP, DLNA and acts as a file store for the music for other players.
It will turn an oldish PC into a new music/file server, add it to a new ITX-Mini based PC and it offer a nice quiet compact music deleivery system.
It rips a CD, you know it will rip it well and little else is going on, unlike Windows it sits their and works, it does little else.
Its free to download and use! Just need a PC!
No-one is forcing you but you are clearly interested, so download and burn the ISO, find a PC with a suitable sized drive that works and try installing it!
Then once up and running copy your music to it and give it a go, try ripping some CD's you have and compare file sizes etc, look at the simple to use web interface.
Have fun!
Cheers,
James
Ralf,
I was also using the same method as you for ripping of CDs (EAC/lame) on my notebook. Then I purchased the VortexBox appliance and I am very pleased with it. In my (not really High-end but very decend system) there is no audible difference between songs ripped with EAC or the VBA.
When ripping CDs the appliance used cdparanoia so you don't have to worry about quality. It's using the latest lame for mp3 encoding and yes you can configure options for it. And for flac encoding it uses flac tools available under Linux.
As James suggested the best thing to do is to try it out on an old PC - if you like what you hear you can get the VB appliance or install it on some other HW. Of course the best sound you can get is using an external USB DAC to feed the amplifier.
Regards,
Andrej
Thank you both.
My concern really comes down to how the CDs are ripped.
In my experience EAC will lift every single bit of each CD when asked to do so, whereas other ripping tools seem to zoom through the CDs in a matter of seconds and not deliver the same results.
Having now read up on cdparanoia I am confident in the vortexbox's ripping capabilities..
I get that once I have the extracted audio wav the audio quality of lossy or lossless compression is then up to the settings I chose.
Am I able to chose which version of Lame I like?
Many thanks,
Ralf
No, We use Lame 3.98.4 and that's the only version avalible for VortexBox.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks