New to this,

Have bought a few classic Black Metal albums, a Darkwave album and a new one.

Dimmu Borgir's Enthrone Darkness Triumphant [Re-released]
Satyricon's Nemesis Divina [Re-recorded]
BlutEngel's Nemesis [Reworked Greatest Hits]
Rammstein's Made In Germany [Greatest Hits]


Don't diss my "primitive" selection, I usually Torrent my music, on Tracker. These were found at local music stores.


So I've only yet opened one, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, tried ripping it, at 320kbps, (I might consider ripping a few of these songs in FLAC, since some of these I still very much like), but it did not sound as good as the Torrent I downloaded on Tracker.


Anyone willing to teach me how to Rip these, with hopefully, a free program? If a paid program rips much better, tell me about it and I'll try the trial, and then decide.

But first, I've read some ripping tutorials a while back, and it seemed quite complex, if you want the perfect sound. You have to adjust some numerals of this and that. Read a tutorial, I'll read it tonight as I bookmarked it, on the program "Reaper", supposed to be a good music editing program. All I need is a Ripper. Willing to try a few programs, but elaborate, if you actually are master at ripping, tell me how to "amplify" the sound, or something of the genre, as I know it's possible. Just simple ripping techniques, don't go too far into music editing as I want it to sound like the original, just a good sounding Rip. As my Rip of the Dimmu Borgir album did not sound as good as the one on Tracker. Let me know, thanks.

also, why Constant Bit Rate? Some of my music sounds great at 320kbps, but as mentioned below, my best sounding album is in Variable Bit Rate, and well below 320kbps. If VBR is better, what options do I have when choosing bit rates etc? Not sure if my mp3 player plays "vorbis" kind of stuff, it sure isn't an ipod, it can play FLAC, etc, but I don't want to convert every song into FLAC, as I only have 32GB on my mp3, it's a good one. Can tell you which one it is if your help is actually useful.

a perfectly ripped album I found on the internet was labeled to be encoded by LAME 3.97 and thing is, it is only 170-217~kbps... But, I had to tone the Volume down with mp3Gain and it just sounds Amazing (mp3Gain is a program that amplifies or lowers volume, with "x" or "y" clipping, "y" when you decrease the dB's, will look more into this aswell)... Most of my files are encoded by LAME, ver. 3.99, 3.96, etc.. which are good, but I found that particular "LAME 3.97" encoded album to be better, there's probably more to it than just the version of the LAME encoder, which I know what it is, it's just like a file you use with your encoding program, to be used as the encoder. I'm interested in the specifics of getting great sound out of my CD's, even if not FLAC, files can sound great. As I just said, these are 170-230~kbps VBR's, that probably sound best in my entire library, including FLAC files. Something must have been done to them, I know clipping them myself helped a lot with how smooth they sound. Can send you this album if interested. It's Toxicum by Incubite, "Electronic Body Music", "EBM". The climax of the song "King of Beasts" is just sheerly zooming, on my mp3, after clipping it, I can pump the volume up quite a bit with no high pitch distractions.

You're overcomplicating this.

-Use your music player (i.e. foobar2000, Winamp)
-Launch ripping page
-Choose codec and rip

If you don't have a pre-loaded/preferred codec, try something like 320kbps AAC. That should be more than sufficient.

Speaking about ripping. Have anyone else come across situations where ther are a few albums that don't work in the same rip program that works for all other albums? All albums I have ripped have worked ripping in Winamp, but not a bunch of Testament albums (the first six, which are the only ones I have by them so I don't know if the others would have worked) and two Overkill albums (The Years of Decay and Horrorscope). Nor do they rip in Windows Media Player.

Make sure your encoder is set to true stereo (as opposed to joint stereo) and use rip-then-encode rather than encoding on the fly. Exact Audio Copy or Audiograbber with LAME plugin are good programs with plenty of control over rip quality (and EAC can also be used to extract the pre-tracks from CDs like Grand Declaration of War and La Masquerade Infernale)

On Windows: Use EAC
On Mac/Linux/some other Unix-like system: Use anything that uses cdparanoia as a backend

For CD ripping, the program will either temporarily store the wav files in cache and then encode or simply create a wav file, encode, and then delete the wav file. It makes no difference either way. There is no way to go directly from CD audio to an encoded flac or mp3 file or something. Audio codecs cannot directly read the raw PCM from the CD; you need to first convert the PCM to an uncompressed audio format that encoders can handle (wav is the most common one, but others exist).

As far as codecs goes, yeah don't use FLAC on portable. That's a waste of space and unnecessary. The absolute latest and greatest lossy codec is Opus (audibly transparent at around 128 kbps in most cases), but it's highly unlikely your media player supports that. However off of your description, it sounds like it probably supports Ogg Vorbis, so go with that. Vorbis audio generally considered to be audibly transparent at around -q5 (150-170 kbps). Personally, I like to be extra sure to cover any potential strange outliers, so I throw some extra bitrate at it and encode at 192 kbps, but that's up to you. AAC is another viable option that your media player most likely also supports, but I wouldn't recommend it because there's some variability in encoders and you would have to dig around and find an HE-AAC encoder if you want something comparable in efficiency to Vorbis.

Oh and always use VBR. Constant bitrate is unnecessary and in some cases may have poorer audio quality (only in instances of super low bitrate though; 320 kbps CBR is merely just a waste of space but not damaging to audio fidelity). Basically the idea behind VBR is to set an average bitrate for the whole song, but throw less bitrate at sections that are easy to compress (like silence or acoustic parts for instance) and more bitrate at sections that are harder to compress.

mp3gain is merely an implementation of replaygain for specifically mp3 files. Replaygain is an audio normalization algorithm which essentially takes the loudness of all the tracks and normalizes everything to some average so all of your songs are the same loudness without damaging the audio fidelity. Of course, different music will be encoded with different loudness, so this behavior may be desirable so volume doesn't jump up at you if you switch from an older album to a newer album. If you like to make a lot of playlists from random stuff, this is probably also desirable. Replaygain is really old, so it's supported on virtually every audio codec no problem (mp3, AAC, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, etc.) It's merely a matter of finding the right tool that will tag all of your audio files with replaygain and then finding software that supports it on playback. I believe EAC can tag replaygain, so that's probably no problem. I don't know if your media player supports replaygain on playback (it most likely does), but be sure to check your settings to make sure.

Also, replaygain does absolutely nothing to affect audio fidelity. It merely increases or decreases volume; it does not actually change the source. If that album sounds better with replaygain to you, then that just means you like it quieter; that's all. You would have the same effect by merely turning down the volume.

Right, good info, I'll look into some stuff. Familiar with EAC, I have it on my computer, just haven't gotten around to implementing it in my ripping.

I've heard great things about Vorbis, right, right when I reread your post, I was gonna say it supports "OGG", then you mentioned it, Ogg Vorbis, that's great, must be it. Now do these Vorbis files come in VBR or ? I don't understand how you can "select" parts of songs that require less compression and put more bitrates in more intensive parts, like I'm going to edit every single song I rip meticulously??? Don't understand how to set an "average" for the entire song, the best quality song I have is at about 217kbps VBR, like I said.

Also, your argument about the other program than mp3gain doesn't resound with my logic, I use mp3gain to lower the volume, never to amplify it, usually an album is consistent, in dB's, but it varies, my mp3 has 40x "Volumes", so, I try to get the "right" volume. For example, Wintersun Time I FLAC I did not lower its volume, however, Deathstars' The Perfect Cult... I preferred the 320kbps over the FLAC, as I found it wasn't well "rounded" off enough for my ears, high pitches made me unable to crank up the volume. So, strangely, this is the single album I crank loudest on my mp3 player, to 38/40, because I've used mp3gain to "clip" it, like you talk fidelity, I talk smoothening the songs. For example, the Explode Remix by Dopestars, I just Blast it through my headphones so loud, and it's listenable, because I've "clipped", assuming, the higher pitches that prevented me from cranking it up, like you know the form of a WAV or FLAC wave, people say it's more "Dynamic", "capturing all the sound", but as to listenability, and this depends for every band, I found clipping it to smoothen it out to be a great plus, I can't name very many albums I've done that to, but this one especially. It lowers the earaching high pitches more towards the mid, or mid high, but the highs are unobstructed, they do not hinder my ear at a very high volume. Sometimes you want to hear the high's, as in Die Verbannten's, you want to hear the high frequency of the flute / horns or what they use. I do not touch Summoning and their works, the production and well, the rips I downloaded were fine. Just a few peculiar albums I "clip" with mp3gain, when you feel the high pitches are too loud.

Anyway, I'll look more into Vorbis, I didn't know it was labeled as OGG, haven't checked the audio compatibility of my mp3 in a long time, never really bothered, just knew well, FLAC and WAV, FLAC is basically the same thing but lossless and takes less space on my 32GB.

Oh sorry, when I was talking about VBR, I was just describing what the algorithm does. All you do is set a target bitrate or quality level (-1-10 in the case of Vorbis) and it does the rest.

As for the bit about mp3gain, you're using a ton of subjective terms, so I can't really object to whatever you think you heard. However what I can tell you is what mp3gain actually does. When you take a set of files and tag them all with mp3gain (or any other replaygain implementation), it will normalize the volume of all the audio so all the songs are at the same loudness level while retaining its dynamics. When it comes to modern music, this generally results in a decrease in loudness since so many CDs are loud, but replaygain is perfectly capable of amplifying audio as well. For example, if you take a modern metal album and classical music and tag them all with replaygain, the metal album will have its loudness reduced and the classical music will have its loudness increased. Now looking at mp3gain, apparently the software doesn't use peak normalization, but some other method for audio normalization, so perhaps the perception will be slightly different. However, all audio normalization techniques do nothing to harm the fidelity of a the audio. No frequencies are changed. No dynamic range is changed. No clipping occurs and so on. Clipping in audio is a form of distortion and that does not occur with any replaygain implementations or techniques.

But yes, the file extension of Vorbis audio is ogg which is the name of the container.