[lug] mp3 ripper

[John Hernandez]

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In a situation where every device you own runs Linux (or even some other
~ extensible OS), ogg would be great.  It's not so simple if you own
hardware mp3 players.

One pretty good alternative is to store your compressed audio using an
open lossless codec such as FLAC or shorten.  Then you can re-encode
into lossy formats without additional quality degradation.  That way, if
ogg OR mp3 turns out to be poorly supported in future hardware, you
won't be forced to re-rip from audio CD.  There are even FLAC and
shorten input plugins for Winamp and XMMS (to decode on the fly).

The down side is that you can only achieve about 40% compression
(depending on the music) with current lossless formats.  It's still a
great way to archive your tunes (particularly when DVD+-R gets cheaper).

For mp3 encoding under Linux, I think the Grip (ripper) + LAME (encoder)
combo is hard to beat.  I'm pretty sure it's trivial to configure Grip
to encode using FLAC or shorten.

Sean Reifschneider wrote:

<snip>

| Hat is dropping support for playing MP3s, as is Java.  Rip to OGG format,
| it sounds better anyway.
|
| Sean


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