Need a good media player, ripping to Flac etc

Justin · Feb 5, 2007

Itunes seems pretty limited. Anyone know a really good media player?
I would like to be able to:

-Play mp3, aiff, wav, flac, ape
-Rip CDs to flac, including getting the album details from the net (like itunes does)
-If possible, arrange my music myself in folders and subfolders, so I can easily access different genres, search well for the albums, and be able to copy them to other locations.
-Not have to copy everything I play (like itunes does! When it copies it to itunes library!)

Hope someone knows a good one!
Thanks!
Justin

Stretch · Feb 5, 2007

Songbird will play Flac, not sure how well it does the other things though.

NanoBite · Feb 5, 2007

Justin said:
Itunes seems pretty limited. Anyone know a really good media player?
I would like to be able to:

-Play mp3, aiff, wav, flac, ape
-Rip CDs to flac, including getting the album details from the net (like itunes does)
-If possible, arrange my music myself in folders and subfolders, so I can easily access different genres, search well for the albums, and be able to copy them to other locations.
-Not have to copy everything I play (like itunes does! When it copies it to itunes library!)

Hope someone knows a good one!
Thanks!
Justin

I found this reply to a similiar thread

Justin · Feb 5, 2007

StretchR said:
Songbird will play Flac, not sure how well it does the other things though.

Does anyone have experience with this program Songbird? Any complaints? And it says on their site "Scan Your Computer for Music
Songbird will find your music and add it to your collection for you." Does anyone know if by "adding" it means it actually copies it to your library (like itunes does) or whether it does not need to copy or move it?

Thanks!
Justin

Stretch · Feb 5, 2007

No idea, I haven't used it.

Justin · Feb 5, 2007

Pulse-8 said:
I found this reply to a similiar thread

[ link says "Unfortunately no. Your options are to play it in VLC, Cog (my personal choice)[...]"]

What do people think of FLAC then? I am new to Macs, and just thought FLAC would be better than the apple lossless format because it is free, and maybe easier for people with PCs etc?

As for COG, I do use it to play .ape files. Unfortunately it crashes very frequently. At the moment I have been using VLC for playing FLAC, but it can't play .ape. So I really want one program that can do everything.
Justin

trpnmonkey41 · Feb 5, 2007

Justin said:
[ link says "Unfortunately no. Your options are to play it in VLC, Cog (my personal choice)[...]"]

What do people think of FLAC then? I am new to Macs, and just thought FLAC would be better than the apple lossless format because it is free, and maybe easier for people with PCs etc?

As for COG, I do use it to play .ape files. Unfortunately it crashes very frequently. At the moment I have been using VLC for playing FLAC, but it can't play .ape. So I really want one program that can do everything.
Justin

I am somewhat of an audiophile and I cannot tell the difference between listening to a song on a CD, or Flac of that same song when compared to the song ripped with LAME -v0 encoding (http://lame.sourceforge.net/links.php)

I use FLAC for backing up my albums but in terms of listening I don't see enough of an advantage to use it for everyday listening.

You can set iTunes to not copy files to the library but it really is most convenient to just let iTunes organize all of your music, copy the music to the library (just delete the files that you imported into iTunes), and you just handle all of the ID3 tags within iTunes. If you let iTunes do everything you will never have to look at the folder structure of how iTunes catalogs the files because everything can be searched for very easily within iTunes

I recommend using iTunes-LAME encoder (http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/) updating it to LAME 3.97 (http://alpharuin.blogspot.com/2006/01/guide-itunes-lame-correct-way.html)

NanoBite · Feb 6, 2007

I downloaded iTunes Lame encoder but .... oops .... it's a lil' bit advanced for me ... it's in my App folder but I don't think iTunes and it are on talking terms ...

Justin · Feb 6, 2007

trpnmonkey41 said:
I am somewhat of an audiophile and I cannot tell the difference between listening to a song on a CD, or Flac of that same song when compared to the song ripped with LAME -v0 encoding (http://lame.sourceforge.net/links.php)

I use FLAC for backing up my albums but in terms of listening I don't see enough of an advantage to use it for everyday listening.

You can set iTunes to not copy files to the library but it really is most convenient to just let iTunes organize all of your music, copy the music to the library (just delete the files that you imported into iTunes), and you just handle all of the ID3 tags within iTunes. If you let iTunes do everything you will never have to look at the folder structure of how iTunes catalogs the files because everything can be searched for very easily within iTunes

I recommend using iTunes-LAME encoder (http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/) updating it to LAME 3.97 (http://alpharuin.blogspot.com/2006/01/guide-itunes-lame-correct-way.html)

What is LAME -v0 encoding? I followed the link but couldn't find it. Is it a kind of mp3? What is the compression rate?
The audiophiles I am used to hearning from think that CD quality is too poor! They prefer the higher quality if vinyl played on good equipment.

As for the way itunes organises the music, I don't like to search for music. The reason is, like that I will only find what I am looking for! And I don't know what I've got, so I can't find what I don't search for.

Rather, I prefer to put everything in a tree-like structure of folders (i.e. genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres etc.), eg.

Classical>Western classical>Early>Medieval
>Renaissance
>Baroque
>Early
>Claudio Monteverdi
>Gregorio Allegri
>Girolamo Frescobaldi
>Middle
>Late
>Classical
>Romantic
>Modern>US
>English
>Eastern European
>Persian>Iranian
>Afgani

And so on.
Does itunes let you do that? I have not been able to make it do that so far.
The thing is, if I just create the folders myself in an ordinary folder (eg in my desktop) then I can do it fine. But, is there any actual media player which would let me navigate like that, you know, like how you can navigate folders in finder, or the tree-like folder navigation available on windows or linux?

Thanks!
Justin

[EDIT] My nicely displayed diagram of folders, subfolder, subsubfolders, appears ruined here. For some reason the forum has deleted all of the blank spaces! I will have to give another way to try to get the message across!

Justin · Feb 6, 2007

Another try to show you what I mean about the folders.

Classical>Western classical>Early>Medieval
...............................................>Renaissance
................................................>Baroque
..............................................................>Early
........................................................................>Claudio Monteverdi
........................................................................>Gregorio Allegri
........................................................................>Girolamo Frescobaldi
............................................................>Middle
............................................................>Late
................................................>Classical
................................................>Romantic
....................................>Modern>US
................................................>English
................................................>Eastern European
.............>Persian>Iranian
.........................>Afghani

trpnmonkey41 · Feb 6, 2007

Justin said:
What is LAME -v0 encoding? I followed the link but couldn't find it. Is it a kind of mp3? What is the compression rate?
The audiophiles I am used to hearning from think that CD quality is too poor! They prefer the higher quality if vinyl played on good equipment.

As for the way itunes organises the music, I don't like to search for music. The reason is, like that I will only find what I am looking for! And I don't know what I've got, so I can't find what I don't search for.

Rather, I prefer to put everything in a tree-like structure of folders (i.e. genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres etc.), eg.

Classical>Western classical>Early>Medieval
>Renaissance
>Baroque
>Early
>Claudio Monteverdi
>Gregorio Allegri
>Girolamo Frescobaldi
>Middle
>Late
>Classical
>Romantic
>Modern>US
>English
>Eastern European
>Persian>Iranian
>Afgani

And so on.
Does itunes let you do that? I have not been able to make it do that so far.
The thing is, if I just create the folders myself in an ordinary folder (eg in my desktop) then I can do it fine. But, is there any actual media player which would let me navigate like that, you know, like how you can navigate folders in finder, or the tree-like folder navigation available on windows or linux?

Thanks!
Justin

[EDIT] My nicely displayed diagram of folders, subfolder, subsubfolders, appears ruined here. For some reason the forum has deleted all of the blank spaces! I will have to give another way to try to get the message across!

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME this wiki gives you a decent idea on how it encodes. I use -V 0 --vbr-new which is a variable bit rate and comes in around 245kbps. I did 100 blind tests and only on one test was I able to tell which was the CD and which was the mp3 that was ripped (there was a bit of a click from a bad rip). And of course any audiophile would prefer to listen to a vinyl on a quality hi-fi set, but we are talking about listening to music on your computer.

As for your categorization issues you can create folders and subfolders of playlists or smart playlists to divide your music up if you need to

Justin · Feb 6, 2007

trpnmonkey41 said:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME this wiki gives you a decent idea on how it encodes. I use -V 0 --vbr-new which is a variable bit rate and comes in around 245kbps. I did 100 blind tests and only on one test was I able to tell which was the CD and which was the mp3 that was ripped (there was a bit of a click from a bad rip). And of course any audiophile would prefer to listen to a vinyl on a quality hi-fi set, but we are talking about listening to music on your computer.

As for your categorization issues you can create folders and subfolders of playlists or smart playlists to divide your music up if you need to

As for sound quality - I am looking for a way to deal with my audio files that will not become outdated. So if I use compressed mp3 now with my computer, lets say I get a decent digital to analogue converter in the future, I want all the audio files I have been accumulating to be worth using with the new equipment. Like it says on the page you linked to, "However, 'archiving' music using a lossy format like MP3 is never recommended – no matter how transparent the resulting files might be. The alternative is to use Lossless formats like WavPack, FLAC etc. that allow true archiving bit for bit like on original CD."

Then as for the subfolders of playlists, and smart playlists, which programs can do that? For example, in itunes I tried to drag a track from my desktop into a playlist in itunes and it simply didn't do anything! It wouldn't go in! If I can't drag and drop folders containing albums, or containing subfolders, then how should I do it? If it is a case of opening every file and editing some tag or something, that is certainly way too time consuming and clumsy for my purposes.

Is there any program where I can just drag and drop and easily arrange my folder structure?

Thanks!
Justin

trpnmonkey41 · Feb 6, 2007

I don't use mp3 for archiving. I have an external drive with all of my CD's archived in FLAC in case I lose the CD's, so I can burn a perfect bit for bit copy.

I listen to music on my computer using a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pro's and I can tell the difference between the original source and AAC / regular MP3s at 256kbps but I have not yet found anything that I have encoded with lame v0 where the quality isn't almost perfect

You can see from my picture that I can drag an audio file (straight from my desktop) onto a playlist in iTunes and it would add it to the playlist without having to alter any tags

Justin · Feb 6, 2007

trpnmonkey41 said:
I don't use mp3 for archiving. I have an external drive with all of my CD's archived in FLAC in case I lose the CD's, so I can burn a perfect bit for bit copy.

I listen to music on my computer using a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pro's and I can tell the difference between the original source and AAC / regular MP3s at 256kbps but I have not yet found anything that I have encoded with lame v0 where the quality isn't almost perfect

You can see from my picture that I can drag an audio file (straight from my desktop) onto a playlist in iTunes and it would add it to the playlist without having to alter any tags

Why not use Vorbis? That's meant to be better than mp3 right? (Just out of interest). Following the link you posted, I came to this page comparing the sound quality of LAME against other formats. I didn't come out that well. See the bottom of this page for the conclusion:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html

As for your screenshot, I cannot see any folders within folders (i.e. subgenres within genres, or playlists within playlists. Is it possible to do it with itunes?
Thanks!
Justin

trpnmonkey41 · Feb 6, 2007

Justin said:
Why not use Vorbis? That's meant to be better than mp3 right? (Just out of interest). Following the link you posted, I came to this page comparing the sound quality of LAME against other formats. I didn't come out that well. See the bottom of this page for the conclusion:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html

As for your screenshot, I cannot see any folders within folders (i.e. subgenres within genres, or playlists within playlists. Is it possible to do it with itunes?
Thanks!
Justin

Vorbis doesn't work with iTunes or iPods and MP3 using LAME 3.97 using -v0 encoding is indistinguishable from the original source. That article (which I haven't read in a long time) was written around the inception of LAME when Vorbis was far and away the best codec. LAME has really come a long way since it was started and is a very fast encoder.

And you can do folders and subfolders as deep as you would like in iTunes, I have never felt the need to use them. You can see from this picture the way it would look (File -> New Folder)

Justin · Feb 7, 2007

trpnmonkey41 said:
Vorbis doesn't work with iTunes or iPods and MP3 using LAME 3.97 using -v0 encoding is indistinguishable from the original source. That article (which I haven't read in a long time) was written around the inception of LAME when Vorbis was far and away the best codec. LAME has really come a long way since it was started and is a very fast encoder.

And you can do folders and subfolders as deep as you would like in iTunes, I have never felt the need to use them. You can see from this picture the way it would look (File -> New Folder)

Hmm, that could be the way then. Thank you very much for showing me how to make it do subsubfolders etc. It may turn out to be worth it.
Thanks!
Justin