Ripping

Ecstasy Edition Release 1.4

CD Ripping & Encoding

CD ripping is the process of extracting the data from an audio CD and writing it to a disc file, either as a .wav file or encoding it to an mp3 or other compressed format file. Varying amounts of compression can be used, the more a file is compressed, the smaller the resulting file will be, but quality is sacrificed. JukeItUp! can encode at a selection of bit rates up to 320k using either the LAME or BLADE encoder. Unencoded songs (wav format) use about 10M byte/minute. Encoding to mp3 format at 128k gives files of about 1M byte/minute. File size is proportional to quality, thus a file encoded at 256k will sound better than one at 128k, but will use 2M byte/minute instead of 1M.
As a rough guide 80k is good quality for speech, 128k is good for music. Higher rates of 160k or 192k are often used for fine quality music. Ticking the HQ box produces a small quality improvement without increasing the file size, by using more precise calculations to encode the file, but this will cause the encoding process to take a lot longer.
Variable bit rate encoding may be used by ticking the VBR box. This method of encoding varies the bit rate around the nominal rate depending upon the content of the music. It is most useful for music which has passages of silence, when the bit rate will be reduced for the silent parts, thus using less disc space. The quality factor of 0-9 biases the base rate towards the upper or lower part of the range. Thus a 128k VBR recording at quality 9 would be equivalent to a fixed rate 160k recording, unless there was a good amount of silence in the song. Note that the BLADE encoder does not support VBR mode.
The LAME encoder is used by default, if you wish to use the BLADE encoder, put the file bladeenc.dll into the JukeItUp! program folder, and rename or remove lame_enc.dll.

When you encode multiple CD tracks from a playlist, filenames are generated using the fields from the database to construct a name. The base name used is the song name, ticking the boxes for Artist name, Album name, or track name cause these items to be placed in front of the song name separated by hyphens. If the 'Write mp3 Tag' box is ticked then an mp3 tag filled from the database will be appended to the file and the selected genre inserted. The year and comment fields are provided because these will not be filled by the online CD database. Any entries made in these fields will override the year and comment fields in the JukeItUp! database.

If you begin a rip and change your mind, press the ESC key, this will abort the whole rip.

Note that you cannot rip a CD while it is playing (but you can play mp3s while ripping).

The controls for ripping and encoding are found in the Options 3 menu screen.


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