Can we please get down to ripping basics for a moment?

[effect]

I have no idea what all this technical stuff is about, but I want to do away with my racks of CDs by converting them to something that I can store in my computer or external hard drive and play on anything - like my home audio system for instance.

My first question is why MP3s or WMA? There must be pros and cons. I know that if I rip using Windows Media Player I get WMA files, but the Media Player plays MP3s as well. However, I am looking for quality reproduction and I don't want to mail these things out although I might want to edit them using something like Audacity to add to slide shows (For my own use) and I can use Ease Audio Converter to get the format I need for this.

I also know that I can adjust the sampling rate on Windows Media Player, so, if WMAs are the answer what should I be setting it to?

If MP3s are the aswer I have read the recommendations on Zeropaid.com about Exact Audio Player and Lame but I'm nervous to download stuff like this without more than a few reassurances.

So you folks in the know. Can you help me out? Thanks

[Potato]

If you're just considering mp3 and wma, definitely go for mp3. Otherwise, for ripping purposes at least, ogg files are nice.

I use EAC. :)

I DID use dbpoweramp before they went and got stupid.

[silentscream]

winamp works well

as do lots of other progs

media player 10 is plenty simple (although bloated and full of drm)

but it will rip in 192 or 256kbps mp3

.

[shawners]

Rip with Exact audio coppier.. and then transform to lame 3.91 mp3 file .. 192 variable.. If you have big hard drive.. 220extreme settings variable byte rate.

[effect]

Thanks for your advice everyone, but I still don't know what the difference is between MP3 and WMA (OK call me slow!). If someone has the time maybe you could tell me whic is more flexible and which is more reliable. As for the other options - I just haven't heard of them. aybe I'm missing out?

[thepuzzler]

mp3s are more portable than wma. Like shawners said, use EAC to rip and encode with LAME 3.91. Use 192kbs variable settings for the best quality/size ratio.

[pimpinaman]

MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format invented and standardized in 1991 by a team of engineers working in the framework of the ISO/IEC MPEG audio committee under the chairmanship of Professor Hans Musmann (University of Hannover - Germany). It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. In popular usage, MP3 also refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 format on computers.

Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a proprietary compressed audio file format developed by Microsoft. It was initially a competitor to the MP3 format, but with the introduction of Apple's iTunes Music Store, it has positioned itself as a competitor to the Advanced Audio Coding format used by Apple. It is part of the Windows Media framework. An initial reason for the development of WMA may have been that MP3 technology is patented and has to be licensed from Thomson SA for inclusion in the Microsoft Windows operating system.

A WMA file is almost always encapsulated in an Advanced Systems Format (ASF) file. The resulting file may have the filename suffix "wma" or "asf" with the "wma" suffix being used only if the file is strictly audio. The ASF file format specifies how metadata about the file is to be encoded, akin to the ID3 tags used by MP3 files. ASF is also patented in the United States.

Files in this format can be played using Windows Media Player, Winamp (with certain limitations, DSP plugin support and DirectSound output is disabled using the default WMA plugin) and many other alternative media players. The FFmpeg project has reverse-engineered and reimplemented the WMA format to allow its use on POSIX compliant operating systems such as Linux.

Windows Media Audio supports digital rights management using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function.

The most current version of the format is Windows Media Audio 9.1 which includes specific codecs for lossless, multi-channel surround sound and voice encoding in addition to the main lossy codec. Both constant and variable bit rate encoding are supported.

In November 2005, an new update was available for the PlayStation Portable (version 2.60) which allowed WMA files to be played on the console for the first time.

(borrowed from the Wikipedia, which you could do some reading from to learn about audio formats :)