im looking for a good mp3 compressor that compresses the files but retains the same quality. hopefully.

now, before you guys flame me about illegal filesharing and stuff.. all the songs are coming from my cd collection and i want to put it

here:
http://www.cheapcomputer.com.au/products/item4357.asp
http://www.cheapcomputer.com.au/imag.../190TC06-b.jpg

or here:
http://www.cheapcomputer.com.au/products/item2316.asp
;)

Im not sure what i want to get. sacrifice the size for the space or space for the size.

[ 02-14-2004, 03:40 AM: Message edited by: Harkoliar ]

I use Audiograbber to rip tracks and Lameenc to encode them. Both are free, but audiograbber will want to be registered before it will let you rip an entire CD in one session. (It randomly disables half the tracks each session, so with persistence you can get em all anyway. Pay the guy, its easier). Audiograbber (or any good ripper) has a help section on finding mp3 encoders, so find that first and get the encoder later.

try winamp, it has the plugins to make files smaller by lowering the quality a bit. But i really didnt notice the quality change.. u can also use WMA format, its very small. imo u should get the first one adn convert your files to wma.

EDIT: btw u can change mp3s or wavs to wma thru winamp plugins.

[ 02-14-2004, 11:47 AM: Message edited by: The Fallen One ]

Quality will always be a trade-off against file size so you can't optimise both, get used to it. However, what I suggest is using Variable Bit Rate (VBR) compression with an average bit-rate set to aroun 140kbps - this sounds pretty good and results in not too large files. Of course not all MP3 players support VBR MP3 playback but new ones should. To do this I use CD-EX - definitely the best ripper I've seen - it's a free download. It uses Lame or you can choose from a variety of other encoders which come with it.

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

[ 02-14-2004, 01:09 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

I'm not familiar with this product. However if you take some time to read the technical jargon, you should find if it's a "recorder" it will do it by itself. Mine is a bla, bla, model and once you start the recording it actually saves to memory then compresses, then actually records. No need for any MP3 compression software.
Most of the newer models I've seen actually have a removeable USB key drive on them, which makes things so fast I could almost but one. You must have MP3 compression software.

Just a little info on MP3: MP3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III, and is a compression format that shrinks audio files with only a small sacrifice in sound quality. MP3 files can be compressed at different rates, but the more they are scrunched, the worse the sound quality. A standard MP3 compression is at a 10:1 ratio, and yields a file that is about 4 MB for a three-minute track. Copy and pasted from here:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/31/index3a.html

Anyhow, for my music stuff I use the very free and very cool Apple iTunes, get it here:
http://download.com.com/3000-2166-10...tml?tag=launch
I use the standard compression rate, and most of my files are 3.5 to 5.2 MB. Quality is unmatched to CD, on a standard(insert MP3 player) playback system.

Felix, although direct encoding is a cool feature, I think you'll find that it happens in real time. That means that if you want to record a whole CD it'll take like 70 mins. However, if you rip it from CD then copy it to your MP3 player in MP3 format it will take much less time. So there is a pretty big need for MP3 ENCODING software [img]tongue.gif[/img] ;)

CDEx does ripping and on-the-fly MP3 encoding BTW so is pretty cool. Anyway, I sometimes like to listen to my CDs that I ripped to MP3 from my computer so that's another reason to rip them.

Vaskez, yes very true, real time encoding. But mine is not a true "plug & play" product. From the item's page above, though I only scanned it, could not figure out the hook-up either. If it's not USB, then again it will be real time and no need for encoding.

thanks guys.. ill try it out..

i tried just using the standard media player with WMV format and it gives out roughly 2-3mb per song. its good quality as well. I will just experiment and see how it goes.