WMP cannot rip CD to mp3

[kschwi]

I have a few noncommercial CDs (It is an old baseball game that was on cassette and converted to CD) that I cannot rip to mp3 using Windows Media Player. Most of these CDs do rip but some don't.

Any other programs that will do this (rip to mp3) for me?

[Baldrick]

EAC or CDex.

[kschwi]

thanks. CDex seemed to be easier that EAC and it worked fine. I wonder why WMP couldn't rip it.

[jman98]

I wonder why WMP couldn't rip it.

I'll tell you the same thing I told a friend a couple of weeks ago about it when he was having problems playing a video in it that was in WMV format (not DRMed either). WMP is a piece of #$%^ and it would be really difficult to deliberately make a crappier piece of media playing software than that.

[kschwi]

I'm am just playing some old baseball games I recorded off the radio. Some I have converted to CD and I wanted to convert some of those CDs to mp3. What mp3 file would you recommend and for non-music audio what compression rate is recommended? I have a friend that does the same thing and used a very high rate of compression and I was wondering if for this type of recording it makes any difference.

[jman98]

Switching to mono instead of stereo can save a good deal of space. 320 Kbps is as high as you can get with MP3 and in theory is indistinguishable from the source for most people. I've seen speech compressed as low as 64 Kbps though so you might want to try various rates and see what you like. CDex and EAC should both be fine for your conversions if that is what you mean by the "What mp3 file would you recommend..." part of your question.

[AlanHK]

If it's off the radio, is there any hiss or static?

If you want to do noise reduction, rip to WAVE with CDEx or EAC and use Audacity. (See Noise_Removal.)
Then after cleaning, save directly to MP3.

For spoken word, 128K is fine. I doubt you'd notice if you used a higher rate.

[kschwi]

Switching to mono instead of stereo can save a good deal of space. 320 Kbps is as high as you can get with MP3 and in theory is indistinguishable from the source for most people. I've seen speech compressed as low as 64 Kbps though so you might want to try various rates and see what you like. CDex and EAC should both be fine for your conversions if that is what you mean by the "What mp3 file would you recommend..." part of your question.

Thanks for all the responses.

Any specific settings you would recommend when using CDex? Or are the defaults what I should use when ripping a game to mp3 format?