Stereo or mono for old baseball CDs & other settings

[kschwi]

Hi,

I use CD-ex to rip audio CDs to mp3. I am use it to rip radio broadcasts of old baseball games on CD to mp3. What settings should I use? There are many options in the encoder tab such as the encoder (Default seems to be Lame mp3 endcoder) Mode, Quality, VBR Quality and Output Sample Rate. Someone told me that for voice recordings mono is best. Is that true and what is the difference. Any other settings to tweak? There are also boxes for Private, Checksum, Original and Copyright that are all unchecked and the on the fly mp3 encoding box is checked.

thanks,

[Cornucopia]

Rarely are sports radio broadcasts (particularly old ones) ever presented in anything BUT mono, so no use fattening the bitrate for no reason.

Use a fairly high bitrate mono mp3: say, 96 or 128kbps (when in mono, one uses 1/2 the normal bitrate of 192 or 256). Use 44.1kHz sample rate (as that's what's already on the CD, no good trying to re-sample).

DO - NOT - USE - VBR (mp3)!
Lots of devices don't work well with it and it doesn't save you much in the long run anyway.

The other 4 boxes are optional and based on your personal needs - you don't necessarily have to check any of them.

On the Fly? I don't recommend on the fly. I recommend ripping as cleanly as possible to a WAV intermediate, and then processing/encoding to mp3 from that.

Scott

[kschwi]

Thanks.

The first VBR box is VBR Method is greyed out but the VBR Quality is not. Currently it is on VBR2 with the output rate at 44100.

I do have CDex on two different computers and one is a bit older and I can choose Mono. On this computer which I installed CDex in the last 6 months for some reason the Mode options for Stereo or Mono are all greyed out. Any idea why that is and what is the default then, stereo or mono?

[jman98]

kschwi - "VBR Quality" sounds to me that you are still doing VBR and I very strongly agree with Cornucopia that this is a complete waste of effort to use VBR as it just creates the potential for problems with very very little space savings in return. Maybe you need to use something like WinLame to encode your files.

[Cornucopia]

Nah, I'd use ExactAudioCopy and fine tune the mp3/Lame settings by hand to what you want. The ripping is cleaner (the best there is, IMO) and you always get exactly what you asked for automatically.

Here's an example of mine (though I am currently using FLAC in compression settings, not mp3):

Scott

[kschwi]

I just got to my office and the odd thing is on my computer here, CDex has the VBR turned off and it is greyed out. I did not see that option on the newer version on my home computer.