How to Rip MP3 Tracks

Many people are still in the dark about ripping their CD's into MP3 format, so here we shed some light their way:

As you can see from our front page, encoding tracks into MP3 format is the easiest, most cost effective way to have all your tracks available, and they will play on virtually any computer DJ package, portable player, and DVD player on the market today. The other formats such as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AAC, etc., are only supported by certain products and OS's, so you are much safer using the standard MP3 format in our opinion.
The encoder you use will make a large difference in the quality of your final product, and we find that most people prefer the LAME encoder over the other versions available. LAME is also free, which can make a big difference to most people.
The steps necessary can range from easy to complex, depending on the results you want to achieve.
The easy but slow way, and quality varies:
-Use a program like MusicMatch.
-Set the software to automatically encode to MP3.
-Start putting in discs.
The way most DJ's do it today:
-Use AudioGrabber - it's free, and works great.
-Rip your CD's into WAV format.
-Batch convert them to MP3 overnight (if you have a large quantity).
-Use a BPM analyzer to add the BPM info to the tag. *
-Go through the tracks with Tag & Rename or another tagger to add additional info.

The minimum MP3 encoding quality for DJ work is 160kbps. You can go higher if your space permits, but remember your noise floor at a DJ event - it's high, so, much of that extra sound quality is lost due to the ambient noise level at the event. If you have plenty of disk space (and the facilities to back it up), you might just as well go for the 320kbps encoding rate, as it is nearly indistinguishable from the original CD to the average ear.

Why rip to WAV first?

If you use a little forethought, you will understand the added benefits of ripping to WAV first, which are; it's much faster to rip to WAV, then to rip and encode at the same time; you can then encode the WAV's to any format you like later. A good practice to follow if you can, is to rip to WAV, convert to MP3, burn the WAV's to CD or DVD, then delete the WAVs off your computer. You then have them available later if you wish to convert them to a different format, without having to re-rip them. The added benefit is less wear and tear on your original audio CD as well.

Why not just use WAVs, if they are true CD quality?

Two reasons: WAV's take up a lot of space on your hard drive, and they aren't streaming files like the other formats, which means they take up lots of memory, and take much longer to load into your player/mixer. Streaming formats read frames or packets off of your hard drive one at a time, and therefore use very little memory while playing.

Why is there a star next to BPM analyzing?

Because most wedding/party and even club jocks don't really use BPM to mix tracks, they use their skills. If you've been mixing for years, and mastered the art of mixing (and it is an art), you will quickly find that trying to let a computer do it for you is very disappointing.

Computers do some things very well, BPM mixing is not generally considered one of them, for many reasons. The first and foremost is the latency encountered on a message based operating system like Windows. It is doing many other things besides paying attention to your mix, so it cannot devote full time processing power to ensuring that mix is correct.

Most jocks like to have BPM information for a general point of reference though, when deciding on what tracks they might want to mix in (this tends to refer to dance club jocks).

Note: Most people are using the freebie BPM analyzer from MixMeister. This writes the BPM into a standard TBPM tag entry, but uses UNICODE character format, which is not readable by all DJ software packages. If you use Tag & Rename AFTER you put that BPM info in, you can convert it back to ANSI character format, which most software reads.

File naming:

You will notice most ripping software seems to make the filenames by using as their default Artist Name - Track Name.MP3.

We have no clue as to why that is, we can only speculate. Here's why we do it the opposite:

We have found that most people tend to look up tracks by title (track name), more than they do by artist. Since any search algorithm will start from the beginning, it is obviously faster to search by filename using Track Name - Artist Name.MP3.

So, if you more often than not use title as the lookup, then put the title first in the filename, if not, put the artist first.

Putting the track index in the filename is useless, as they are no longer on the CD (unless of course you are a trivia buff, or care for any reason in what order they were on the original CD).

No matter which way you choose, keep it simple is the rule (title and artist), as most software has limited buffer space available when loading filenames, and having a 400 character filename with all the info in it is just slowing everything down