I'm trying to decide if it's worth the extra space to rip my cds at 224 instead of 192 kbps. Anyone have any feedback on that? I'm not sure that I notice any difference in audio quality, but maybe it's something you pick up on after repeated listenings...?

Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone and everyone about what your preferred rip rate is.

Cheers.

First, read this FAQ. Then, I'd suggest that you make multiple encodings at different bit-rates of multiple songs of varying auditory natures. Then listen to each of them in the settings you usually listen to them. Decide at what bit-rate the songs stop sounding better to you. Then either choose that bit-rate or the next higher.

Well I'm sure you'll have a few folks here who will tell you there's an audible difference, but I don't hear it. I use 192 (VBR. LAME ABR, actually) and that sounds fine to me.

The real audiophiles say they can hear it, and who knows...maybe they'll convince me, too.

The real audiophiles also probably have audio equipment of higher precision than we have, as well, making it easier to hear the problems.

I consider myself an audiophile with pretty decent equipment, and I couldn't tell the difference between any of the high bitrates when I hooked my empeg to my system.

Of course, maybe I didn't setup the greatest test cases. I thought about going back and ripping a short little snippet at different bitrates. Anybody have a suggestion on a good piece of music to test with?

Although, since most of my listening will be done on my not so "audiophile" car stereo system, the point is somewhat moot.

I rip at 50% VBR. This gets me average bitrates of around 130 kbps. This may not sound like a lot, but remember it's an average! For those stretches that need it a high bitrate will have been used, in exchange for low bitrates for soft or simple stretches that don't need a high bitrate. My untrained ear can't distinguish between these files and the original CD...

/Pepijn

Unless you can hear a difference between 192 and 224, then no, it's not worth the effort to re-rip.

I always find it hard to tell if I can actually hear a difference, or if I just think I hear a difference.. It's hard to perform a true golden-ear test on yourself. I can tell the difference between 64 and 128, but that's like feeling the difference between glass and gravel.. Anything higher than 128 usually requires the music to have problems encoding at 128 for my ears to notice anything..

Unless you can hear a difference between 192 and 224, then no, it's not worth the effort to re-rip.

You may have mis-understood what he was saying (or, just as likely, I misunderstood.

I don't think he is talking about re-ripping his music; but instead ripping it for the first time.

It would only take 17% more disk space to rip/encode at the higher bitrate -- probably about $15 worth of disk space, depending on what size disk(s) he has.

From that perspective, I would say go ahead and use the higher bitrate, even if you're not sure you can tell the difference. As a side benefit, the higher bitrate will take less time to encode. (Less compression = less work for the encoder.)

tanstaafl.

It would only take 17% more disk space to rip/encode at the higher bitrate -- probably about $15 worth of disk space, depending on what size disk(s) he has.

Although this is no big deal for your HD in your computer, I think 17% is a significant amount when you're talking your empeg. Let's assume you get 2,000 songs on 10GB:

10GB = 340 extra songs
20GB = 680 extra songs
30GB = 1,020 extra songs
60GB = 2,040 extra songs

So, my point is that you should weigh the options of quality vs. quantity and find a happy medium. This may not be as important to a person with a 60GB, but it should definitely be considered when you only have 10GB.

There's a point at which I can hear a huge difference between a bitrate and the next bitrate. This is usually between 96 and 112. But I think that the difference is not the bitrate itself as much as the fact that this is the point where most encoders decide to resample down to 32kHz sample frequencies, and they seem to do a poor job of it, if it's even really possible to do a good job. See if you can force your encoder to use 44.1 kHz at these low bitrates. Not that this has much to do with the original question, as the problems at these bitrates are usually severe enough, regardless of resampling, to be apparent to even the most tin ears.