cdrom

[Potatoe2]

ok here it is. I am getting ready to buy a creative labs 52x blaster cdrom player. I have fallen for creative labs ever since they became king of the sound card. I am however slightly confused about the term audio ripping. It has been my understanding that cdroms all would play mp3s or whatever you had on the cdr\cdrw. Is this merely a format issue and how important is it for everyday cdrom use?

[daedalus]

yes, .mp3 is different format to the normal .WAV format that songs are in on audio CD's....i don't know whether the Creative drive can play mp3 format or not...check the specs.

[Potatoe2]

yes, it can but I just wondered if mp3 ripping was worth the money. The drive is 52x but only 20 x ripping. Is it that much different from the regular .Wav format? Anyway, I am just rambling. I am already sold on the drive. I just have to wait for the arrival of my MB and Processor. Oh yeah, my wifes approval is going to be the hard part. I havent told her about the MB or Processor. I think I will survive. Wish me luck, I am going to need it.

[Beefy]

Wow.. That's the first time I've seen a drive advertise it's ripping speed. I wouldn't worry about that figure too much.

Good luck with the wife thing. :)

[Mr. C]

OK, now I'm lost (breaking news there:rolleyes: )

Does the thing burn data? Ain't that the same thing as "ripping" an MP3?
Or does this device play MP3's by itself without the assistance of a processor and soundcard?

Please someone enlighten this poor country boy.

[Beefy]

'Ripping' an MP3 is the act of copying a audio track from a CD and saving it in MP3 format. So you rip music from CD's as MP3s.... Some drives seem to be able to rip Audio tracks faster that others, even if the drive is the same speed.. but like I said, don't worry about it too much...

[Shepps]

The program u use, also makes alot of difference, my windows media player 8 is slow compared to somethin like say, music match jukebox. Thats probally just cus the mp3 codec i use with wmp isn't very good lol.

[Mr. C]

Isn't all that the CD-ROM drive is doing is reading data? Data in the forms of 1's and 0's?
I wouldn't think it would make much difference what form the data may take, whether it be .zip, .jpg, .mov, .wav, or .mp3.
It's the software that is going to utilize the data combined with the system specs that is going to determine the rate at which the data can be fully utilized.

Or I could be wrong:D
If so, please enlighten me.

FYI; I generally copy a CD to HDD utilizing Media Player 6 - it's pretty quick actually. Then I use DBPowerAmp (with Media Player 6 codecs installed of course) to turn those tracks to any number of available formats.

I find DBPowerAmp to be quick simple and normalizes very well when converting individual MP3 tracks to .wav for making your own music CD's.
Don't know that this is the best method, but I have had great success!

[Beefy]

Audio Extraction from a CD is actually different to just copying files from a CD.. From what I understand, Audio CD tracks are stored on the CD in a RAW format. When you rip from a CD, it has to be able to read the audio track in this format and convert it to whatever format you are using (ie; WAV, MP3, WMA etc..), so it's not quite as easy as copying all the 0's and 1's...

In some reviews for CD drives, the reviewer sometimes does a DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) benchmark to show how fast the drive can rip audio. For some reason, some drives do it much better than others.

Again, I could be wrong about this. That is how I understand it all though.

[Mr. C]

So the key here is burning from a CD instead of HDD then.
Still has a lot to do with system specs and software being used though.

I wonder how True X type drives do in that kind of application:?: