I popped in one of my favorite CDs to listen to while I worked (it was probably Buena Vista Social Club, I've been hooked on Cuban music ever since Ry Cooder and Wim Wender's great movie), and suddenly there was RealJukebox. It was not only playing my CD, it was recording it as well.
"Hello, what's this?" I generally hate it when some program climbs into my computer uninvited, like a parasite. (I'll never forgive Netscape for forcing AOL Messenger on me every reboot -- and Real did the same thing. Shame on you both!) RealJukebox Beta had ridden in on RealPlayer G2.
I'd been fascinated with mp3 several years previously when I once ported the free code for maplay, a unix-based mpeg audio player, to a Windows dialog-box based application as a demonstration for the boss. I recognized the potential of mp3 then, but my 90 MHz Pentium machines, pretty fast for the time, weren't good at decoding and playing the best quality audio. Meanwhile I put away mp3 for several years, worked on other things, and watched the market and enthusiasm for MPEG audio climb through the roof.
Those first mp3 recordings by RealJukebox were pretty good, but the beta program had many problems which were gradually worked out for the gold release of version 1, not long ago. I eagerly recorded several of my favorite CDs to store on the hard disk at work. It was fun and easy, but I started thinking that it could be better. For instance, why did my recordings have those pops and clicks in them? I expected better from mp3.
I was running into storage problems as well, and knew I'd want to start moving my mp3 files off to CD-R disks. I was imagining my entire music library on a few golden CD-R disks, all catalogued and available at my fingertips wherever I was.
It took research and practice to work out how to use all the
tools available to get just what I wanted. I didn't find quite
this document in the process of my research, so I decided to
write it.
The sound is good. It's not as good as uncompressed CD
PCM data, which isn't as good as many analog recordings, which may
not be as good as rare modern 96 kHz / 24-bit recordings. But it's
not bad, and it's excellent for noisy, mid-fi environments like
offices and traveling.
The storage is great. I can put several favorite CDs on one
CD-R in mp3 format. As I write this, I'm putting my entire Beatles collection
on a CD-R. I can put hours of classical music, or jazz, or all my
cuban tracks on a CD-R.
My next step will be to have a dedicated PC next to the stereo
for referencing my music collection from hard disk.
Doing all the default things with RealJukebox will get you some
fair recordings. One problem that nagged me was the presence of
pops and clicks in the recording. A little
deja research turned up that these are generally caused by
corruption in the input data stream. RealJukebox would occasionally
complain to me that my system wasn't able to keep up doing digital
extraction of audio files. This on a Pentium III running 500 MHz
with tons of memory! Buffer overruns from the CD-ROM drive could
be the culprit.
Others report that making a clean mp3 file should be done in
two steps. First get the audio data off the CD using a high-quality
extraction program. Secondly, compress the audio data into an mp3
file at a leisurely enough pace to get a high-quality compression.
RealJukebox was just trying to do too much all at once.
Programs that extract audio tracks from CDs are called "rippers,"
and my trail led me to WinDAC32 from Germany as one of the best
rippers out there. It was cheap, fast, and perfect.
Then for compressing the raw PCM data into mp3, RealJukebox Plus
did a fine job, using the "Save as ..." function from the menu. Much
of RealJukebox's functionality is hidden as an "advanced" feature,
but (as usual) that's where you find the really good stuff.
Then there were lots of other little problems, like getting the
album, artist, and track data correctly set so I could import the
files to the RealJukebox database, and keeping the filenames under 64
characters so they would fit in the CD file system. I'll get to
those later.
Update: RealJukebox Plus will in fact do a fair job of
ripping CD audio. Set the output format to WAVE Audio, and it will
store the uncompressed audio in WAV format. Doing it this way lets
you use the CDDB lookup of Real Jukebox Plus. Also turning on the
error correction flag in RealJukebox will get rid of pops and
clicks, though on my system I encountered frequent "I can't keep
up" messages from RealJukebox in this arrangement. Thanks to
Steven Bondi.
I'm using very generic PCs, tending to be built from components,
both at the office and at home. The office machine is a 500 MHz
Pentium III with 128 MB ram. At home I'm running 400 MHz on a
Pentium II with 128 MB ram. The CD-ROM at the office is a Mitsumi,
and at home I have an HP CD-Writer.
You'll want to have enough free disk space to hold a CD-worth
of uncompressed audio data. A gigabyte is plenty.
If your CD-ROM doesn't allow digital audio extraction, you
might have to upgrade. They're cheap. If it doesn't include the
ASPI layer extensions from Adaptec, you might have to track those
down from the manufacturer as well. On my systems, everything was
in place and I didn't have to do anything special to get WinDAC32
to work.
The software components are a ripper, WinDAC32 version 1.49,
and a compressor/file manager tool, RealJukebox Plus version 1.0.
You'll need to purchase these components. The free version of
WinDAC32 has nag screens that make it less useful, and the free
version of RealJukebox doesn't include the "Save as" feature
that you'll need. These programs are good enough that the
authors deserve your support anyway! Besides, they're cheap.
Configuring the software is important. In WinDAC32, you'll want
to set a few useful defaults and test it with your CD-ROM to be
sure it will extract quickly and cleanly. Configure your drive
under the DAC, Configure drive ... menu item. My old
Mitsumi CD-ROM drive claimed 16x performance, but in fact worked
best at 8x. I used normal copies, with a spin up time of 5 seconds
before the first track (which I'm not sure makes any difference).
You need to configure the filenames in WinDAC32 so it will
create useful reasonably short names. This seems straightforward,
but choosing a really good name makes a big difference in sorting
the list of files on the hard disk. Go to Dac, Settings, General,
Output File to set the format.
Set a base directory that will be unique to full-resolution
WAV files. I use C:\My Music\waves. Don't use an extended path
name.
For the extended file name, the combination I recommend is
"Artist," "Album Title," "Track Number." There are two reasons to
use this order. First, it usually keeps the file names reasonably
short, under the 64 character limit for CD-ROM file systems.
Secondly, it sorts into a really useful list of files in Explorer.
Your files will be sorted by artist, then by album, then by track
within the album. If you put the track number before the artist,
as I did once, the sort nets you all the "track 01" cuts first,
which is really annoying to work with. In WinDAC speak, that
translates to an extended filename of: "%I - %T - %U".
Configuring RealJukebox Plus is important too. You want to get
it away from all the default settings that seem to make it easy, but
in fact quickly gobble up your computer with things you don't
want.
One of the first changes I recommend is to disable the "Start
Center" for RealJukebox that appears in your systray (there on the
task bar). I don't see any advantage to having it there, and the
program just sits in memory or swap space when you aren't using
it. Right click on the icon in the systray, and select "Disable
Start Center."
Then with RealJukebox in Full Mode instead of Skin Mode, go
to the Options, Preferences menu.
In the General tab, unclick everything (except maybe the
"Automatically switch to a new skin," which is immaterial).
The File Storage tab is important -- be sure to point the
Recorded Music Files Location to a directory different from
the one WinDAC32 is going to use. c:\My Music is fine, as
long as you set WinDAC to something different.
I personally prefer to record in mp3 format instead of
RealAudio. Nothing personal about RealAudio, I just find
proprietary formats to be an anathema. I also disable the
security options, because I intend to move my mp3 files
around between home, office, and later a portable mp3
player.
No matter how you choose to configure RealJukebox, do not
pirate someone elses work! I hate people who steal someone elses work
as much as I hate anti-copying features in software, including music.
The first step is to extract the audio tracks from the CD.
1. Start WinDAC32, and put a CD in the drive. WinDAC should present you
with a list of tracks, their size and duration. It won't know the
name of the CD.
2. Click the "CD Information" button (or select Actions, CD Information
from the menu). Fill in names for Artist and CD Title. This is important
for WinDAC to name the files.
3. Select all of the tracks. My favorite shortcut: click on Track 01, then
hold down the shift key and click on the last track.
4. Select "Copy track(s)" from the Actions menu (or press F9, or press
the icon in the toolbar).
The uncompressed wave files will now be in your configured destination
directory with names like the following:
Beatles - A Hard Day's Night - 01.wav Now comes an important step, updating the track information for the
audio files. RealJukebox will embed the data in the tracks so it will
always be there whether you move the files to CD-R, CompactFlash, or
any other media.
Unfortunately when you use this technique, you don't get to take
advantage of RealJukebox's clever connectivity with the online
CD database. It doesn't
take very long to fill in the information from the CD, if you're
a fair typist.
Caution! Take the CD out of the drive now, or wait until
you're completely done. If you're doing "Save As" with RealJukebox
and you take the CD out of the drive, RealJukebox goes crazy and
forgets what it's doing. The CD drive notifies the system that its
disk has been changed, and RealJukebox isn't handling it well.
1. Start RealJukebox Plus, and put it into Full Window mode. Select
the Music Library icon on the left.
2. Import the recently created WAV files, as follows. Choose File,
Import files
or playlists. Browse to your WAV directory. Select all of the files
from your album (see "my favorite shortcut") and click Open. The new
tracks will appear in the
"All Tracks" section of your database, at the bottom of the scroll
window.
3. Now set the data that the tracks all have in common, as follows.
Select all of the tracks (see "my favorite shortcut" above). Right click
on a selected track and choose Properties. Key in the correct values
for Artist, Album, Genre, and Year, then OK.
4. Now select each track individually, right click and bring up
the Properties dialog again. Fill in the Track # and Title with the
correct values from the album.
5. Next go back and select all of the new tracks again (see "my
favorite shortcut"). Choose File, Update Files with Track Info.
RealJukebox will permanently add the track information to the WAV
files.
Note: As of this writing, RealJukebox loses the Track # from
some of its music files. I'm not quite sure what the circumstances are,
but for me it happens frequently with my classical recordings. I suspect
that the long strings in one of the other fields is wiping out the
Track # field in some way. I can tell that if there is anything in
the Comment field, the track number will be lost.
Now it's time to convert the tracks from WAV to mp3.
1. In the RealJukebox Music Library, select all of your new
tracks.
2. Choose File, Save Tracks As from the menu.
3. Set the correct values for "New Track." I use mp3 format,
128 Kbps Stereo, and I click on the VBR button for "variable bit
rate." Use your own favorite format if you like. I'm not sure if
the VBR feature actually buys you any quality or compression or
not.
4. Click OK, and have a cup of coffee. When it's done, you'll
have a new set of mp3 files in c:\My Music, and the Music Library
of RealJukebox will have duplicate entries for all of those tracks.
5. The original WAV format tracks in the database will be selected
when the Save As is completed. If you press the Delete key now, you
can delete the database entries along with the big disk files that
were extracted from the CD.
Note: It's also possible to check the "Erase the current
track when done" box in the Save As dialog, but I like doing it
after and double checking the work first.
Now you can take the newly created mp3 files and move them to
any storage media you like. When they're moved, you can use the
"Import files and playlists" command in RealJukebox to catalog the
tracks from their new location, and play them in any grouping you
like.
Currently I've been keeping my RealJukebox Music Library
empty. I have my mp3 files organized on a few CD-R disks. When I want
to listen to some music, I'll pop in the CD-R, import the tracks to
RealJukebox, and play music.
Using this process, I can encode an album in about half an hour
or less with my fast PC at the office. My mp3 files all have metadata
track information burned in, so whenever I import them to the RealJukebox
database, I still have the organization by album and track. The tracks
themselves are tiny files, with nice clean playback -- no pops or
clicks.
Unfortunately I have to key in the track information myself, instead
of using CDDB. The process does require several manual steps using two
programs. I'm sure it's possible to use an mp3 plug-in with WinDAC and
go directly to mp3, but I bet the two-step process is more consistent
and reliable. Off-line compression will always have the opportunity to
do a better job than real-time compression. (Whether it does or not
depends on the engineering of the compression tool.)
As long as you encode to mp3, you should be able to import your
files to any of the popular mp3 playback utilities and portable music
players.
I am relatively new to the process of making mp3 files, and I'm sure
there are other techniques and utilities that will do as well or better
than what I've outlined. Drop me a note with your suggestions.
Why mp3?
Problems and Pitfalls
System and Tools
Click here for WinDAC
Click here for RealJukebox Plus
Configuration
Step-by-step, Recording an Album to mp3
Beatles - A Hard Day's Night - 02.wav
Beatles - A Hard Day's Night - 03.wav
Advantages and Trade-offs
Final Notes
Last updated: February 05, 2002
Copyright © 1999 Morris Jones, White Oaks Group.
All Rights Reserved
Mail to:
Morris Jones
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