Well, there’s some trouble in paradise … I ripped some Queensryche the other day with the Cybermedia MP3 encoder and Windows Media Player 9. When listening to the tracks later that day on my iPod, a good number of them were truncated by 10-20 seconds! When I got home, I fired up the original MP3s stored on my PC and they played fine. Windows Media Player also played the MP3s directly off the iPod fine, too. A little digging in Google and I discover that there are some encoders that create variable bitrate MP3s that the iPod just doesn’t like.
Apparently there is a thing called a null frame at the front of a VBR MP3 that contains information about the timing of the track. If this frame isn’t there, then players have to estimate the duration of the song based upon the size of the file itself – a suboptimum decision when you’re dealing with variable encoding, and the iPod seems to suffer from this problem.
Some more digging turned me on to a solution, VbrFix, that “corrects” your MP3s. The program works as advertised even if it’s a tad clunky. However, even more digging turned me on to Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and the LAME MP3 encoder through The Quintessential Guide to Creating High Quality MP3s by Chris Myden, which I highly suggest you go read. I did a quick test to encode my Queensryche disc with EAC and LAME and the audio quality was noticeably better! As a result, I’m ripping a bunch of CDs tonight in that combination to listen to them in comparison to the existing MP3s. I bet as a result that I’m going to go back and revisit my entire ripped collection and do it again (as painful as that may sound) with EAC and LAME. Why? Because my buddy Scott mentioned that his MP3s don’t sound as “bright” as the original CD and I had to agree. My MP3s sounded somewhat muddied. However, the EAC/LAME combination sounded amazing and I want the high quality audio.
Why does EAC/LAME appear to do a better job than Windows Media Player and Cybermedia? My understanding from reading the guide above is that the reader and encoder are both very important in the process of ripping CDs. EAC/LAME just appears to do a better job than Windows Media Player, which means its time for an e-mail to the Windows Media Player team and ask them what’s going on.