My 70 Gigabyte Mahler job

Today I completed my Gustav Mahler 11 Symphonies ripping job, requiring almost 70 GB free space from my ripping workstation. Not mentioning of two 3GHz CPU-s, running hot at 99% performance level.

Matherial

I have bunch of DVD-s in my posession. All Gustav Mahler's symphonies fom 1 to 10, plus Das Lied von der Erde. All DVD-s had:

• Video: MPEG-2 / 720x480 (NTSC) / 4:3;
• Audio: DTS audio + PCM stereo audio 48KHz 16bit

Original recording was done in stereo and DTS was artificially generated later.

What I did

I copied the contents of DVD-s to my workstation's HDD, using DVD Decrypter. Decrypting happened at the speed 7x - 10x, depending other simultaneous tasks. Then I converted original MPEG 2 video to much more efficient format MPEG 4 in AutoGK. It took about 1:1, eg 20 frames per second.

Result

I have now Gustav Mahlers 11 symphonies in MPEG 4 compression with hi quality PCM stereo sound.

Ripping in My Mind

Today I did some more ripping.

Ripping (also referred to as digital audio extraction) is the process of copying the audio or video data from one media form, such as Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) or Compact Disc (CD), to a hard disk (definition from Wikipedia).

My objective was to understand difference between WMA Variable and MP3 320 Kbit/s encodings. They both are my vavourite because they meet hi quality listening needs and still they both are compatible with most of equipment available.

MY test album was Denon's high fidelity demo CD, containing 11 tracks from Beethoven to Bruckner. Demanding stuff! Symphony finales and Piano contserts.

My surprise was quite big, then MP3 320 gave 23% bigger file than WMA Variable. I assumed, that encoder should choose very high bitrates because of nature of music.

• MP3 320 Kbp/s: 162 MBytes album size;
• WMA Variable: 132 MBytes album size.

Ichecked real compression levels of WMA Variable:

• Track 2 Ludwig van Beethoven, Egmont overture
  341 Kbit/s
  
• Track 4 Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonie nr 7, Presto
  325 Kbit/s
  
• Track 10 Anton Bruckner, Symphonie Nr 6, Finale
  317 Kbit/s

So, no real differene in compression, WMA variabl is just more effective than MP3. I didn't hear any difference in sound, listening tracks after each other. I know, that A-B-X blind test is more objective, but I dont have equipment at my home for that.

I didn't make any fundamental conclusion. I keep ripping using WMA Variable, as I used to do earlier.

I digitized it all (almost)

One day I made quite fundamental decision. No stacks of CD-s anymore in my house! I should rip them on the hard disk and listen from more innovative systems -- like digital media receivers all over my house.

I made quite MS friendly choice to rip them into WMA format: 192 bps, 44 Khz sampling, 2 channel, 16 bit format. For some reason I believed its sound superiority over mp3 format.

Also, I moved to digital photography -- that's indeed pretty obvious. I also started to scan all my previous films and photos into my digital storage.

Today I have 8 700 tracks from 680 albums, fron 230 different artists in my Media server, about 35 GB of songs.

Key facts of Digital Music:

• 35 000 000 000 bytes of music
• 8 700 tracks
• 680 ripped or purchased online CD albums
• 230 artists

Also I have 21 000 digital photos in my Media server, allocating 23 GB of disk storage. They occupy about 15% of my half-terabyte Media server. So, there is room for growth.

I don't have videos and digitized DVD-s yet in my Media server, as I use to rent films and look digital TV.

More about my Media server hardware and software, also about media receivers in my future blogs.