My First Uberstandard Rips
I got into the MP3 scene late, during Napster’s last waning year, from early 2000 to summer 2001. My iBook (with its whopping 3gbs of hard drive space) had a bizarre assortment of MP3s on it that could barely be called a “collection”. When Napster finally shut down and the userbase split between the several clones already on the web, I jumped between several of them: WinMX, Bearshare, Morpheus, and others.
For whatever reason, I finally settled on Kazaa (and subsequently Kazaa Lite and its various hacks), and used it for years. It was then that I began collecting entire albums, rather than random songs. As anybody knows, the popular filesharing programs at the time like Kazaa and Limewire were HORRIBLE for this sort of thing. My albums were often comprised of files of different bit rates, with unconventional filenames, and worse. It was at this time that I also considered 128kbps the highest quality of MP3 that I would ever need. Embarrassingly, if I downloaded higher bitrate files (or variable bitrate files…), I would downgrade them to 128kbps. Needless to say, my collection was a mess.
Around 2003, a couple important things happened that changed all this:
1: I got a good set of computer speakers for my system, and I began to notice how tinny and obviously compressed highs (especially cymbals) sounded at 128kbps.
2: Kazaa’s popularity made it a prime target for record companies to flood with bogus files.
I moved onto Soulseek, which is still an excellent source for high quality and/or rare MP3s. I deleted my entire MP3 collection and began to recollect the entire thing, album by album, rather than file by file, at 192kbps. Again, I assumed this would be the highest quality I would ever need to collect songs in. 192kbps is now my absolute minimum. A year or so after this, BitTorrent had established itself as one of, if not the, best ways to share files. Private MP3 torrent communities were popping up all over the place, and I was lucky enough to gain membership to a couple (many have a limited number of available accounts, some are by invitation only). Generally, these sites only contain original pirate releases. As anybody with any familiarity with the music piracy scene knows, the rips are held to extremely high standards. Any release not meeting these standards is destroyed, the group that released it is defamed, and another group quickly steps up to release a proper. These high-quality, properly tagged, uniformly named files made my 192kbps collection, painstakingly downloaded over a period of years from single Soulseek users, look pitiful.
Since my Soulseek days, I had entertained the idea of slowly replacing my MP3 collection with the actual CDs (of course, only to rip them into high-quality MP3). The boom in my collection since I began torrenting albums made this a monumental task, but I purchase CDs from my MP3 collection from time to time. I just needed a very strict standard in which to rip, tag, and name them. Enter the Ãœberstandard.
I discovered Ãœbernet and the Ãœberstandard quite some time ago, but it seemed a little too…well, anal. Anybody wishing to digitally archive their audio collection at the highest possible quality, however, should take notice. The Ãœberstandard documents, in overwhelming detail, a method in which to rip, verify, and name MP3 files for archival purposes. Not only are specific programs/codecs REQUIRED, only specific versions of these programs and codecs are allowed. These programs must be manually configured to very specific settings before ripping, and log files and checksums are produced to verify the resulting archive’s integrity. The end result is the best possible copy of his music that an audiophile can get with MP3 technology, accompanied by the “papers” to prove it.
The amount of correction and verification that these various programs perform slows down ripping speed considerably; it takes me about 12 minutes to produce a full MP3 copy of an album now (not including the various scripts I run on the files afterwards to verify their uniformity and alert me of inconsistencies), but I think the end result is worth it. The first two albums I ripped to the Ãœberstandard were Thrice’s Vheissu, and The Straylight Run’s Prepare to Be Wrong, which have been sitting on my computer desk in a stack of about 20 still-shrinkwrapped CDs since the day I blogged about purchasing them, way back on June 3rd. My plan is to maintain a folder of “proper” rips, held to this new standard, which will slowly be purchased and deleted from my old collection. This may well be an endless task, since I download about 10 times the albums I purchase, but it should be a fun project.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:28 am
unrelated but you might get a kick out of this or go on a blogging tirade about it.
http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/
November 30th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Yeah, I’m not nearly this anal about my MP3’s. Honestly, 192kbs sounds just fine to me.
November 30th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
OMG I GOT A WII TOO. HOW DO I FIND MY FRIEND CODE??? LETS BE FRIENDS K?
November 30th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Your friend code can be found in the message area.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Hahaha, did anyone else actually read what this blog post was about?
December 1st, 2006 at 7:10 am
It was about his Wii moron
December 1st, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Add me Bill! 1165-4771-0453-7432
You haven’t done it yet you bastard!
December 1st, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Bill, add me, seeing as how you rip CD’s so well, it seems fitting how well your Wii works. If I rip CD’s does that mean I can be your Wii friend? How does the CD rip to Wii code work? Get back to me.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Sorry Bill, I didn’t mean to illegitimize your blog.