best audio quality from CD
I'm using a music track off of a CD I have to edit a video to (using Premiere). What is the best format to rip the audio in? MP3, WMA, WAV?
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WAV. No processing overhead, least complex (least likely to cause problems), and full quality sound.
Other codecs can save hard drive space but there are tradeoffs (not working, lower quality audio, processing overhead), and it just doesn't make sense to use them for video editing. Your video files take up so much more drive space anyways. |
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thanks
Isn't wav the file format the CD is in already? Couldn't I just copy it directly off the cd without a program? |
The structure is different on the CD.They are CDA's.They are wav files but you cant get at them directly.Put the CD in your computer drive and look at it with windows explorer.You see the size of the tracks?( 1k)Glenn and Rob are right.Use an extracter.
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For some things, you may also find iTunes to be very useful.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ You can configure it to automatically rip CDs into WAV format (or MPEG4 or MP3). If you are looking through sound effects, I find it very useful. As well, you can get it to rip your entire SFX or music library to a hard drive as wav or mp3. iTunes is a great way to organize all your sounds too. |
The format on a CD is actually PCM. WAV is a container format
that supports different codecs, uncompressed PCM is one of them (and the default). The reason why you want to use a program (depending on your Operating System and tools/drivers installed you could also copy the files directly indeed) to do this copying is the following: Audio CD's (and Video CD's as well) use a lower amount of error correction bits than a data disc does. Why? Becacuse you don't want to loose a bit of data, but loosing some bits of audio is generally not a problem (ie, you can't hear it). This results in the fact that you can burn 800 MB of music or video (in VCD format) on a 700 MB disc for example. So what programs such as EAC do is work with the drive and the error correction mechanism to get the best copy of the disc as possible. It reads each sector multiple times and then combines these with the help of error correction information to get the data as good as possible (with the least amount of "errors" in them). Small price to pay (in terms of time) to get the best quality, the product is free. Hope that explained it a bit. |
Thanks for the info Rob.Quick question.... what other codecs would a wav file support?
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This link from NCH Swift Sound (Australia) may be of use to you. I don't know if it's comprehensive, but it seems so...
[codecs for .wav files] http://www.nch.com.au/acm/index.html |
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