Making MP3s
Step 1: Where to start?
The first step is to copy a song from an audio CD. This is called "ripping". Not
all cdrip programs work with all cdrom drives, and not all cdrom drives can rip audio.When
you have a cdrom drive that can rip audio and have downloaded a cdrip program, you
are able to copy audio tracks from a cd to your harddrive.
Step 2: Choose an encoder
Now download a mp3 encoder, you need that for encoding the .wav files you get from the
cdripper. There are encoders for all operation systems, get one you can use.
Step 3: How things work?
Now you got all the tools for making your own MP3's.
WinDac32
First I will explain WinDac32, in my opinion the best cd ripper for windows95/NT. It is a
shareware program, but you can rip 5 songs with it, if you want to rip whole cds you have
to register it.
The first time you start WinDac32 it will detect your cdrom
drive, if not try to add the drive by yourself. Click 'DAC' and then 'add drive' there you
can fill in what drive you have and SCSI options.
If WinDac32 has your drive you can rip audio, select the song or songs you want to rip and
click on 'actions' and then 'copy track(s)' or use the button on the main screen.
Now the program ask for a filename, simply type in the name of the song and click 'save',
if you have done that the program starts to rip, if WinDac32 comes up with a message that
your drive not ready is, your drive can't rip or you have to set things up.
Try change settings in WinDac32, click on 'DAC' then on 'configure drive' and select the
tab 'copy' there you can change stuff like 'copymode', 'sectors per read' and
'synchronisationsectors'.
Now you know how to rip audio we go further with the encoders, again i will not explain
all the encoders but only one.
Fraunhofer's
L3enc/L3dec
This is a encoder for DOS, it was the first encoder ever made. Very slow but super
quality. Its shareware and can only encode at 112Kbyte/sec, but if you register you can
encode up to 256Kbyte/sec.
Because its a DOS encoder there is no graphical user interface, but there is a graphical frontend
available for use in Windows.
There are many options but the right commandline for
encoding .wav files into .mp3 is:
l3enc.exe wave01.wav wave01.mp3 -br 112000 -hq
If you have register L3enc/L3dec the commandline is:
l3enc.exe wave01.wav wave01.mp3 -br 128000 -hq