sredmyer

So they are specificaly blocking their customers by IP. That is precisely opposite of what they claimed in the press released posted by Rich_Guy earlier.[:^)]

One of my all time favorites...Burning Down the House from the Speaking in Tongues album by the Talking Heads 1983.

Although I tend to listen to more mellow stuff, my wife is 10 years younger than me and she says there are three bands she absolutely must hear LOUD!!! 1) “Mandatory Metallica” 2) “Required RUSH” 3) “Obligatory Ozzy” You can see from my signature that I run the RF-7s and an RSW-15 sub. This combo will go to ear splitting levels and will make you think there is an earthquake shaking your house. What amazes me most about the system is that it goes that loud without any discernable (unintended) distortion. The RF-7s are simply awesome speakers. Given enough power they have a very impressive punch all by themselves (without a sub). At one point I had my sub out to Klipsch to repair the amp. During this time I had a friend from out of town visiting. When I demoed the system for him (without the sub) he was simply amazed by the bass I was getting. He thought I must have had a sub hidden somewhere. When he later visited (after I had the sub back) he was completely awe struck. Having said all of that, you should realize that the RF-7s, though a very efficient speaker, really need lots of power to truly shine. At some frequencies these speakers drop from their nominal 8ohm impedance to somewhere around 2.8ohm (I think) and when they do this your amp better have the balls to handle it. Many will tell you that you only need a small amp to drive these speakers to really loud volumes and they are right…the speakers will sound fine with a small amp…but if you really want to hear what they can do give them lots of power.

Those F$*#ing Ba$$#&%s. I say we stage a revolt against all media download sites. Quick everybody gather up all your CDs and send them to Ripit Digital (my CD conversion company []) for conversion. Seriously though I had no idea that DRM could present such serious problems. I thought it only prevented you from playing on multiple devices without permission (ie. sharing with family and friends). I had no idea that if the place from which you purchased the music went out of business you would be SOL. This (I would think) would have to give serious reason for pause to anybody considering purchasing media with DRM.

No you didn't. You rented 500 tracks and now your time is up. Any DRM content that needs to phone home is based on the bad assumption that there is someone to phone home to. Which is the single best reason I can think of to rip our tracks ourselves (to DRM free lossless codec of coarse) from CDs we own. This way we have complete control. []

Well that worked but it is a little hard to read. Here is a link to it on an image hosting site where I just uploaded it. http://i33.tinypic.com/23u4osh.jpg

Maybe this will work

Well not sure why but I am having problems attaching an image...mind give me some pointers on doing it.

Not sure how I can show the date but here is a screen shot of what is currently on my screen

I may be interested in working something out along those lines but as I said I doubt I will have the robots ready before the first of the year. Anyway, if you want to talk further about this lets take it off the forum. You can email me direct at steve AT ripitdigital DOT com. Obviously you will need to remove the spaces and replace the appropriate characters.

Strange indeed. Do you have another PC which has never been logged onto your account with them and from which you have never played one of their DRM'd files...maybe that would allow you to atleast get to their site. What is particularly odd is that in the statement you posted they said they were down to a skeleton crew keeping the lights on for existing customers but not taking on new ones. You are an existing customer and can not get to their site...I am not a customer and can. None of it makes any sense to me. Oh well I hope you are able to get in touch with someone there.

From their "Contact Us" page Contact HDGIANTS Technical Support For technical support, please contact Support@HDGIANTS.com Monday – Friday 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. PST or call 775.832.5692 Sales For sales and dealer inquiries, please contact our sales department at Sales@HDGIANTS.com or call 775.832.5692 Marketing For marketing and press inquiries, please contact our marketing department at Marketing@HDGIANTS.com or call 775.832.5692 Content For new content inquiries, please contact our content department at Content@HDGIANTS.com or call 775.832.5692 Corporate Office: HDGIANTS 926 Incline Way Incline Village, NV 89451 Phone: 775.832.5692 Fax: 775.832.5693

That is odd indeed...I am on their site as I write this. I wonder if their site (at least for you) being down has anything to do with your DRM files no longer playing? I am not that up on all the limits imposed by DRM but I suppose maybe the files needs to "phone home" to get permission to be played. Very curious though about how you can not access their site.

Out of curiousity, do you know if their downloads are DRM free or not?

Yes I just tried and I can access the site at www.HDGiants.com. Possibly you need to clear your browsers cache.

I believe MusicGiants is now HDGiants. If this is the same service you are referring to then you might be happy to hear they still exist at www.HDGiants.com. As for the quality of their music downloads, they do offer lossless downloads. The format is WMA lossless which being lossless is equivelent to wav but utilizes file compression without data loss (which is what flac does). Since these are lossless they are identical to the source CD. They also offer what they call SuperHD which is (IIRC) a bit perfect copy of SACD and DVD-Audio discs. Again since the format is lossless (again WMA lossless) they are a bit perfect copy of the higher quality discs.

I guess this comes down to what is the definition of "better". If "better" = more accurate, than it is not possible to be "better" than the original (CD). Further any form of lossy file (regardles of bitrate) is by definition less than accurate and therefor not better (by the definition given). However in the digital realm (which we are in when speaking of computer files and CD data) a lossless format (such as wav) is a bit for bit copy of the original and is therefore accurate. On the other hand, if the definition of "better" = sounds better, then I would not begin to argue the point. Although I might think that the data lost in lossy encoding is meaningful and not having it makes the audio sound worse, that would just be my opinion. And when it comes to opinions we all have one and no one can (or should) say mine (or yours) is wrong. All one can say is my opinion differs from yours.

Most any software which is capable of recording raw (PCM) audio from the "line in" jack of your sound card will work fine. Audacity is one choice. I have never used (or heard of) Majix so I can not comment on it.

I will let somebody else handle this one as I am not familiar with that particular transport. For my money any inexpensive sound card which has digital out (either optical or RCA) which would keep the signal digital until it reaches your DAC is as good as it is going to get...spend your money on the DAC as that is where the magic happens.

Exactly how is this accomplished?

Yes that is pretty much the same automation you would get from the BatchRipper. However, as mentioned, the BatchRipper utilizes AccurateRip and secure ripping (the re-reading of errors) to help ensure you get an accurate extraction of the audio WMP has no such features (that I am aware of). Also with the PerfectMeta tagging provided by the BatchRipper the tagging will be much more accurate and consistant than what WMP would provide making for much less manual rework. No offense taken, I completely understand all of those reasons and I have heard them before. In fact, I have been working on a solution to just those concerns. What I am trying to do is to build a stand-alone CD ripping robot. This would be a multi-drive, autoloading robot with an embedded PC running WinXP and the dbPoweramp BatchRipper software. My concept is that an individual, such as yourself, who prefers (for whatever reasons) to do the job themselves could simply rent the robot. Although the idea is still mostly in the conceptual stages here are some of the highlights of what I expect to offer. I expect to have multiple robots with differing numbers of Plextor drives. The software would be preconfigured to, what I consider, best practice settings for tagging and file naming. All the user would need to do would be to connect a keyboard, monitor and mouse, load the discs onto the input stack, start the PC then click the button labeled "Rip". He/she would then come back in several hours/days (depending on the number of discs) to find the job complete. While the idea is to have the software pre-configured with "opitmal" settings, the user would be free to fiddle with them to get what ever result he/she wanted. Like I say this idea is still mostly in the conceptual phase (I do have a few robots I am experimenting with). I expect that it will likely be the first of next year before I actually have these robots available for rent.

There are many lossless file formats (WMA provides one) which produce a bit for bit identical copy of the original audio data from the CD. That said I am surprised to hear that you can hear any flaws with 320kbps mp3s. I personally am not blessed with hearing that will allow me to hear any but the most obvious differences (this however does not prevent me from realizing and believing that others are capable of hearing what I can not). I would have thought though, that the ambient noise which would certainly be present in a truck or on a motorcycle (engine noise, wind, traffic, etc.) would preclude any real critical listening

Welcome to the forum. I am sure if you stick around you will find the place friendly and informative. Speaking only for myself (the OP) I am glad to see this thread come back to life. WOW! that is indeed a large collection...not to make to fine a point of it but have you considered hiring a service to do the ripping for you? I do run a small ripping service ya know. I wont talk about the media server as there are others here far more qualified than myself. However for the ripping task itself I do have some thoughts and suggestions. EAC is indeed a good choice for getting the best possible audio from your discs. Although it does not "fix" scratched discs. What it does do is identify and attempt to recover from read errors (which may be caused by scratches). This recovery attempt is accomplished by simply reading the errant area over and over again until it gets an error free read or until there have been a number of matching reads. Possibly one of the best features of EAC is its use of the AccurateRip online database. This is a database of CRC values (like a digital fingerprint) of thousands of tracks. EAC will calculate a CRC for each track it rips and compare it with the matching track in the AR database. If they match you can be very confident that your rip is an accurate one. However, as good as EAC is at getting accurate rips, it (as far as I know) only uses FreeDB for metadata lookups. While this might be ok for some discs, for many the data will have errors or be completely wrong. Another short coming of EAC is that it does not have any way (that I know of) to run it in batch mode. Doing a collection the size of yours completely manually would be a real PIA. I would suggest you look into dbPoweramp. Their software has a BatchRipper module which will automatically rip discs as you feed them in. Even better yet this software has drivers for many of the autoloaders out there which allows you to setup a "batch" of a few hundred discs, start the process and let the software do its thing. The folks at dbPoweramp are the developers of the AccurateRip DB and therefore their software also uses it. They also have a feature called PefectMeta which pulls tag data from 4 online providers. This data is then analyzed by the "PerfectMeta" algorithm which attempts to find and use the most accurate parts of each. Although still not perfect this feature is really nice. Lastly this software also has the ability to find and attempt to fix read errors (like EAC). This is the software I use in my business and I highly recommend it. As far as CD drives choices go, I would suggest you try to find some of the older Plextor drives. Specificaly both the PX-708A and the PX-230A are very well thought of as a ripping drives. Both EAC and dbPoweramp software have special code for handling some of the audio extraction specific features of the Plextor drives. These drives can still be found as NOS on the auction sites. You did not mention file format as one of your questions but I thought I would go ahead and offer my advice there as well. I suggest you go with a compressed lossless format such as flac (there are others but I like flac). Since this would create a lossless digital library of your CD collection you could be assured that (depending of coarse on your player) you were getting true CD quality audio. Further if in the future you decide you would like some mp3s for a portable player, you can simply convert the files you want from a lossless source no need to re-rip the discs. To summarize, if I were in your shoes, I would get a couple of older Plextors and the dbPoweramp software. Play around with the settings in the software until you get like you want it, then just start ripping. It will take awhile but when your done (if you did it well) your done. Then you can pack the discs away in a closet or even sell them. Of coarse you could always take the easy way and send the discs to me and let me do them (sorry couldn’t help myself). Hope this helps,

Dave, You seem to really know what your talking about in this area. In another thread here some have talked about jitter and timing issues with audio playback from digital sources. Can you explain what this issue is and what we can do to minimize it's effects. Thanks, Steve

I'd love to come...I missed the Pilgrimage last year, had to work (what a bummer). I'll bring the wife. I plan to get a room for the weekend (Mike or Rodger can you suggest something close to your places). However I only live about a two hour drive away (Louisville, KY) so if there are some who would like to come but can't swing a room I will be happy to change my plans and open my house to those wanting a place to crash. We could all then drive up to Indy for the fun and then drive back to crash before doing it all again the next day. [EDIT] On second thought a 2 hour drive after a day of fun (which for some of us implies drinking [D]) might not be such a good idea. So unless we can end up with a DD in the mix the idea of staying in Louisville probably wont work. Steve