First, Specs.

ALpine cda-9833
Front: Alpine 6.5 Type R
Back: ALpine 6x9 Type S

I salvaged a few older CD's by using the toothpaste trick and ripped them to my computer at 128kb/s. Would it sound better in my car cd player if I burn it as an audio CD (ie .cda and takes up a lot more room on the cd) or as an mp3 CD (and fit all the cd's on one disc).

Basicly, is there any sound differance between burning mp3's in the format of an audio disc (.cda) or an mp3 disc (.mp3).

128kb/s .mp3 -> .cda = better sound quality?

128kb/s .mp3 -> .mp3 disc = same as above quality?

Thanks for any input!

 

what's the toothpaste trick....sorry, off topic

 

mp4 = cd
mp3 = lowwer then cd

ok what the toothpaste trick [img]graemlins/dunno.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/dunno.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/dunno.gif[/img]

 

Put toothpaste on a damaged cd (scratched) and rub like hell with paper towel. It eventually "polishes" the surface around the scratch so that it can be read. The cd doesn't last long and looks terrible after this, but it is a good way to get data out of a damaged disc.

dumbest, even though the cd or mp3 cd is coming from the same 128bit source the audio cd will sound better than the mp3 cd? Hasn't the data already been lost by the ripping of the cd to mp3 format?

 

That's what I thought as well. But then why is the .cda so much bigger than the .mp3 when it is burned?

 

When you "ripped the CDs to 128kbps" your software extracted the CD data and then encoded it into 128kbps MP3s. 128kbps is a low quality bitrate and IMO sounds awful. Regardless of what you do with these MP3s (convert to CDA, burn audio CDs, upsample to a higher bitrate, etc.) they will still sound awful because you're starting with a 128kbps compressed source.

For best results, take your original toothpasted CDs and use your burning software to make direct copies (audio CDs). If you want the albums in MP3 format, rip the files off the original CDs using a higher bitrate (256kbps or 320kbps).

Hope this helps

 

Alright, so if I rip them at a higher bit rate (provided I can read them again), would I get better quality by burning the mp3's as .cda's or would it be the same quality if I burn them as an mp3 disc since the data has already been lost?

 

[img]graemlins/thumb.gif[/img]

Exactly the response I was looking for to re-affirm what I thought.

 

If you can read the original CDs, the data has not "already been lost" and you can pretty much do whatever you want quality-wise. Just be sure that your software is just "ripping" the audio data and not "ripping and encoding into MP3" as was the case before. Or adjust the settings so that a higher bitrate is being used for encoding.

CDA is basically uncompressed CD Audio data so there is no size or compatibility advantage to CDA. You might as well just make direct copies of each disc in Audio CD format.

If you're having trouble reading the CDs then try using CDex to rip them, with "Full Paranoia" turned on (under "CD Drive" in the config window). I've had good results using this method to read damaged discs. Download CDex here:

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

Rip the tracks to WAV using CDex and then use your burning software to create audio CDs using the WAV files. Perfect quality!