Music for Unitiqute

Posted by: plimpington2 on 23 November 2010

Hi,

OK, I've been without dedicated audio for about five years and my cd's are collecting dust (the vinyl long since moved on). I'm just about ready to pull the trigger on a unitqute. As I will likely have no cd player (worthy of playing cd's anyway), I'm in the process of ripping my music to the computer. My question is this:

What bit rate do I want to use to convert them? My options include 192khz. I assume this one.

Second, what format do I use? I don't use itunes (i'm using Windows media player)? My options include:
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio Pro
Windows Media Audio (Variable bit rate)
Windows Media Audio lossless
MP3
WAV (lossless)

The main communication technique with the Qute will be via USB memory stick or over the wireless (with my laptop as the server).

I have to be honest, this digital audio stuff is a black box to me.

Thanks
-J
Posted on: 23 November 2010 by David Dever
44.1 kHz / 16-bit, uncompressed WAV – but do try a couple options as regards ripping and music management, as you'll find quite a few divergent opinions here as regards rip quality / best practices, etc.
Posted on: 24 November 2010 by okli
welcome to the digital jungle :-)

if you are on windows, the most popular ripping software is EAC (free) and dbpoweramp (38$ + VAT for EC). I've started with EAC, but very soon moved to dbpoweramp, because of the better UI and most important the additional features such as converting between different formats and metadata editor. Moreover, there is a very detailed manual at their homepage what settings you need and for some of them even a help how to determine them (drive offset, cache, etc). I would suggest you first take a look there. Most important to you, both of these products has an option for sample rate and bit depth "same as input", which is the best choice.
Regarding the format, there are a lot of discussions here, but I threw away WAV in favour of FLAC, because of the file size and most important the metadata support - WAV does not support tags directly and I'm not aware of a software, which can process metadata within WAV files at the moment. On the other side FLAC is emerging almost as a standard in the non-Apple world and all online stores provide FLAC downloads, so sooner or later you'll get some FLAC files in 24bit/96 kHz (believe me - I was infected very soon, too :-)...).
So my suggestion is to try dbpoweramp with FLAC first (you can test dbpoweramp for 30 days) and then consider the other possibilities, if you are not satisfied with the results.

Enjoy!
Posted on: 24 November 2010 by Michael Chare
If you want to use Windows Media Player as the Upnp server then Windows Media Audio Lossless would give you the best quality.

WMP does not support FLAC.

If you wish to use FLAC then, on Window, you could use a Unpnp server such as Foobar.

DBpoweramp will convert Windows Media Audio Lossless file to FLAC. There is a batch option. So if you start of with WMP and WMA Lossless, you can change to FLAC later.