I'm getting some electronic gadgets for Christmas and I'll be converting some analog music to CD and some of that will eventually need to go to my new MP3 player.
Question. Is there a way to go directly from analog to MP3 or will I have to convert my wma, wav ect. files to Mp3?

Also can anyone recommend a good external writer that supports (writes)DVD, CD and photo?

Thanks in advance.

There's no harm is creating a wav for an intermediate file, as it is uncompressed. Be sure to record at the highest possible resolution.

I don't know what would be special about a photo CD for the hardware. The software package is what would support that. I'd recommend a name-brand since they may come with better software.

You say analog - as in tape? Record?

- I would HIGHLY recommend going to wav first. The reason is because you can compress the wav a few ways to find out what sounds best after it's ripped. I have a feeling that, unlike a CD, you can get away with a lower frequency/bitrate and still have it sound about the same as a tape.

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Thanks! While we're at it, can anyone explain in 300 words or less what all the different formats are for? As in DVD-R, DVD+R, CD plus and minus as well as DL and all that other stuff. And why the different "X"? I have a DVD recorder bought just last year and it had to be upgraded just to record 8x and it won't even recognize certain brands of DVD no matter the speed!

DVD+R, +RW, -R and -RW can be read by nearly any DVD player. The R versions are probably more universal, but you'll be hard pressed to find a DVD player which won't read the RW's.

8X refers to the speed, which is eight times normal playback speed (as in, playing a movie).

+R and -R media are both widely available and at the same price. The same goes for +RW and -RW. However, this may not always be the case. There may be a time before your unit is obsolete when one of the pairs is not easily available, so I would recommend getting something that records all four. Any of them will also burn CD's.

DVD-RAM is a bonus which you probably don't need, but might greatly appreciate.

I believe that of the formats, the rewritable disks are actually more stable with time (i.e., more archival). This seems counterintuitive, but it's because of the way the data are recorded.

But what does + and - mean? How are they different?

WAV is not compressed.

Anyone here have any experience or opinions on downloading to an MP3 player without a computer?
Reason I ask is that my computer is 7 years old, but I'm reluctant to invest a big pile of money in a new one simply to listen to music in the car. So far I've been satisfied with recording whatever I want onto (horrors!) cassette tapes. however, one of my vehicle radios has audio inputs for direct connecting a CD or MP3 player. Recently at Target and Sam's Club I've seen a couple of RCA and one Philips compact book-shelf stereo systems with built-in USB ports, that claim to be able to download direct to an MP3. In addition, Panasonic has a model that downloads to an SD card. That unit includes a player that accepts the SD card. Prices range from $70 to $150. The sales-person at Target claimed the units only download from CDs, not the cassette or radio, but claimed he had no owner-manuals for the display models that I could check myself. Idiot suggested I could buy it, then return it if I wasn't happy. (Yeah, I know about restocking fees!)
I'm intrigued with the idea of being able to store a bunch of music on an MP3, instead of dealing with a pile of cassettes in the car, but prefer not to to buy one of these units just to find out if it's adequate or not. Any thoughts?

Happy Motoring, Mark

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Mark: As long as your PC has a USB port and Windows 98 or newer, any PC can use one of those "Modern" MP3 players (iPod, Zune, etc).

buckwheat: wavs are by default not compressed. You can use MP3 compression on a wav - along with other choices - but they're typically not. I believe a CD uses a "raw" format that is not like a wav other than it's sound. Apples and oranges.

Cap'n Carageous: Wow, 300 words or less? Whew. They're different formats. I believe -R came first and was considered inferior to +R for burning performance - but anymore, any PC or DVD player can burn them at a good speed (at least if it has a good drive). I can burn a 4.7GB DVD in 6 mins, fast enough for me. DL is "Dual Layer" - a ~9GB DVD. Costs a lot more. Some movies that are bigger are dual layer format. Dual layer burning wasn't possible for consumers until about 2 years ago, and only became more affordable within the last year or so.

__________________
Current:
2021 Charger Scat Pack Widebody "Sinabee"
2018 Durango R/T

Previous:
1972 280SE 4.5
2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited "Hefe", 1992 Jeep Cherokee Laredo "Jeepy", 2006 Charger R/T "Hemi"
1999 Chrysler 300M - RIP @ 221k

I use a Sony dual RW double layer DVD burner at work and it's very swell.

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[QUOTE=Tomguy;1368547]Mark: As long as your PC has a USB port and Windows 98 or newer, any PC can use one of those "Modern" MP3 players (iPod, Zune, etc).

Well, I'm not really interested in buying tunes from Napster and I currently only have dial-up anyway.
What I really would like is to transfer many of my tapes and LPs to MP3, which I've been told I can't do with my existing computer - a Dell Latitude laptop.

Maybe I'll check out the post-Christmas sales and see if prices on the bookshelf stereos I mentioned have dropped much. (Or I can get hold of an opened box with a manual before I buy)

Happy Motoring, Mark

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DrDKW

As a WAV has a header, a player could use a compressed encoding. I've never seen it, but there are a lot of things that I've never seen. Ripping to a WAV should be done with an uncompressed output which matches the sampling rate of the CD, of course.

CDs are encoded at 44Khz, one 16 bit sample per channel. There's additional information there also, but it doesn't matter for this. They are uncompressed and with no redundancy. If a sample can't be read, it is interpolated from the surrounding samples.

The fact that a CD is uncompressed is not a good thing in reality. This severely limits the S/N ratio for quiet parts of the audio. The minimum difference between samples is unrelated to the magnitude of the signal. This means that although a CD can give you better than 90db S/N, this can only happen for samples which include values close to the maximum sample value. I don't recall the actual S/N ratio in db, but in absolute terms it would be 1/65K. If you record a signal which has a maximum sample value of 4/65K (very quite), the S/N ratio would be (1/65K)/(4/65K) or 1/4. This is 6db.

It is uncompressed because when the format was first produced, the technology to put a decoder in the player was too expensive. Now we're stuck with it.