In past years I would always buy physical copies of CDs and then rip them to my PC, for transferring to players later. Nowadays I usually only buy digital copies of albums, but I wanted to go back and move my previous mp3 library to my current desktop.
All our prior CD albums had been ripped and uploaded to Google Music, which in recent years is now YouTube Music. With Google Music you could upload and download as you wished, but with YouTube Music there is no download option anymore, the only way to get copies of your uploaded files is to request a Google Takeout request.
After downloading 20x 2GB zips for our entire CD collection, I stumbled across this realization that some of the CDs had been ripped with a shockingly low bit rate:
Luckily most tracks were at least 128kbps (even that’s low by current standards where I wouldn’t normally rip anything less than mp3’s 320kbps maximum rate), but there is still around 400 tracks at various rates below 100kbps, and some as low as these, around 50kbps.
At various points in the past years I had considered selling or just donating all my physical CDs but I never actually got to the point of committing. In this case I’m glad I still have the original discs so I can re-rip them and get better copies. I’m sure most people with large audio collections have gone through the process of comparing bitrates to see if they can tell the difference. The only reason I can think that some of these were ripped at such a low rate was to get the lowest file size possible for playback on a portable mp3 player. Nowadays storage is large and cheap that filesize of music files is really not a concern, even with lossless formats. I’ve bought albums in recent years in hi-res audio formats from HD Tracks, so ripping these again at either 320kbps mp3s or even as lossless flac is definitely an option.
I’ve gone through the exercise of comparing bit rates before in the past to see if I can tell a difference. I can just hear a difference between 128kbps and 320kbps on good headphones (e.g. my current 11 year old Audio Technica M50S), but the files I have here in 50kbps sound incredibly muffled and are lacking any definition at all, so it makes sense to re-rip them again to something better quality.
Reading around it seems Exact Audio Copy is the current ripper of choice. I followed this guide to setup for ripping mp3s, and this guide using flac for lossless.
Comparing the same tracks in 320kbps and flac I can barely tell the difference, there may be some clearer treble on cymbals in flac, but it’s barely noticeable to my ear. At least now these lates rips should be good for another 20 years or so… 🙂