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Problems with traditional ripping and listening

Ripping, tagging and listening to digital music, you might think, what's the fuss, how difficult can this be? Just rip the audio CD to some MP3 files, tag them with some album and track information, fire up your favorite media player, point to the created files and there you go.

But soon, you bump to the boundaries of this simple approach. So, what are these problems and why do the lead to the 3A concept?

Which audio format should I choose, MP3 or something else?

First, there's the choice of the audio format. Most people choose for MP3, but there are many more to chose from, for instance ogg or wma to name a few. The same problem as with the choice of the quality level arises: once you've made a choice and decide later on for something different, there's no way back except for reripping and retagging your complete CD collection (this could be easily the third time)...

At what quality level should I rip my CD?

Next, there's the never ending story of choosing the right quality rip level: the higher the level, the higher the audio quality will be but also, the bigger the ripped file will be. For example, you settle for 128 Kbit/s after some examination of different quality levels. There's a point where you cannot here any difference, you think it's no use to go any higher because it will cost you valuable disk space. Also, with smaller files, more tracks fit on your portable media player.

Next, you decide to update your audio equipment and very soon, you come to the conclusion that the chosen quality level is not enough, the audio quality is not sufficient. What to do? Re-rip your complete collection? When do you know what quality level is enough? And after that, you end up with bigger audio files so less tracks on your portable audio pl ayer...

How do I synchronise two sets of music files with different quality levels?

To circumvent the problem of having the highest audio quality for your fixed audio equipment and the smallest files for your portable audio player, you decide to maintain two different sets of files, fully identical with the only difference the quality level. But what happens when you change a tag, for example name of the album of a file in one set? Do you change the corresponding file in the other set also? You must be thinking, this must be done automatically...

How can I access my music files from multiple computers?

When you have more than one computer, say a desktop computer and a laptop, you want to enjoy music on both your computers. The simple approach: copy the entire file tree from one computer to another. This poses the problem of resynchronising the trees once in a while. Sure there are tools for this, but it is still something which cannot be forgotten. A more intelligent approach: stay with only one file tree, place them on the desktop PC and access the tree from another computer through file sharing. This works well, as long as the computer which contains the music files, is always online which is of course not the case because it's a normal desktop computer which will be switched off when not in use...

And how to move on?

If you are running into one ore more of the problems with the current method of ripping, tagging and listening, you need the concept of 3A. It can actually solve all these problems and gives you even more options to enjoy your music.

Advanced Audio Architecture