I did a search for this but all the answers were a couple years old and I know there is much newer technology since then.
My questions are if I back up my cd's to mp3's what quality is near cd? I know there use to be 192, then 256 and now 320kb and some are sample bit rate. Which is better? I heard 320 is near cd quality. Is this true?
Then how do I put the song titles on the backup disc? They never seem to transfer. What do I need to do to get my player to read them. My player does show titles.
Thanks for your help in this matter. Oh yea, I use the latest version of Nero Utlra. Is there anything better for this? If so I really would like it to be free since I already paid for Nero.
Nancy

320 is best quality, 192 is CD quality.

320 is best quality, 192 is CD quality.
Not to my ears.

Any mp3 bit rate is less than cd quality. It's a lossy compression format - something always gets tossed during conversion. And once it's gone, it's gone forever.

But, yes, 320Kbps would be close to "near cd quality".

But consider that the CD is the equivalent of 1.4Mbps.

192 throws away way too much information to even be considered "near" cd quality. Maybe "FM Radio quality" is more like it since both cut everything off above 16KHz. 128 cuts off everything above 14KHz.

At any rate, I'm sure Nero will do what you need. I've never used it but there must be some way for Nero to pull the track names off the net (as most software players and rippers do - either from Freedb.org or gracenote that stores track names from cd's). Then Nero should save the mp3's with the song name and artist as part of the filename. If it can't find the info for any particular disc, you still have the opportunity to tell Nero somewhere in the program what the track name is. Check it's help file if you have to.

If all you want to do is make a straight backup of the CD, do you really need to convert them to mp3 at all? You can save as uncompressed wave files, still with the title file names pulled of the net (or added manually), and burn them to a back-up CD-R as an audio CD with CD-Text turned on and your CD-Text capable player will now display the track names instead of just the track number. Sure, the wave files will be huge - around 11MB per minute of audio - but that IS cd quality because it's the same format internally and you lose nothing sound-wise.

Thanks for the help. That helps clear things up.

i'm kind of late for saying this, but 128kbps is pretty good too...

i'm kind of late for saying this, but 128kbps is pretty good too at an even smaller file size...