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[maynerd]

Hello all,

Once again I come to the place of vast knowledge known as GAF for assistance. I have about 1000+ CDs that I would like to rip to MP3s. I need some advice on the best way to rip cds.

I was just thinking about using iTunes to rip but I don't know how good of an encoder iTunes is.

I seem to remember using Exact Audio Copy and the Lame encoder but it took forever to rip a cd. I don't know how much better the result was but man was it slow.

Disk space isn't too big of an issue. But I don't want to go with lossless recordings. I'm looking for a balance of quality, size and ripping speed. With quality being the most important.

Can anyone make any good recomendations to me?

Thanks!

Maynerd

 

[Christopher]

iTunes def gets the job done with little to no sacrifice on quality. However if you convert them to AAC to save space on your iPod, then you might have to suffer a bit. However, by converting all my songs to AAC I have TONS of more space on my iPod.

 

[Phoenix]

AAC is generally a good compromise format and iTunes can crank those out pretty quickly. I haven't found lossless to be that much more space considering the price of picking up another drive, however.

 

[Great King Bowser]

CDex

 

[maynerd]

I should clarify a bit more. I don't want to use any other format other than MP3. I also don't want to use software that isn't free. Free is best!

 

[Ecrofirt]

CDex

 

[The Faceless Master]

CDex

 

[GaimeGuy]

CDex

 

[evil ways]

I use FreeRip. It's free and easy to use.

 

[HokieJoe]

One of the best encoders you can use is LAME- and it's free. You'll need a front-end for it though, as it's only an encoder/decoder.

LAME

 

[maynerd]

CDex

Thanks guys. Looks like CDex is getting a lot of love here. What settings are you CDex users using?

Maynerd

 

[Red Dolphin]

I use CDex too.

I usually rip at CBR of 192. But I've heard of ppl doing variable bit rate is becoming a lot more common. It's harder to tell what "quality" they are if you didn't rip them yourself though.

 

[Argyle]

I still use EAC. I haven't used CDex but if it's not using a secure extraction mode, I'd avoid it.

EAC is definitely slower but how much slower depends on your CD reader hardware. On my old Lite-On CD burner it's not bad - gets up to 24x on the outside edge of the disc, rips the whole thing in a few minutes.

As for why I don't use something faster...I'd rather rip something slowly and do it the right way once, rather than rip something quickly and then hear all the glitches and pops later. This is especially true if you're ripping a thousand CDs - do you really want to listen to all of them right after you rip them to make sure they don't have pops and skips?

Either way, you should be using LAME to encode your mp3s - I recommend --alt-preset standard as a good compromise between quality and storage space.

Edit: Looks like CDex might be ok - it looks like there's a "full paranoia" mode which is equivalent to EAC - make sure you use that

One apparent caveat is that CDEx seems to have problems ripping gapless mp3s (that is, ripping an album with no spaces between tracks as separate mp3 files per track)...

If you use EAC with LAME to rip and then use something like Foobar to play it back, this won't be a problem. I assume there's some way to do this properly in CDex but looking at their forum, it doesn't look that obvious - maybe someone here who uses it regularly can shed more light on how to do this properly?

 

[navanman]

i agree with using EAC, its may be slow but it is the best out there.
see this link to configure EAC to rip perfect mp3s.
http://www.cd-rw.org/articles/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm

 

[Sagitario]

I'll rip some of my CDs soon... thread bookmarked for later use... =)

 

[Lemurnator]

That shit is way to complicated.

Do these programs have built in taggers?

 

[aoi tsuki]

That shit is way to complicated.

Do these programs have built in taggers?

It's a pretty simple step-by-step process, especially if you've used EAC before.

And yes, EAC and CDEx have built-in taggers.