best cd ripping program

[peat]

i swear by a program called CDex
anyone know it

what do you use?
what are the pros and cons of different programs?

[Henry]

EAC Exact Audio Copy. It's free, just google it up.

[Jason Dirckze]

Im not sure why you'd need to rip CD's these days, I just pop em in and drag em onto the desktop. Or chuck em into iTunes...

[Kurt]

That is ripping them...

Im not sure why you'd need to rip CD's these days, I just pop em in and drag em onto the desktop. Or chuck em into iTunes...

[Chris H]

Im not sure why you'd need to rip CD's these days, I just pop em in and drag em onto the desktop. Or chuck em into iTunes...

The diff between Mac and PC i presume.
I don't think PC's especially the old os does the drag and drop things that makes the mac a convenience most of the time...

Still i'm ignorent of most things PC ( and mac!!!! )

[JulienG]

The reason you use EAC or cdparanoia etc. is so that you get an *accurate* *bit-for-bit* rip.

Normally a cd-drive will just stream off the disc and only use error correction if it needs it, on later drives you can detect how much error correction is being used and keep retrying to get as close as possible to what was origionally put down.

[peat]

so pretty much any ripping program would be ok?
as long as youve got a recently built cd drive?

[Kurt]

Pretty much, it just comes down to what features you want and which interface you like best.

Having said that, some are more equal than others, look for accuracy over speed.

Personally I have used Audiograbber (it's free) for ages and I also use dbpoweramp which does all sorts of format conversions as well as cd ripping. (Handy for making mp3's or lossless compression of session files for archiving etc)

so pretty much any ripping program would be ok?
as long as youve got a recently built cd drive?

[JulienG]

so pretty much any ripping program would be ok?
as long as youve got a recently built cd drive?

Not quite, the point with EAC et al is that they listen to the error count from the drive and reread several times if it's above 0 to get the accurate rip. If you just use a simple ripper (eg iTunes) they don't listen and don't care when they get dodgy (or even just plain bad) data.

[peat]

thanks alot julien
ill definitely give EAC a go

kurt
what do you mean by lossless compression?

[Kurt]

Compresion formats like mp3, wma, ac3 etc make files smaller by removing the bits that probably won't be missed much by the listener.
If you convert an mp3 back to a wav file it will sound pretty much like the original.

Formats like flac, ape, shn are lossless formats, they work more like a zip file for wav's, when decompressed the file is identical to the original from which it was created.

The trade off is of course file size, mp3 etc can create a file much smaller than the source wav file, eg the "standard" for internet bound mp3's is 128kbps, this will result in a file approximately 1/10th of the original. Lossless compression formats are lucky to achieve file sizes lower than 3/4 of the original.

thanks alot julien
ill definitely give EAC a go

kurt
what do you mean by lossless compression?

[peat]

thats what i thought you meant kurt
i just wasnt sure
perceptual encoding right

ill look into those formats that you said are lossless
are they playable
or do you have to turn them back into wavs to play them

[Kurt]

They're playable if you install the direct show filters in windows, not sure if there are equivalents for macs.

thats what i thought you meant kurt
i just wasnt sure
perceptual encoding right

ill look into those formats that you said are lossless
are they playable
or do you have to turn them back into wavs to play them

[Kris]

I got all the sydney U2 shows as bootlegs in the FLAC format. I am yet to source it but I am told a FLAC plug in does exist for itunes.

I supply files to the iTunes store in Apple Lossless format.

[smash]

http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

FLAC for iTunes