CD Ripping software

Was introduced to a free software today at work, Audacity. Seemed pretty comprehensive.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Dave

*By far* the most popular proram is FooBar2000. It does ripping, it acts as modern-day jukebox - giving you access to ALL of your music without having to haul yer lazy are outta that Barcalounger. It does network streaming (look it up, good thing got the advanced audiophile)

BTW, it is TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY, FREE and has the broadest support of any of the similar products. It uses plug-in technology allow developer to easily write and publish additional capabilitied to the product. Go take a look, it is *incredible* that software this good is truly free - there IS a God!

-RW-

Since posting I did a bit more research.

Mapman is right about EAC. Very difficult to understand (as the author is German and his English can be a bit confusing). Very complex program, hard to understand how to use it. It is free, however, donations are suggested.

dBpoweramp is pay for use. Better supported as there is a dedicated tech forum that is well moderated. Apparently this software came out of development at EAC, so they are similar. Both use that Acurrip data base for file comparison. I just wonder if any of the esoteric Japanese remasters or MFSL stuff is in that data base. If no more than 1 or two users have put data for these recordings in the acurrip database, it is useless.

The reason I mention scanning the CD source before ripping is that the secure ripping features are not really needed if there are no C2 errors on your disk. For those, a "burst" rip done by Win MP should be as good and error free. Its just that with MP you get no assurance or feedback that the digital copy is indeed error free (like you do with EAC or dBpoweramp). In fact, the most reliable error free copies are obtained by dBpoweramp when the CDROM has C2 error detection support.

That being said I have started scanning a number of my audio CDs and have found some with very low C1 error rates (under 30) and zero C2 errors to some with thousands of both. On the latter, I would not expect bit perfect copies with Media Player. But would with the former. dBpoweramp warns, however, that its software may cause premature wear on your CDROM if it has to do a lot of error correction for CDs with C2 errors.

Don't know much about Foobar, but I don't think it does "secure" ripping. So it would not be any better than Win MP for .WAV files.

Try ripping to WAV with J.River Media Center 16 in "Secure x4 max" mode.

J. River offers 30 days fully functional trial, so there is nothing to loose.

Hope this helps!

Alex Peychev

I'm not sure why you are insisting on WAV. You'll just make more work for yourself down the road if you ever want to tag your files.