Best CD ripper/Media player

[davepuma]

I still listen to my CDP/Amp for music as I prefer the quality of a CD to mp3 full stop but sometimes I get lazy and use my one of my media players both for music and video, simply as I can access all my music at the touch of a button. I've never really been that impressed with the music side of things from my dlink. This could be simply as I've got them connected to my AV receiver (set to Direct) and not to my HiFi Amp. I don't think any of my media streamers (Dlink, Xbox360 (can't use it for music, it's doo damn loud) and PS3) have support for lossless.

Anyway, as Hard disks are so cheap at the moment, I've been filling them up with DVD back-ups and thought I might as well get another 500Gb and re-rip my music. I'm looking into an alternative to the media players and the obvious choices are sonos (too expensive), Squeezebox and Soundbridge. I don't want to have the TV on when listening to music, so a HTPC (which I have in the bedroom) is also out. I would like to able to view album art etc (just as gimmick more than anything else). I've read that I could use a PDA to control the media player (SB3) and if I go for one, I'll look into it as I have an unused PDA lying around.

If I do rip to a lossless format (FLAC seems to be the format of choice), what is the best ripper to use? Any guides I should look for?

I use an Iriver 340 as a mp3 player. I think it can support FLAC if I use rockbox (which I've never got round to doing), however, I have around 30gb of music on it at the moment and am more than happy with the sound on it as a portable device. So, I would just stick with mp3 for portable music. I like being able to drag and drop to the Iriver, so I presume I could just convert the file on-the-fly directly to the Iriver. Is that correct?

[trevor g]

hi, easy cd-da extrator. rip cds/multi file converter/ make audio cds/ create
full joliet mp3 cds for the car ect. costs £20.oo from poikesoft.com and has
pacific microsonic audio codecs to ensure quality music. regards trevor

[Autopilot]

Generally, EAC (exact audio copy) is the king of rippers and it's completely free. It's the most accurate and have other great features. Some people dont like it because it's tricky to set up, but there are loads of guides on the net and iit takes just a few mins. CDex is generally regarded second best, DBpowerAMP is also popular because it's nice and easy to use. Technically, Foobar2000 is about the best audio player and have great tagging and conversion tools, but it's basic interface is not for everyone. A great all in one solution is Media Monkey, but personally i prefer a few dedicated tools like EAC as they tend to be better at their specific task.

BTW, you will love you Squeezebox 3 when you get it, they are fantastic

[davepuma]

Thanks for the recommendations guys. I'll check it out.

[bounce]

I have to agree with Autopilot that the EAC/Lame combination is the best solution for ripping CDs. Just make sure that the ripping mode is set to "Secure Mode" rather than "Burst Mode" to get the advantage of the re-sampling/error correction and let the program search it's database fot the optimal rip settings for your CD/DVD drive.

Burst Mode Ripping (iTunes, Windows Media Player etc.) DOES cause problems with skips and jumps - especially on older CDs. A lot of people don't realise this as they assume that CDs are digital and should be perfect. I've gone back and re-ripped a lot of my CDs using EAC for this reason.

Great bit of software and free to boot.

P.S. If you check the "Source" MP3 tag in the extended MP3 tags using something like Mp3Tag, you can see if the track was ripped in Secure or Bust Mode as EAC (and other rippers) write to this tag.

Happy Ripping

[Autopilot]

Yeah, i have recently been listening to CD's perfectly on my SB3 and Portable players which i have not been able to listen to for years, thanks to EAC.

They were scratched enough for them to skip and jump like crazy in CD's players, but almost all the data was there for EAC to rescue. It took up to an hour to rip some badly damaged CD's and reported them as containing many errors, but i can't hear any major problems and they sound sweet to me.

I'm sure a lot of people just give up on scratched CD's because they use Windows Media Player, Sonic Stage, iTunes etc, which have very average ripping engines and can't cope. Certainly not all damaged CD's can be resurrected, but you would be surprised what can sometimes with a decent ripper (and CD/DVD drive).

Another great feature in EAC is it's excellent gap detection.

[davepuma]

Thanks guys. Fortunately, most of my discs are in good nick, so hopefully I won't get too many problems. Just toying with the idea of buying a NAS rather than storing the music on an external drive. I'm having a look at how they're powered up and down.

[amcluesent]

Check out the guide to using squeezebox, ripping and tagging using EAC/FLAC/mp3tag - http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?BeginnersGuide

Since EAC, mp3tag, the slimserver, the softsqueeze player for your PC are all free, you can get the hang of slimserver at no risk, then buy the SB3. You won't regret it.

Slim devices are developing 'Jive' as a means of providing a Sonos style remote control that does album art etc.

There's an add-in to EAC that'll make it rip to FLAC and then generate mp3 as well for your portable player, but there's also plenty of tools to batch process FLAC to mp3 copies.

[avanzato]

I use dbpoweramp reference as I found it fast, easy to use and it will do secure ripping.

[davepuma]

Sorry to drag up an old thread of mine but I have been having a few problems with ripping to flac. I setup EAC using a guide on hydrogenaudio and away I went but it too ages on my laptop (admittedly saving to an external hard drive). So, I gave up and set it all up on my HCPC and started again. This time, things moved on a bit quicker (internal drive for a start) but when I went to playback the file, it had only ripped the first 30 seconds or so, which I presume was down to some form of copy protection on the disc. I thought I would give CDEX a go and it keeps pausing between ripping tracks with a message about flac is not guaranteed or something and only continues the rip once I have closed the message box. Surely ripping to flac shouldn't take a) as long and b) be as complicated and time consuming as this?!!

[Autopilot]

Originally Posted by davepuma

Surely ripping to flac shouldn't take a) as long and b) be as complicated and time consuming as this?!!

There are a few stages in ripping a CD (this is a very simplified rough overview) - getting the data off your CD onto the PC and storing it (temporarily) as a WAV file. The speed of this part depends on things like CD-ROM read speed, bus speeds (USB, IDE) etc. The second part, converting to FLAC, is very much CPU intensive. Whats taking so long? the ripping, or the compression to FLAC?

To speed up ripping (CD extraction); well this also depends on who you set up EAC, Error recovery setting, acurip etc. It's well worth taking the time though, you would be surprised at how good EAC is at recovering scratched CD's. Often a large visible scratch, that renders normal play in a CD player pointless, can be extracted to 100% quality. The quality and condition of the CD will also play a large part.

The only way to speed up the FLAC compression; (other than updating your hardware) is to adjust the compression rate. But i would really not bother messing around too much here. Stick to around level 5. Higher compression levels take a LOT longer, yet barely effect compression ratio any worth while amount.

Remember, you can save a hell of a lot of time and work by ripping all your CD's to WAV, and then do the conversion and compression to FLAC as a batch job while you are in bed/work etc.

EAC and DBpowerAMP are the best rippers you can get, both are free too. Use DBpowerAMP if you really cant get on with it. But you will get there It's well worth spending the time getting to know them, even though it can be frustrating learning new things at times. Good luck.

I'm sure i am missing something, hopefully others will add...

[davepuma]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. It appears that the problem was with the one disc (brand new). I will try it again at a later date but it looks like it has some form of copy protection on it. I ripped it using cdEX (FLAC) and it creatved the Artist and Album folder and the Album contained......nothing!! I should have tried another disc and would have discovered this a lot sooner. At the moment, I am ripping FLAC and it doesn't seem too slow. I think the compression ratio is set at 8, as that is what the guide said was best. If it makes no difference, as you said, I will adjust it to 5 and monitor it. I take it to rip to WAV I just need to copy it uncompressed? I haven't seen any way of doing a batch conversion. I take it this can be done by just selecting all your artist/album folders and doing it using one click?

[Autopilot]

I have never had a CD with copy protection that EAC would not rip perfectly fine. But if it does, there are very simple methods to get around it - Google for them.

DBpowerAMP comes with an extra stand alone program called, wait for it... DBpowerAMP Batch Converter

I tend to use Foobar2000 for my batch jobs (converting FLAC's to MP3 for my iPod).

As for FLAC compression level/speed, well just experiment. Higher settings are probably fine in this age of dual/quad core CPU's