Which CD ripper do you use?

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Which CD ripper do you use?

  • Itunes

    Votes: 14 56.0%
  • WMP

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Exact Audio Copy

    Votes: 5 20.0%
  • dBpoweramp

    Votes: 4 16.0%
  • foobar2000

    Votes: 1 4.0%
  • Winamp

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • CDex

    Votes: 1 4.0%
  • Easy CD-DA Extractor

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Audiograbber

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • others (please specify in the thread)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    25

dirtpeach

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Just wondering what ripper most iPod users use and why.

To start I use EAC because of its secure mode and because it's free.

I have used CDex a long time ago with a non-caching drive for a few CDs EAC couldn't rip. Since that drive bit the dust, I use EAC mainly and foobar2000 as a backup in case EAC can't rip it without errors.

I have not experienced a single audible skip or click with these 3 rippers. I'm glad I didn't have to start with iTunes or WMP before discovering them.
 
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Code Monkey

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Astro_Digital said:
I use iTunes because it is free too and it works.
I've got a few hundred hours of my life I'd like back ripping in iTunes when I first started followed with subsequently re-ripping with EAC that says otherwise. iTunes blithely ignores rip errors no matter whether error correction is on or not (why I had to re-rip everything). It also lacks drive offset and drive cache detection/purge options; this guarantees that it's only ripping accurately on a very small percentage of the drives out there. The result is that many, if not most, iTunes rips will contain CRC mismatch errors from the original audio even if they're not necessarily noticeable.

For the average schmoe, it probably works well enough, but if you care about accurate rips, you will not use iTunes.
 

Astro_Digital

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What you said makes no sense at all to me.
I am not into this and I have no time to learn either.

Error correction, drive offset, CRC mismatch all mean nothing to me.

All I want is put my CD in, walk away and when I come back have music in my library that I can sync my iPod with, and iTunes does it everytime.

I can not tell the difference between songs i listen to on my CD or my iPod, I am an average schome.
 

Code Monkey

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Astro_Digital said:
What you said makes no sense at all to me.
I am not into this and I have no time to learn either.

Error correction, drive offset, CRC mismatch all mean nothing to me.
Error correction: any CD ripper worth its salt will read each file (or each part of the file) multiple times and make sure it always gets the same value. If it doesn't, it will continue re-reading the mismatched parts with different methods until it can either say with certainty it has figured out the correct data or it will tell you that file can't be read properly. If there is no error correction or notification, you wind up with audio tracks filled with pops, skips, and all manner of garbage when it encounters a scratch or smudge that scatters the laser improperly. Since most times you could have cleaned or polished the CD to get an accurate read, this wastes your time discovering the problem and re-ripping. Then, since iTunes won't tell you if a rip is good or not, it wastes even more of your time repeating the process indefinitely trying to get a good rip from a problem disc.

CRC mismatch: this is basically a digital fingerprint of a computer file. The audio data for a lossless CD rip should be the exact same for any rip from that same pressing of the CD. If someone gets a different CRC value for a given pressing of a CD than everyone else, that indicates there is a flaw in the rip. Verification methods like AccurateRip, used by dBpoweramp and EAC to name two major quality rippers, use these values for external validation of a rip's fidelity.

Drive offset: very few CD drives actually read the start and stop of an audio file accurately, they are usually off by certain amount of data frames. If you don't correct for this offset then you always have that many frames of data either padded onto or missing from the ripped file's beginning and ending. Since offsets for some drives are more than a tenth of a second's worth of audio data, this is not trivial, particularly where gapless CDs are concerned.

All I want is put my CD in, walk away and when I come back have music in my library that I can sync my iPod with, and iTunes does it everytime.
You get out of things the amount of effort you put in. I may spend a bit longer ripping my music than you, but my archive is just that, an archive, bit for bit identical to the original CD so that I'll never have to re-rip again. To me, that makes a lot more sense than taking shortcuts.
 
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misper666

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i'm not really bothered about the benefits of using EAC or foobar over the itunes error correction since i repair any scratched CDs i have with an automated CD repairer / polisher. some discs require more grading down as the scratches are deeper / cause read errors but as the data is actually right near the label underneath all the coats of polycarbonate this is not a problem. if this doesn't resolve it after 3 or 4 attempts i won't bother with that particular disc.

i don't really have the time for a middleman program like this. my ripping is like this: ensure disc is good enough for ripping (see above). import with itunes & edit any info. sync ipod. done.
 

dirtpeach

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CDs are expensive. CDs get scratched. They get sat on. Friends and family don't give them back. Even if they stored in a box in your closet, they will deteriorate. It's called disc rot.

The extra time it takes to make sure that a rip is secure is worth it for me. Also dBpoweramp can be as easy as iTunes to setup and just as fast. EAC is a bit slower but it's free and also easy to setup. You don't have to learn the technical terms of these rippers just the fact that your rips will have exactly the same data as your CDs without any errors.
 

kornchild2002

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I value my music and rip to a lossless archive on my 2TB drive. I don't see the benefits in using iTunes to rip my CDs to ALAC (or AAC for that matter) just to listen to some tracks and hear audible flaws such as bleeps or bloops. What is the point of ripping with iTunes if a certain percentage of my CDs is going to come out this way?

That is why I take the extra second to rip with dBpowerAMP to ALAC for archive purposes. I don't see why someone would complain about not having the time for a "middleman" program like EAC and dBpowerAMP when it really takes just a second longer. So my ripping is like this: insert disc, import with dBpowerAMP, copy into iTunes, sync to iPod, done. Both EAC and dBpowerAMP don't take extra time to rip an audio CD. I could see complaining about their time if each program took 30 minutes to rip a CD while iTunes only took 4 but that is just not the case.

Instead of complaining about the one second it takes to copy the files over into iTunes, I think the real reason should be noted: lack of motivation to learn how to use a slightly more complicated CD ripper. People see iTunes for what it is and they often rely on it for all their music needs. They insert a CD, rip it, sync to their iPod, and are oblivious to what is actually going on. They could care less about the error due to iTunes ripping, they just want their music and they want it now. That works for them and it is fine if people don't want to use a new program. Just don't go around complaining about the time it takes to learn/use a dedicated ripping program, that is complaining about nothing.
 

dirtpeach

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Secure ripping is not really a new or complicated technology. I wonder why Apple with all its resources haven't added the feature to iTunes. Instead it adds useless bloat like Genius playlists. Could it be the record labels influencing Apple to not let iTunes users have perfect copies of their CDs?

@misper666
How can middleman programs be a waste of time and using a CD polisher isn't?
 

kornchild2002

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I never thought about a CD re-surface device being a middleman just as much as a dedicated ripping program, that is insteresting. That is why I say that misper just isn't motivated to learn how to use a new ripping program as the time it takes to rip a CD with dBpowerAMP and import it into iTunes takes about the same amount of time as it does to rip the CD straight with iTunes.

As for iTunes not being secure, I don't know why Apple hasn't made it secure. They could very well do so as secure ripping technology is nothing new. EAC has been able to securely rip CDs dating before 2003. It took dBpowerAMP many years to catch up to EAC but they did it and many would argue that they have passed EAC. Free commercial programs don't normally have secure CD ripping methods. WinAmp, Windows Media Player, MusicMatch, CDex, and many others just aren't secure. Hell, foobar2000 isn't even secure but it has the ability to sync data with the AccurateRip database (I think CDex does as well).

I guess I fail to see why someone would go through all the time to rip their CDs just to use something like iTunes (the iTunes AAC encoder isn't bad though) that could introduce audible errors into a song.
 

Code Monkey

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I don't even get the middleman argument in the first place. Letting iTunes rip your music is like asking your accountant to repair the roof on your house while he's going over your taxes. It's a music management program, and at that it's excellent, the best I've ever used, but as a ripper (and as a player and as a tag editor) it's simply a substandard solution who's single good point is that it lets you skip a single step for importing music. You'll still need to normalise the volume on the files, you'll still need to go over the tags and make sure they're correct, you'll still need to embed album art, and you'll still need to convert to a lossy format (nobody is ever going to convince me that ripping to lossy is anything other than ignorance in action). The importing is the easiest part of all: select files, right click -> send to: #DONE, go into iTunes, ALT-F -> D -> RETURN

I don't even begin to understand the logic of people who will argue that skipping one mouse select, one right click, and a quick four key combo is worth giving up accuracy in copying CDs. If you had one bank that lost 2% of your money and one that didn't, but the one that didn't reqired you to travel an extra block, I guess you'd all opt for losing 2% of your money? It's just 2% and there is that extra block to deal with. I'll never understand most people. The internet makes it almost fall off a log simple to learn how to do things right, and it puts the tools to do things the right way at your finger tips, but it's still too much effort to bother with...
 

drewhiggins

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I rip with Foobar to WAV format and then copy that to an external drive.

For iPod, I convert those files to 192Kbps MP3 with Foobar + LAME. For me, iTunes takes forever to do the same thing. It is used purely for syncing...artwork and tagging is done with other means.
 

misper666

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kornchild2002 said:
I value my music and rip to a lossless archive on my 2TB drive. I don't see the benefits in using iTunes to rip my CDs to ALAC (or AAC for that matter) just to listen to some tracks and hear audible flaws such as bleeps or bloops. What is the point of ripping with iTunes if a certain percentage of my CDs is going to come out this way?

That is why I take the extra second to rip with dBpowerAMP to ALAC for archive purposes. I don't see why someone would complain about not having the time for a "middleman" program like EAC and dBpowerAMP when it really takes just a second longer. So my ripping is like this: insert disc, import with dBpowerAMP, copy into iTunes, sync to iPod, done. Both EAC and dBpowerAMP don't take extra time to rip an audio CD. I could see complaining about their time if each program took 30 minutes to rip a CD while iTunes only took 4 but that is just not the case.

Instead of complaining about the one second it takes to copy the files over into iTunes, I think the real reason should be noted: lack of motivation to learn how to use a slightly more complicated CD ripper. People see iTunes for what it is and they often rely on it for all their music needs. They insert a CD, rip it, sync to their iPod, and are oblivious to what is actually going on. They could care less about the error due to iTunes ripping, they just want their music and they want it now. That works for them and it is fine if people don't want to use a new program. Just don't go around complaining about the time it takes to learn/use a dedicated ripping program, that is complaining about nothing.
who was complaining?
 

misper666

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dirtpeach said:
Secure ripping is not really a new or complicated technology. I wonder why Apple with all its resources haven't added the feature to iTunes. Instead it adds useless bloat like Genius playlists. Could it be the record labels influencing Apple to not let iTunes users have perfect copies of their CDs?

@misper666
How can middleman programs be a waste of time and using a CD polisher isn't?
interesting, where exactly did i say it was a waste of time? tut tut.

i just posted my alternative, which i may use only for a few discs, otherwise (and as someone mentioned disc rot), i tend to look after my discs & not leave them in sunlight & open air if i can help it. most times i will get a disc it is new one & will be ripped straight away. this is my choice

totally agree itunes should incorporate this & ditch some of the gimmicky stuff. but you gotta look at the target audience. we're not all audiophiles from birth, some of us are learning as we go, new headphones, experimenting with different bitrates... and wading through the audiophile snobbery :rolleyes:
 

dirtpeach

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misper666 said:
i don't really have the time for a middleman program like this.
You didn't exactly say it was a waste of time. You just have time to use a CD polisher but not a middleman program.
 
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