Ripping CD's

For some reason, and disregarding advice from the Admin many many moons ago, pretty much all of the music on my computer is ripped at 128kbps. oops

I'm getting a nice, new HDD tomorrow and I want to re-rip most of my CD's since I'll have the space to accomodate the bigger, better files. So I was wondering what you guys use to rip your CD's? I'd like something that's somewhat advanced.

I downloaded EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and tried using the MP3 Lame encoder to rip a CD to an MP3 at 320kbps but it kept making the files WAV's. Anyone else use this and know how to "work" it?

I don't want to go Lossless so what's better than 320kbps MP3 but that doesn't take up a huge amount of space?

+karma for help. D

I rip everything at 320K VBR New at high HQ using Winamp Pro.

Here's my WinAmp rip settings

http//www.morrisonline.us/pics/winamprip.png[" alt=""/img5c58c55461]

I bought the Pro version of WinAmp ($20 I think, well worth it). Don't remember if the free version rips MP3's or not.

I used EAC a long time ago and had some issues with it, but supposedly it's the best ripper if you configure it for perfect rips and have the patience for it. For me it's a waste of time -- my 320VBR rips with WinAmp sound perfect to my ears. I play 'em on both my desktop and my iPod.

I like to use AudioGrabber[=http//www.audiograbber.com-us.net/]AudioGrabber. It also has freedb integrated to grab CD info.

[quoteeb140da9b3="dmorris68"]I rip everything at 320K VBR New at high HQ using Winamp Pro.

Here's my WinAmp rip settings

http//www.morrisonline.us/pics/winamprip.png[" alt=""/imgeb140da9b3]

I bought the Pro version of WinAmp ($20 I think, well worth it). Don't remember if the free version rips MP3's or not.

I used EAC a long time ago and had some issues with it, but supposedly it's the best ripper if you configure it for perfect rips and have the patience for it. For me it's a waste of time -- my 320VBR rips with WinAmp sound perfect to my ears. I play 'em on both my desktop and my iPod.[/quoteeb140da9b3]

Yeah I have the same, and used it a couple of times and it worked great. It also has the ability to grab the CD information from teh interwebs.

Anyway, the reason I was looking for something other than Winamp was because some of the CD's I wanted to rip and upload to Oink. They're very strict on the quality and the users are pretty picky when it comes to quality, so I wanted to make sure that I'd be ripping it and people not complain about it or that I did something wrong.

Anyway, I had my Winamp CD Ripping settings at this

[img="eb140da9b3]http/" alt=""/img138.imageshack.us/img="138/639/winampgq9.png[" alt=""/imgeb140da9b3]

Much of a difference between that and your settings?

Would you mind using WMA? I rarely use it but even at 128k quality, it sounds like it is 192k MP3 quality.

You get good quality at small size. I had a bunch of 64kbps WMA's to post online and they sound just like 128k.

I'd rather they were 320. At the very least, for uploading on Oink they have to be 192 so anything less would either be deleted or I'd be banned (or both).

Seriously, go with FLAC if Oink is the reason.

FLAC rips cannot be topped on Oink. If you do a rip at 192k, someone will steal your ratio by upping at 320k. When you do a FLAC rip, people will grab it.

From what I've seen, if the CD is a fairly recent release, then a lot of people on Oink will skip over anything but FLAC. That's not true elsewhere. A lot of recent stuff can be grabbed off Demonoid or other sites, but people go to Oink for high quality rips, and rareties.

I know you don't want to fill that drive too fast, but if you think you have something popular that people want, and it's not up in FLAC already, do it in FLAC. It should help your ratio.

So what would I need to rip the CD's to FLAC?

I don't know if you've seen this yet, but just in case

Oink ripping tutorial[=http//oink.me.uk/forums.php?action=viewtopic&topicid=39605]Oink ripping tutorial

Basically, EAC and the FLAC front end is what you need, but I'd recommend installing Accuraterip as well.

I'll echo Tholek's post on FLAC. It's really a great lossless format and for uploading, people love it because it gives you lossless recordings that can be re-ripped down. The files are quite large (45mb for a 4 1/2 min song), but worth it.

As a side note, I've got most of my songs ripped in AAC format 128, and my MP3 files ripped at 160 for my ipod, but anything I want to share or keep around, gets ripped in FLAC.

check out my faq

go down to the software section -> file conversions

flac rocks
i have over 400 gigs in flac of live shows

Ok, so I just used EAC to test rip a CD in FLAC using the Oink tutorial.

Even though I specified the file extensions to end in .flac,url==http://=http:///url they're all .wav,url==http://=http:///url just as when I try to rip the CD as MP3.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Also, jy3, what FAQ are you talking about?

lol i left out the link
check ur pm

EAC rips to wav always, from what i remember about using it. then you do your conversion elsewhere. FLACfrontend lets you convert that wav to a FLAC file. another lossless format is SHN, which is basically the same as FLAC but results in slightly higher filesizes. you would use mkw to convert to that.

i use easy cdda extractor for my ripping, it does a variety of formats and qualities, but i just do it straight to mp3.

I use Easy CD-DA Extractor[=http//www.poikosoft.com/]Easy CD-DA Extractor to rip all my CDs. It gives you a ton of options (3G2, 3GP, MP1, MP2, MP3, Windows Media Audio, Ogg Vorbis, MP4, M4A, AAC, aacPlus v1 (HE-AAC, AAC+), aacPlus v2 (HE-AAC v2, HE-AAC+PS, eAAC+), FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Monkey's Audio, Shorten, CUE and M3U) and it also has a converter if you ripped a CD in one format but need it now in another. Its a great program...

hoorah wolfey! that program kicks butt \m/ i found it when none of my old ripping software from win 98 would work on xp heh

[quoteaf7e0ffdd5="kyks17"]hoorah wolfey! that program kicks butt \m/ i found it when none of my old ripping software from win 98 would work on xp heh[/quoteaf7e0ffdd5]
Its really funny because I started my post before I saw yours and we both said the same program at the same time. Its the best one out there IMO. I love that they are constantly updating to stay with the times (FLAC, OGG). The interface is so simple. They use the CDDB to get track names which saves time having to rename. I've been using it for years and never found anything else worth switching over for.

Anyone have an Oink invite they can PM me )?

Frank, the tutorial explains that you have to set the compression options (under file) to use the external flac encoder.

It should look like this

http/" alt=""/img378.imageshack.us/img="378/971/eacfortsjxm8.jpg[" alt=""/imge5c4d7e886]

I then set "Append Gaps To Previous Tracks" (under action) as default, and save the profile (at the bottom) as "FLAC". I have profiles set for LAME and others as well. I also installed the Accuraterip plugin, so the drive offset was exactly set.

That's basically it for the one time setup.

Everytime I do a rip, this is what I do

1. Ensure the ID3 info is correct. (Edit if necessary)
2. Detect Gaps
3. Create CUE sheet (Multi Wavs With Gaps - Noncompliant)
4. Hit Crtl+A (Highlight all tracks).
5. Choose Test and Copy Selected Tracks - [be5c4d7e886]Compressed[/be5c4d7e886]

That compressed part or setting EAC to use the external encoder may be the problem. Good luck. )

Use Easy CD-DA P

Ohhhhh, but chef of the future, does it do 100% accurate rips? ;)

Yeah, you may not notice the difference, but this is EACs claim to fame.

Tholek said and posted what I was going to post.

On the Mac side, there is a tool called xACT which has all sorts of FLAC options for importing and exporting.

To reiterate it is frowned upon to use anything like Winamp or WMP to rip cds in order to upload them to OiNK. A true audiophile can tell the difference.

@TSJ If you follow the directions exactly on the OiNK tuts, the files should have a .flacurl==http://=http:///url extension (do what Tholek said). I too am leery about ripping all my cds to FLAC on my HDD, but as someone else said, FLAC is pretty much the end all to rips on OiNK. Besides, the large filesize is pretty beneficial to your ratio wink

Thanks for the response guys.

Wolfeman gave me the Easy CD_DA Extrator so I'll try that too.

Last night before going to bed, I followed the instructions on Oink on how to rip it to FLAC and it worked. I'm not sure why it didn't work the first time but it used the external FLAC programme to then convert the .wav'surl==http://=http:///url it had created.

I can't get the LAME MP3 encoder to work though, even though EAC is pointing to it before I rip. I found another small programme that rips the WAV's to MP3's so it's all good.

Thanks for the help and +karma to all. D

I'm assuming you have LAME encoder as a script in iTunes right?

If so, this is from OiNK

[quote67b005ca0d]The Command

The first thing you will notice in this simple interface is the command box. LAME has a multitude of different commands and presets that each effect the final bitrate of the MP3, with different bitrates for different needs. In our case we want a small sized, high quality MP3.

The APS and APX presets, also known as V2 and V0, are exactly what we need. These commands produce MP3's with a variable bitrate, encoding the more complex parts of the song at a higher birate, while the simpler parts such as pure silence are encoded at an alot lower bitrate.

To proceed, all we need to do is use one of the following commands, which are the APS and APX standards in their full form

liAPS -V 2 --vbr-new
liAPX -V 0 --vbr-new[/quote67b005ca0d]

So I've been ripping alot of CD' in various formats, but one thing I don't understand is that when I use my DVD burner to rip a CD, the max speed it goes to is about 9x, whereas my shitty Sony CD burner gets up to 40x.

Here's my DVD burner that is supposed to be 8x faster than my CD burner

http//www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827151118

Any ideas what's up? ?

A lot of DVD writers don't do digital audio (DA) extraction as well as DVD-ROM and CD drives. The drive will slow down to reduce errors. For years I kept both a burner and a ROM drive in my machines, but eventually dropped to just a burner since I don't do much ripping anymore, and my NEC DVD burners rip plenty fast.

And your DVD drive can't be 8x faster than your CD drive if your CD drive is reading at 40x. The fastest DVD drives read CD's at 48x.

I was thinking he ought to check that his IDE controllers and drives are DMA enabled. That might improve things.

[quote5688977f37="Tholek"]I was thinking he ought to check that his IDE controllers and drives are DMA enabled. That might improve things.[/quote5688977f37]
Yep, that's certainly something to check. But slow rips from DVD burners are quite common, so that's most likely the culprit.

[quote873b804e1f="dmorris68"]A lot of DVD writers don't do digital audio (DA) extraction as well as DVD-ROM and CD drives. The drive will slow down to reduce errors. For years I kept both a burner and a ROM drive in my machines, but eventually dropped to just a burner since I don't do much ripping anymore, and my NEC DVD burners rip plenty fast.

And your DVD drive can't be 8x faster than your CD drive if your CD drive is reading at 40x. The fastest DVD drives read CD's at 48x.[/quote873b804e1f]

I meant it was +8 speed faster as opposed to 8 times faster. oops

[quote873b804e1f="Tholek"]I was thinking he ought to check that his IDE controllers and drives are DMA enabled. That might improve things.[/quote873b804e1f]

How do you check if they are or not?

I checked the drive properties and it says Digital Audio is enabled. shrug

[quotedc846bcecb="theysayjump"][quotedc846bcecb="dmorris68"]A lot of DVD writers don't do digital audio (DA) extraction as well as DVD-ROM and CD drives. The drive will slow down to reduce errors. For years I kept both a burner and a ROM drive in my machines, but eventually dropped to just a burner since I don't do much ripping anymore, and my NEC DVD burners rip plenty fast.

And your DVD drive can't be 8x faster than your CD drive if your CD drive is reading at 40x. The fastest DVD drives read CD's at 48x.[/quotedc846bcecb]

I meant it was +8 speed faster as opposed to 8 times faster. oops

[quotedc846bcecb="Tholek"]I was thinking he ought to check that his IDE controllers and drives are DMA enabled. That might improve things.[/quotedc846bcecb]

How do you check if they are or not?

I checked the drive properties and it says Digital Audio is enabled. shrug[/quotedc846bcecb]

In the properties of the IDE controllers in device manager. You can set them to DMA in there.

If I download an album from iTunes and then convert it into MP3/320 will there be a loss in quality? I've never used iTunes before to buy music and I got a GC for it so I figured I might as well get something.

Its a bitch to convert iTunes to anything else because of the copy protection. You usually have to burn it to a CD and then rip it to whatever format you want.

[quote248f14a572="theysayjump"]If I download an album from iTunes and then convert it into MP3/320 will there be a loss in quality? I've never used iTunes before to buy music and I got a GC for it so I figured I might as well get something.[/quote248f14a572]
First, there will always be a loss in quality from iTunes, since iTunes M4P/M4A format is lossy itself. Transcoding that to MP3 will introduce another layer of lossiness. iTunes songs are encoded at 128K, but 128K M4P/M4A sounds quite a bit better than 128K MP3's -- I'd say they're roughly equivalent to a 160K or maybe even 192K MP3 in quality.

Having said that, I'm not nearly the audiophile than I am the videophile, so MP3's I create from iTunes sound okay to me.

BTW if you have resisted the upgrade to iTunes6 as I have, you can use JHymn to remove the DRM from your tunes. The result is much better quality unprotected M4A's since they aren't transcoded, just scrubbed of DRM. You can also use JHymn to convert to WAV or MP3 while it scrubs them. However if you've made any purchases with iTunes6, then JHymn won't work -- Apple changed the FairKeys algorithm, and DssJon and some others are still working on cracking it.