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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: dMbTiger on February 07, 2007, 10:01 AM
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Up to now I've occasionally ripped a CD or two with Windows Media Player. Anyone who's done this knows it's exceedingly slow. My girlfriend has a lot of CDs and I just bought her a new 30GB iPod. If she wants to rip her CD collection to put it on the iPOD, it will probably take well into the next century to fill it using Media Player. I'm hoping there is some really fast software out there that might make the job easier. Anyone have any suggestions?
dMb
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I like CDex:
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/
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winLAME (http://winlame.sourceforge.net) & Audiograbber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net) are decent enough for what you want probably. You will get errors from time to time in your rips though.
If you want accurate, there is only one choice, Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de). Using this will require some reading on your part as you must ensure that you follow the proper steps setting it up to work properly.
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While accurate, Exact Audio Copy can also be blazingly SLOW so that's probably not what you want.
Audiograbber is pretty fast.
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CDex is fast and I have never had a hiccup with ripping. Once you get yourself a CDDB key (free) it will name all the tracks for you - probably done this way since its open source, not sure...
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I just remembered the cd ripping software i liked the most:
Easy CD-DA Extractor
http://www.poikosoft.com/
Maybe we can try to get a discount on the best shareware rippers once we get a consensus about the top ones. Or maybe someone feels up to doing a big review comparing them all (free+shareware)?
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cdex is good for quick and dirty, although if you want really quick and don't have a fast processor, you'll want to use another mp3 encoder than LAME (and suffer worse quality).
In the old days, I used to use AudioCatalyst (which seemed very similar to AudioGrabber), which had blazing fast burst-mode rip speed and the pretty fast XING codec... quality kinda sucked though, compared to other solutions.
Personally, these days I wouldn't use anything but EAC+LAME+AccurateRip since I do archival-quality ripping (which also means I encode with the lossless FLAC, and will transcode from that when I get a new MP3 player, whenever that be).
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Easy CD-DA Extractor is a very easy to use and full featured audio software, it rips protected cd's to a lot of codecs and then burns it too if needed. (has lifetime updates which is very good)
However for the ripping part i think dbpoweramp reference version is the best, here is a link why http://www.dbpoweramp.com/secure-ripper.htm
Bad news is only the power pack version has lifetime updates and there is no burner included.
Also dbpoweramp uses and is the maker of accuraterip, Easy CD-DA Extractor has been excluded of accuraterip.
I use both programs and like them both very much
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I also recommend Easy CD-DA extractor. This is by far the easiest, and most feature filled software available. If you want a freeware solution, EAC gets lots of raves, however I have not been able to get it to work on my computers. If you dont mind paying, Easy CD-DA is by far your best solution.
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i'd go for AudioGrabber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/gettingstarted.html) (freeware since v1.8x). but if you're in the browsing mood, check out, www.mp3machine.com and www.audioutilities.com. they've listed & categorized tons of tools.. 8)
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Easy CD-DA Extractor is the best one. It works great, has all the bells and whistles one needs, and they send out notices alerting one to upgrades available which are at no additional cost.
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These days I use VUPlayer. It's light and ripping is painless.
http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php
I particularly like it's mechanism of specifying codecs
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If you have a Plextor drive, PlexTools is accurate and fast.
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If you have a Plextor drive, PlexTools is accurate and fast.
-jared1999
Fast yes, accurate no, unfortunately.
Found out the hard way. Ripping the same (clean, perfect, non-copyprotected and unscracted) CD multiple times produced different .wav output. And it wasn't just a few bytes of header info, it was a lot of bytes. Nothing that I could hear, but definitely visible.
EAC, on the other hand, and how much I hate to admit it, produces perfect rips for me every time, and it's verifiable because it supports the AccurateRip plugin.
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Can some one explain why this happens? I have always been perplexed that CDs are capable of storing accurate digital data but ripping music seems to be prone to errors like this? If CD music data is just treated as digital data why are there errors cropping up all the time ?
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I'd like to associate myself with Carol's question - to me this seems very weird concept and i'd like to know the answer too.
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Seems like its more of a hardware related problem than software. The software tries to copy bit-by-bit perfect, but the hardware you use might be limited. This cdfreaks thread (http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=125211) recommends using Plextor hardware and software for the least amount of CRC errors and best cd ripping.
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Yeah but i guess the question still is:
Why does normal digital reading of FILES presumably almost NEVER lose a byte to corruption, while working with audio cd does. In other words, a cd filled with 700mb of mp3 files you dont EVER expect to read a corrupt bit from an mp3 file. But a cd filled with 700mb of audio cd data, you expect to get lots of corruption. If they are both digital, why is that?
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It's mainly because audio CDs implement Philips Orange Book (not sure about the color though), which has no native error correction, unlike DVDs which do have that. You could check it by creating an audio DVD and check the copy result from that.
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The question that mouser asks would take a bit to explain. There are very capable people in the Hydrogenaudio and CDFreaks forum who could explain the issue down to the most technical detail, but you would end just like at the beginning, since you'll be overwhelmed with information. I'm sure that's related to the standards, and that the Orange Book has something to do with it. Search around and I think you'll find some answers. I would explain the thing myself, but I'm STILL busy...
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Well, a guy that used to do plextor firmware recommended plextools as well, but my experience still stands - it wasn't able to accurately rip, at least not in burst mode. I rather prefer secure ripping over speed anyway, so EAC it is.
As to why audio data is hard to extract, iirc it is because audio CDs don't have some synchronization data (not error correction data) that data CDs have. I guess the reasoning was "music just needs to be played back at 1x speed, and we'd rather have more available space and do without the sync data". A CD usually has 74min capacity, which would be 74*60*44100*2*2 bytes, or ~746MB - when used for data, the capacity is only ~650MB.
There is some error-correction done in cd players, which is why a scratched CD I have plays perfectly in my NAD player, but can't be ripped 100% on my computer.
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Thanks for the helpful insight f0dder! :up:
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It seems no one has mentioned iTunes !!! It includes a CD-Ripper, you can either chose AAC format (ipod only) or mp3 (ipod and all other players - but less compact than AAC for the same quality).
Besides, you usually need iTunes to transfer tracks to your ipod.
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Well, most jukeboxes are fine for the casual ripping, and if your CDs are in perfect state, clean and pristine :). The error correction of iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player, and so on, it's terrible when they deal with scratched CDs. For quality, EAC is the best. It may be slower, but you can also activate the 'burst' mode and it'll be fast like no other, at the expense of possible problems in the ripped tracks. CDex was fine some years ago, but its compatibility is not the best, and it can't handle scratched CDs with some drives very well (like mine). AudioGrabber is good, but the interface is terrible, the programmer must had a lot of fun drawing it in the IDE ;D. dbPowerAmp R12 is the best of the best (only the reference version), but its interface is not standard, and weird things happen when you click on some of the elements of the GUI, like when you try to input your own tags.
And well, f0dder solved the riddle ;)
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I've read a bit about dbPowerAmp, and it sounds pretty interesting - I don't think I'd use the standard version, but the one called "reference" with it's special error detection seems pretty interesting. I'll have to do some tests (especially with copy-protected CDs, which is the reason I even checked it out at all) and will get back later... it seems like dbPowerAmp ref is able to read my Iron Maiden: Dance of Death CD, which EAC estimated would take ~6 hours to rip, and probably didn't even handle error-free.
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There is some error-correction done in cd players, which is why a scratched CD I have plays perfectly in my NAD player, but can't be ripped 100% on my computer.-f0dder
Off topic, I know, but it' nice to see another NAD aficionado. Do you have the Master series?
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Nope, a second-hand NAD 314 stereo amp, and a NAD C521BEE CD player, which seemed like a good quality/price compromise. Hooked up with a couple of B&W DM601 S3 speakers, and a couple of (old!) Pioneer S-Z92 speakers (which deliver a the bass that the B&Ws lack). All in all produces pretty decent sound for our 50m2 flat :)
Now, back on subject :)
Unfortunately dbPoweramp doesn't give identical rip results for the Iron Maiden CD on my LiteOn and my Plextor drive, and neither are matched in the AccurateRip database, and I haven't found a way to produce one big .wav + .cue sheet either :(
On the plus side, for non-protected CDs it rips very fast. It also rips lots faster than EAC for the protected IM CD, and while my results don't match AR, at least the results are *consistant* between rips on the plextor. Will have to look at the output waves with some editor, and listen for clicks and hisses as well.
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When i did my CD collection (i have about 50Gb at a medium quality level) I tried a few and ended up using the jriver media center (or its previous version, i think jukebox might work in the same way on the ripping side).
Mostly because it offered a very slick workflow - it will do all the usual, look up in an online cddb, encode (does ogg too, which was a big plus for me), get cd cover picture if you're so inclined, save the files in a folder structure which you configure (i use artist - album) and with names you customise. And after you rip one CD and it ejects it, if you put another cd in the drive the program will just start ripping it with the same quality settings. So you can just keep it going while doing other stuff: put cd in, potter about, put next cd in, potter about.... and get through quite a lot of CDs that way.
It's not cheap but I did register it at the time, I was already quite pleased with it from the ripping but I also liked the dynamic playlists (I'm too lazy to handpick lists most of the time) and the media server modules, and tag management is not too bad either...
It also allowed copying files to my player device (rio karma) either song by song or via playlists, so turned out quite handy
And if you care about quality there are different codecs you can use etc. etc.
I know it's not perfect, quite quirky in some ways, and they are trying to make it do too much nowadays (manage photos and movie clips etc.) - but i suspect it's very likely that their older version "media jukebox" (http://www.mediajukebox.com/) might already have a ripping workflow much like the one media centre has, for a low cost.
Of course what you end up using and buying depends a lot on what you try and find at the time - there's probably even better tools out there, probably freeware.
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f0dder, did you try using the "Burst" mode both in EAC and dbPowerAmp? Badly scratched CDs get ripped with amazing quality (considering the scratches) most times.
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Well, I don't have scratched CDs, but I do have copy-protected ones. No audible artifacts isn't not good enough, I want AccurateRip matches! :). I know this is rather anal, but I rip to lossless format with archival in mind, so I want it to be as good as possible. Which is a bit hard with audio, since it's just about impossible to get 100% exact extraction.
I guess doing a burst extraction of the copy protected CDs could be interesting, to see just how bad it goes - but I'll still have to find some decent audio editor and do some analysis.
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Ah, OK, your CDs are protected, not scratched. Against that, maybe you can do something fancy using Alcohol or Daemon Tools, as your Plextor drive can't do anything (Plextor is the best when it comes to skip protection software). I've never run into any issues with the few copy-protected CDs I have, but my drive is a generic one, so maybe there lies its power ;D
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The one thing i found to work to rip protected CDs is anyDVD from slysoft.
I own it to watch stupidly protected DVDs on my laptop, but when my dad complained about not being able to get his Celine Dion CDs on to his mp3 player i suggested we try installing anyDVD, and indeed it allowed the normal CD ripper tool suddenly worked perfectly.
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I'm not interested in ripping copy protected games or applications, only in gaining fair use of my legally purchased CDs - dunno if AnyDVD, CloneDVD/CD, Alcohol or whatever can help there; they seem focused on data. I want (as close to as possible) bit-perfect copies of my audio.
Plextools is supposed to be good, but even for non-protected CDs it gives me different results on every rip, and we're not just talking a few bits here and there. Pretty weird.
It should be noted that I don't have the usual problems with only one track showing up, only audio tracks showing up, or whatever - plextool's "enable single session" works pretty well for that, and so does EAC's alternate TOC detection. The problem is the actual ripping, which is damn slow, and doesn't seem to generate very good rips (well, exact rips - I don't seem to get pops and clicks, though).
Of course for non-protected CDs, everything flies. I wish I could get dbPoweramp to generate cue/wav though, it's pretty darn fast, and seems to have very intelligent error detection/handling, unlike EACs pretty bruteforce method. Would be worth registering if it did :)
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How about ISO Buster ? There is a free version and it copies on a bit by bit basis if you want (and will even try to repair by multiple reading to try and recover damaged areas). The pro version adds some functions for $29.99 See www.isobuster.com
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Anydvd is not a copy tool, it's just a software which allows whatever software you have to access copy protected CDs and DVDs which might not let you use them on a PC. So your software CD player, or a ripping tool, can get access to those CDs which would be unreadable to them.
I am not sure if it has any quality impact since I don't need perfection beyond what i can perceive and there is certainly no perceptible difference for me with the original CDs played on the stereo (pc output run to my stereo amp). But I am sure that pure signal comparison would probably find differences but I just listen to it. Note that although i am not an audio fanatic, i could hear the difference with mp3s generated by some other tools i had, but these I do now are fine.
And since I have all the CDs in boxes in the basement i can always rescan if needed if my hearing starts noticing a difference.