Been looking around on the net for some time now for a quick, stable mp3 ripper. Do they exist? What's your favorite? BTW, I've tried the winamp mp3 plugin and hate it. Also tried 123 CD Extractor/Ripper but they're too expensive.

CDex works good. Lightweight and it wont drown you in software bloat, well the version I have anyway.

I use CDex, got it off sourceforge I beleive.

Yeah, I've also tried CDex but for some reason it was slow as hell, I had changed the rip speed to 48x too. Musicmatch works good and quick but the software sucks and I don't want it taking over all of my mp3 files, I keep having to change them back to Winamp file types.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 6 http://www.poikosoft.com/

I no longer rip MP3s though. Ogg is the way to go.

I've also used Easy CD-DA Extractor 6, that was a nice program as well.

I like Nero 5

YAMP - I think i got it bundled with a cheap Motherboard last year.

There was one that I used to use (when I ripped mp3's) that was basically a bash shell script that piped stuff directly to the lame encoder, got the cddb information auto-magically, etc.. I cannot for the life of me remember the name, but the mp3's it produced were fantastic. I believe it used to even come with redhat many versions ago, but I could be wrong.

So I've been searching around for it for some time now, as it was easy to feed discs into the machine and rip it across the network. If anyone knows the name of this phantom script, let me know... Google can't seem to find it anymore for me, and I don't run redhat any longer either.

For windows, cdex is acceptable.

-David

I use Exact Audio Copy. A little slow but top quality rips and really does a nice job of correcting on scratched CDs.

Off topic: I'm actually one of the administrators of CDex. ;)

I use Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/eac.html) to rip, and OggDropXPd (http://www.vorbis.com/files/1.0/windows/oggdropXPd.zip) (direct download) to convert to Ogg.

Speaking of Ogg, I did some experimenting today with a blind sound tester called ABX (http://www.pcabx.com/). You take a raw .wav, copy it, compress the 2nd copy with Ogg (or LAME, or whatever), uncompress it back to .wav, and then compare the two versions. It randomly plays them side by side, and you switch from one to the other with a click of a button. You have to determine which is the original and which the compressed version. It keeps track of your score and tells if you if really can tell the difference or if you're just guessing.

I was able to detect the level-4 compressed version with 100% accuracy, and the level-5 with 65% accuracy. I failed at level 6, with 25% accuracy. I could detect a difference, but I couldn't tell which was which. So I'm using level 6 to compress my files.

At what MP3 bitrate or Ogg level can you no longer accurately detect the compressed version?

I'm mainly using CDex to rip my OGG.

EAC is the king ;)

Originally posted by Daijoubu
EAC is the king ;) Ogg is, without a doubt, the best lossy audio codec.

Ogg @ 224k > MP3 @ 320k

When it is important to have a perfect reproduction of a CD, however, I use FLAC. http://flac.sourceforge.net/

I use audiocatalyst.
Pretty good i must say. :)

Cakewalk Pyro is good for pc.

But my favorite is iTunes4 for mac.

Audiocatalyst fhg encoder is no match to LAME ;)

EasyMP3.

Not free; but it's excellent and easy to use.

-Shaun

Music Match for me