Ripping My Music »
I had started ripping all my CDs using iTunes, but recently it just decided to belch. No comments on the technical merits, please - it sounds good enough for general listening, and I am not an audiophile by any stretch. This isn't (necessarily) permanent archival. Just making things more available by having the music stored digitally.
I've always had problems with iTunes recognizing the CD correctly in XP - it isn't that it wouldn't work, it just wouldn't work reliably. Some times I'd even need to shut down iTunes and start it back up to have it recognize a new CD had been loaded. Every once in a while, I have to shut down the PC - it's like the CD drive just gets "locked up" - for any application - after iTunes loses it's way. I finally tired of that.
So in my searches, I found Exact Audio Copy (EAC), a sweet little program that does a fantastic job of ripping, including the ability to specify paths in the file name (such as directories for artist/disc) and an interface to LAME, considered by many to be the best tool for ripping quality audio. Most excellent!
Comments (3)
My frustration is how to easily rip tapes to MP3. There is just no easy way.
Posted by Ted on May 11, 2005 7:23 PM
You should check out CDex. Its free, fast, feature packed. (that sounds like an advert).
I have used it to back up over 500 CD's so far without a problem and I have another 2000+ to go. (Thank god for the 2 new USB 300 Gig HDD's I bought a month or so ago).
Ted: Ripping from Tape is easy if you want to spend some time splitting the files down into individual files. I do remember a nifty utility that I will go see if I can locate again. Basically you hooked up the tape player as normal (via audio in) and pressed play. It would create a massive wav file, which it then spliced into as many wav files as it detected quiet gaps. You could configure the quiet gap length so as not to split songs with gaps. Even then it had a review feature that allowed you to join tracks together if incorrectly split. The only pain is having to type in all the info, as there isn't a CDDB function for tapes.
IIRC it even had filters for removing tape noise as well. It was over two years ago when I used it so I will have to dig around to see what it was called and where to get it from. (Doesn't Nero have some tools to do it?)
Chris
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ was the link for CDex btw
Posted by Chris on May 11, 2005 7:42 PM
Congrats on finding EAC, it is actually the best ripper for AudioCDs. It's not as userfriendly as CDEx, mentioned by Chris, but it has the best error correction out there, unmatched by any other software.
Michael
Posted by Michael on May 14, 2005 5:49 AM