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Ripping CD's - Bypassing Computer CD Player

At the risk of sounding stupid, could someone point me in the right/best direction of how I can rip my CD's to a hard drive while maintaining fidelity? Hold on, I know how to do it with my computer and I know the difference between lossless and lossy files. My concern is that the CD players on computers are not of sufficient quality to do a really good job. I've tried to find the best CD player for my computer, but I know it's not nearly the quality of my stereo componentry. My thought is to use my "audiophile" quality CD player(s) to rip to a storage medium. Is there a component that I can attach to one of my current CD players that would seamlessly backup the CD's and/or a combination CD player/hard drive that would do the same thing?
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rlwainwright
1,904 posts
 
Ain't it funny how a $50 computer CD drive does a better job of ripping CDs than a $10,000+ "audiophile" player?

And yes, dbPowerAmp is the bee's knees of CD ripping software. It also does a heckuva job transcoding ripped discs to other formats like FLAC, etc.

Long story short, Nab2, your PC's CD drive coupled with dbPowerAmp will do a fantastic job of ripping your CDs - end of story...

-RW-
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,308 posts
 
RL, So far I am using mostly MusicBrainz Picard to autotag FLAC after ripping. Is there a tool from dbpoweramp vendor that enables tagging similar to while ripping that automatically pulls best metadata from the 4 multiple metadata DBs dbpwoeramp rip software uses?

Musicbrainz/Picard is a great tool but only uses Musicbrainz and none of these DBs seem to always trump the other. Each has different content available and tagging works best by using multiple source DBs still these days it seems/
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nab2 OP
61 posts
 
Thanks for the answers. I've used both Exact Audio Copy and dBpoweramp for ripping my CD's but was concerned. As Dtc noted there used to be reviews on the quality of the drives and Plextor came out on top. My current drive is a Plextor, but thought (apparently mistakenly,)that the quality of the drive might have something to do with the quality of the rip. I see the logic of "digital" ripping being independent of the CD drive in the computer, but it doesn't feel right.

I usually rip to WAVE rather than FLAC, but have done both. Perhaps for the same reason (feelings over reason).

Thanks.
tympani
30 posts
 
You might find this thread I started in AudioAsylum interesting:

http://db.audioasylum.com/mhtml/m.html?forum=digital&n=172907&highlight=rip+dull&search_url=%2Fcgi%2Fsearch.mpl%3FForumSelect%3DSelected%26searchtext%3Dcbs%2B6sn7gtb%26SelectForumtubes%3Dtubes
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nab2 OP
61 posts
 
I've scanned it and will read it carefully soon. Is there a bottom line in that discussion? Seems like it was one opinion against another. Did you reach a conclusion?
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