CD Ripping software

Accuraterip is the best for extracting the data from the disk. The developer(s) who built it went the extra mile for perfect rips.

The problems I had before were skipping like sounds when playing back ripped content. That is now completely gone.

The skipping sound reproduced when ripping from Windows Media Player and iTunes (even with its option to fix the skips).

Choices of software that include Accuraterip:
http://www.accuraterip.com/software.htm
Exact Audio Copy is great. Songbook was a complete non-starter on my Mac Book (Lion os) and was very dissapointing.

I rip with WMP and it seems to work well as best I can tell by just listening.

Based on time to rip, it appears to re-read data as needed in the interest of sound quality in that rip times can vary widely. If a disk is in very bad shape it can take a long time to complete a rip and sometimes appears to retry indefinitely even if perhaps in vain.

Definitely no clearly audible artifacts 99.9% of the time.

On occasion, from older CDs I have burned myself, an occasional hiccop perhaps, but I suspect that is largely due to major errors in the source that cannot be filled in an inaudible manner completely.

Is there a way to test to confirm if the results of a rip to .wav is not bit perfect?

I've tried EAC. A beast of a program. Horribly designed and poorly documented though supposedly meticulous in regards to copy quality. Not for the faint of heart. It also appears to be quite old and unsupported really for quite some time though now. I can see why. You have to be a real audiophile computer geek (like me) to like it and even I do not. There's gotta be better! I'm not even sure it runs cleanly anymore on some versions of Windows. IT was quirkier than prior last time I tried it. PRobably due to lack of ongoing support to keep it up to date with OS changes, etc.

Was introduced to a free software today at work, Audacity. Seemed pretty comprehensive.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Dave

*By far* the most popular proram is FooBar2000. It does ripping, it acts as modern-day jukebox - giving you access to ALL of your music without having to haul yer lazy are outta that Barcalounger. It does network streaming (look it up, good thing got the advanced audiophile)

BTW, it is TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY, FREE and has the broadest support of any of the similar products. It uses plug-in technology allow developer to easily write and publish additional capabilitied to the product. Go take a look, it is *incredible* that software this good is truly free - there IS a God!

-RW-

Since posting I did a bit more research.

Mapman is right about EAC. Very difficult to understand (as the author is German and his English can be a bit confusing). Very complex program, hard to understand how to use it. It is free, however, donations are suggested.

dBpoweramp is pay for use. Better supported as there is a dedicated tech forum that is well moderated. Apparently this software came out of development at EAC, so they are similar. Both use that Acurrip data base for file comparison. I just wonder if any of the esoteric Japanese remasters or MFSL stuff is in that data base. If no more than 1 or two users have put data for these recordings in the acurrip database, it is useless.

The reason I mention scanning the CD source before ripping is that the secure ripping features are not really needed if there are no C2 errors on your disk. For those, a "burst" rip done by Win MP should be as good and error free. Its just that with MP you get no assurance or feedback that the digital copy is indeed error free (like you do with EAC or dBpoweramp). In fact, the most reliable error free copies are obtained by dBpoweramp when the CDROM has C2 error detection support.

That being said I have started scanning a number of my audio CDs and have found some with very low C1 error rates (under 30) and zero C2 errors to some with thousands of both. On the latter, I would not expect bit perfect copies with Media Player. But would with the former. dBpoweramp warns, however, that its software may cause premature wear on your CDROM if it has to do a lot of error correction for CDs with C2 errors.

Don't know much about Foobar, but I don't think it does "secure" ripping. So it would not be any better than Win MP for .WAV files.