PC recomendation for cd ripping

PC shouldn't affect anything. The drive might, and having scratched or dirty discs certainly will. Use something that can give accuraterip results so you can monitor results. EAC can do this, as well as DB Poweramp. Also, you might want to embed album art while you are doing the rips. I didn't do this when I ripped my collection a few years ago, and wish I had. I don't know if JRiver has a similar feature.

I have ripped hundreds of CD's using Jriver. I used iTunes before and really found Jriver much better. I have used 2 different PC's and heard no difference in sound quality. Started ripping with WAV and have switched to FLAC as no difference in sound was detected in A/B listening tests. I have tried different compression settings for FLAC and heard no difference so am using the default setting of 6.
I agree with Riffer in making sure discs are really clean and dust-free before ripping.
I think Jriver is all you need for playback and ripping (use Copy mode: secure, and a Read speed of 2x).
Good luck!

Looks like Tune_Man gave you good info, go with that...

-RW- I still loves me some dbPowerAmp!

I don't think you need the fastest or most modern PC for ripping. I use dBPoweramp and a dual CPU Xeon 3.6GHz (Nocono processor) with an 800 MHz FSB and Win XP.

The biggest factor IMHO is the CDROM/DVD drive. I use Plextor drives with an error detecting ROM. This DVD drive can detect both C1 and C2 errors. My two CPUs are hyperthreaded for a total of four logical CPUs, and dBpoweramp divides many of the tasks between all four CPUs. The ripping speed is determined by the actual ripping conditions on the disc. Some rips run at > 35x, but others run much slower. Its unclear to me why the speeds vary that much, as I see a large speed variation even between immaculately clean discs.

The Secure Rip function is great but I have run into situations where my particular album was not in the secure rip database. I have also run into one or two albums where dBpoweramp refused to read a disc (perhaps due to some form of copy protection), although my CD player and Plextor will still play the music through the PC.

Rip CD's on PC using dbpoweramp with Accurate Rip enabled. Use a drive with C2 error correction.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio