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Also, maybe need multiple CD drives and use Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Unless the CDs are physically in bad shape.

It's interesting to not that everyone thought I was Dead serious w/ my analogies. I am never serious. but I do think that CDs are about done.

There will be a breakthrough new way for digital distribution of music. Many schemes are going on right now. CD's won't be around forever. But just to note, I saw VHS tapes for sale the other day. Who here has watched a movie on VHS in the last 3 years? Not too many I'd guess. CD quality MP3's will only grow in popularity. Most slashdotters use EAC http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ (or a comprable program) to rip their music from CD's they own anyway right?

It's allready happening. Cell phones. Yeah Verizon is trying too hard to make money on what could have been an easy way for them to STEAL cash from the public, but they priced songs too high, and chopped the bitrate (WAY) too low. If they pulled their heads out of their butts, and fix TWO small problems, BAM! a real i-tunes competitor w/ a decent install base of allready capable phones, and a solid network to distribute w/.

I think it's kind of amusing that I have been able to watch full length movies on LG phones for 3 years, but we still rely on CD's as a distribution method for Music.

In another post, I wrote about how CD's are not a bad method for the US, our penetration of Broadband is not the best by comparison to other countries, HOWEVER, they are still going the way of the cassette, it's only natural. Maybe not as fast as Cassette gave way to CD, but going none the less here is why:

1. They are bulky compared to new storage media
2. They are not as durable as new storage media
3. They can't be rewritten as much as new storage media
4. Their are limited to 650mb.
5. The general population wants the portability & compatability of a file, and the ability to buy by the song.

It's odd, the general crowd agrees w/ these things but thinks that CDs will stick around forever?

It's probably not the only tool out there, and it is Windows-only, but I've retrieved remarkably hacked-up CDs using Exact Audio Copy. I've retrieved perfect tracks from disks that sounded awful and looked like they had been sandpapered. It sometimes took hours to do on really bad disks, but it worked.

It's free for non-commercial use.

Try ripping it with both cdparanoia and with Exact Audio Copy (Windows freeware that works well under Wine). Stuff that won't rip in one will often rip in the other.

So why pay extortionate sums of money to buy good music in a format that you cannot share with others after you have legally bought it?

Purchased downloads are for plastic throwaway crap, not for proper music that you will want to cherish for decades to come.

Not necessarily; a lot of ppl use EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/). Together with FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net/), this makes for a winning combination in terms of fidelity of your backup.

-V0 -h --vbr-new

--alt-preset extreme

I'd be interested in what you use to process your music prior to encoding.

I'm currently using EAC which does a great job of ripping WAVs, and will automatically encode in FLAC and MP3 or other formats if you want (and multi-threaded too!). But what else are you using? I'd like to do some analysis and possibly equalization compensation for some badly recorded (early) CDs.

The article confuses many terms and standards. The following is my amateur understanding, based on substantial research a few years ago:

Almost all digital audio you hear, including on CDs, is recorded using Pulse Code Modulation (PCM).

Audio on CDs (CD-DA or "Compact Disc Digital Audio") is stored using the Red Book Audio standard.

A WAV file does not reproduce the bits on the CD; it reproduces the bits output by the CD reader. The Red Book standard uses out-of-order and redundant bits to preserve integrity; the reader interprets the Red Book data into a simpler stream of bits, like WAV.

By the way, if you want to get a perfect rip of a CD, try Exact Audio Copy (EAC).

I will admit that the first thing I do with a CD when I buy a new one is CDex it to high quality MP3 format.

Maybe its time to get users to look at Exact Audio Copy. It's by far the best ripper I've used for Windows, as I prefer quality over speed. It will produce guaranteed exact copies which corrects for minor scratches and blemishes if possible. If not possible, it will notify you exactly where in the file the problem lies to let you sample it to see if the problem is noticeable or not.

It will do regular high speed rips too.

Audiograbber was good 10 years ago, when VBR just appeared, and no one cared about jitter correction.
Nowadays EAC is much better. And free.

But it did make me wonder: do all those remedies really help the machine read more bits correctly by repairing the refrective plane, as it is tempting to believe? Or do they simply allow the built in error correction do its job, by blocking the area where the (clear but warped) surface of the sratch would otherwise make the laser lose its tracking?

I'm guessing you are in one of the following situations.

1. you have a crappy optical drive

2. you are trying to rip a badly scratched up CD

3. you have an extremely slow computer

4. you are a technophobe.

i have personally had CDs take over an hour to rip, but only on ones that look like they tangled with a brillo pad, when it has to go heavy on the correction and run at sub-realtime speed.

if you have to manually name your files, you need to get some different software, specifically, some that supports CDDB, FreeDB, or preferably both. i personally like Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/)

Seems no one is giving serious answers so i guess i will be the only one

Freeware or open source software:
01. Firefox, http://www.getfirefox.com/
02. Winamp, http://www.winamp.com/
03. Miranda, http://www.miranda-im.org/
04. Media Player Classic, http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
05. ffdshow, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm
06. CDBurnerXp Pro, http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
07. Daemon-tools, http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
08. uTorrent, http://www.utorrent.com/
09. XnView, http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.htm l
10. ExactAudioCopy, http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
11. Dev-C++, http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
12. 7-zip, http://www.7-zip.org/
13. Real Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm
14. QuickTime Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
15. Process Explorer, http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/processexplo rer.html
16. Uniform Server, http://www.uniformserver.com/
17. nLite, http://www.nliteos.com/ (sp+hotfix+driver slipstreaming and ability to remove almost anything from the windows installation disc, including wmp, ie, drivers, services, etc, you can get your windows install disc down to 180MB with a 70MB RAM footprint after boot).

Commercial/Shareware software.
01. NOD32, http://www.nod32.com/ - simply the best antivirus software out there
02. Cinema4D, http://www.maxoncomputer.com/ Great modelling/rendering program (also available for OS X)
03. mIRC, http://www.mirc.com/ not the best irc client, but it has a tiny memory footprint/feature ratio
04. Directory Opus, http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ replace Explorer with a far better file manager.
05. UltraEdit, http://www.ultraedit.com/ great editor for many textbased formats
06. Visual Studio, http://microsoft.com/
07. Nero Burning ROM. http://www.ahead.de/ my burning program of choice

Shit, I missed GP's inclusion of Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Mod me redundant.

Music: Foobar2000 0.8.3 (iTunes and dumbed down fb2k annoy me)

Video: Media Player Classic with ffdshow

If you are using an iMac or MacBook Pro, then you might be interested in the Windows-only software that enables the ATI Radeon 1600's GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding. For GPU-accelerated H.264, I think you need to purchase CyberLink's H.264 decoder. ATI's Avivo Video Converter is integrated into the latest Catalyst Control Center, which I'm not sure is included on Apple's Windows driver disc image.

Does anybody know if GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding is enabled on OS X yet?

Foobar2000 - An audio player that is a painful reminder how heavy iTunes feels. Has 10x the functionality, and brutally enforces good practices in keeping a media library. 0.9 just came out a few weeks ago.

Media Player Classic - The only media player you'll need. With ffdshow, it handles just about anything I can throw at it, audio works, subtitles work, and its one exe.

uTorrent - Everything you'd want from Azureus, in a 150k self-contained exe. Makes it almost manditory to leave it open all the time because its just that slick and efficient.

BurnAtOnce - A cdrdao based burner with an amazingly simple interface. Who needs Nero with this around?

Exact Audio Copy - THE cd ripper. cdparanoia works fine in most cases, but doesn't leave you 100% sure your rip is 100% perfect like this one. And this fits in almost any audio workflow with its advanced tagging, and command line support.

More apps like these on other platforms please!

AviSynth: Frameserver, scriptable non-linear video editing.
VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod: Video capture, linear processing. Use in conjunction with AviSynth.
Isobuster: CD/DVD data recovery
ExactAudioCopy: CD ripping even from badly scratched CDs.

There are none that don't rip (at least the one's I've tried) with Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ on Windows or CDParanoia on Linux - plus you can plug LAME as an external codec into both of them.

While it lacks a little bit in user-friendliness with regard to setup, Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is by far my favorite ripping software. You just throw in a recent LAME dll and rip with ease. It also claims to handle burning, though I've never tried that feature. The best selling point of EAC is its slow but extremely reliable "secure copy" mode, which reads the disc "very carefully" (my words) in order to make absolutely sure there are no glitches. I can't remember the last time it made a bad mp3.

Minor sticking point, though, is that it doesn't seem to handle the Japanese stuff very well either ... "??????" it says :)

I stick to the old Winamp ml_ipod plugin for my iPod management, since my iPod can't do photos or video. I prefer it to iTunes partially because I prefer Winamp for my listening experience, and partially because it gives me more flexibility to define what to sync and other transfers.

Let's be realistic, the AAC format is far ahead of the mp3 format, we shouldn't even be talking about them together. AAC is much closer to OGG in quality (so much so, that there seems to be a never-ending war on which one is better).

I realize that. For high-quality rips, the order appears to go something like lossless > MPC > OGG > AAC > MP3, with some cases where OGG is best in the latest versions of it. But when you compare [any bitrate of any codec you want all the way up to lossless] to [128 kbps aac], shifting your thinking from the abstract to the specific case, you get an obvious win for the [any bitrate of any codec...]. That's the case whether you're arguing for buying CDs or buying from allofmp3. iTMS loses.

In fact, try going to hydrogenaudio.org and arguing that 128kbps aac gives you CD quality, or that 128kbps aac is the best encoding of a song. Those that do the ABX tests would surely not agree.

If you think about it, AACs do lose some quality, but they never will again, whereas CDs eventually get scratched and become unusable.

But that's a bit of a red herring, because when you buy a CD (assuming it's not a Sony DRM CD played in Windows), you can then encode backups, extra copies, etc. in whatever format you like, including uncompressed, lossless, or lossy formats. Hell, you can make a 128kbps DRM-protected AAC if you like!

You're getting what most people consider to be an original copy. If you wish, you can even make an exact duplicate of the CD, which will be perfect no matter how many times you copy it because of error correction on the CDs. Even if you try it after you've already scratched your CD, you can use something like Exact Audio Copy to perform multiple reads and average out the errors from your rip.

The way I look at it, when you buy a CD you're getting a less restrictive license and a higher quality ("original") music file. allofmp3 gives you close to the same thing, for a ~88% discount before even considering that you can pick only the tracks you want.

Hell, in 5 years, memory will be so cheap that we'll see iPods with the capability of storing as many apple lossless files as we can store AACs now. That's in 5 years and has no affect on the music purchases you add to your library now. Unless you're suggesting that iTMS will upgrade your music files for free. I highly doubt that will happen.

My first troll mod... sweet.

Securely: Every sector read is doublechecked. It re-reads up to 80 times and corrects mistakes if necessary.

The end result is no unexpected popping, hissing, whistling, etc.

http://exactaudiocopy.de/

I've tried numerous CD ripping programs (although none of the ones featured in that article), and Exact Audio Copy is by far the best one I've used. It even gets around some forms of copy-protection thanks to its error correcting feature. It takes longer to rip a CD than most other programs, but the quality is unmatched. Add freedb lookup and automatically configured LAME encoding (once you download the encoder itself) and you've got the best CD ripper in the market. Oh, and it's completely free. 100 million pirates can't be wrong.

You might try:
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

It might be working, depending on the scractches.

Why are you creating MP3's on your MP3 player?
Do you like wasting your time? Your PC will make Mp3s much faster than any Mp3 player.
If you are getting DRM protected MP3s you're using crap software.

Please try this:
1) Download Lame (Linux) or Winlame
2) Rip CD Audio to Wav using Audiograbber or EAC
3) Create Mp3's using lame, like this (lame.exe --abr 256 filename.wav filename.mp3). You can also enter the --abr 256 in Audiograbbers MP3 tab so it will do all of this automatically, including assigning a full ID3 tag to all your new DRM, HQ Mp3s.

That's it!

Besides the confusing name, Lame IS and Mp3 encoder!

You're correct that disc IDs are based upon the number and duration of the tracks on the disc. Ideally, CD->FLAC->CD should produce a binary-exact copy of the original CD that produces the same result from CDDB/freeDB. However, due to slight variances in CD/DVD drives, it can be tough to produce an exact copy - most rippers will produce a copy that comes back as an "inexact match" in CDDB. The only ripper I'm aware of that can produce binary-exact copies is Exact Audio Copy, and that's only using secure mode and after you determine your drive's offset value. There used to be an online tutorial on calculating the offset value; it's no longer there, but can still be found in the Internet Archive.

Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by. They even provide software, MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software), for ripping CD, WAV or AIFF to OGG or FLAC format for using with their system. That's not to say that you couldn't use flac/oggenc, especially since it isn't F/OSS, but it's nice that they've provided their own multi-platform utility with a GUI to help out in that regard... not to mention the fact that the MARS documentation says that you need oggenc/flac/cdparanoia installed on Linux in any case.

There's a nice piece of software that I use called Exact Audio Copy. It provides an amazing GUI that can be switched from noobie mode to ultra-1337, it can detect and correct errors on even really badly scratched CD's, provides online CD database access, custom naming schemes, lots of ID3 tag options, and you can encode to *any friggin format you want to*. It has built-in support for a very large number of formats, but you can also integrate it with LAME, oggenc, flac and whathaveyou. Oh yeah, and it's free too. Windows only, but it might work with wine on linux.

Also, if you want more bang for your buck, er, download, Rarewares has special builds for oggenc, flac, and other formats that support a larger number of features. For instance, they added hard min-max bitrate levels for ogg vorbis (so ogg doesn't encode silence at 100kbps), and something called "impulse-trigger", which helps with promblems in echo from rimshots or something like that. The forums at hydrogen audio explain the extra features in more detail.

But it is still considered the best audio extractor out there.

I encode in FLAC when I borrow CDs, or have a beat-up CD I can get a good extraction from (I use Exact Audio Copy with AccurateRip).

I should have been more clear. I don't use or want these features in WMP (I prefer MPC), but many people use and want these features, so MPC would not be a good replacement for them. For these people MusicMatch or iTunes would be a more appropriate replacement for WMP.

For Windows, I use and recommend EAC and LAME. I don't own (or want) a portable music/video player (I prefer PDAs) and I keep my music organized in folders I choose (not in C:\Documents and Settings\jackass\My Documents\My Music).

But that's just me. Many people want that extra shit in their media player app.

Forte Free Agent, a free and excellent news reader http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php

ZoneAlarm is an excellent free firewall, but it does seem to nag more than before http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/catalog/prod ucts/sku_list_za.jsp;jsessionid=BQnRnRFFu7vlwK9sR9 zM3ydKxKZB7qdA2NEZ1dOyQNX1I20o5O2I!138179110!-1062 696904!7551!7552!-2058358518!-1062696905!7551!7552

The Microsoft PowerToys are free add-ons for Windows, some of which are very useful http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is one of the best CD rippers, and free http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

DVDINFOPro is freeware that gives information about CD and DVD media http://www.dvdinfopro.com/

StrokeIt lets you use mouse gestures in any program http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

I find EAC to be fantastic for ripping CDs. Also, it works nicely out of the box with oggenc.

Purists would say that it is not exactly free because the guy who wrote it asks for a postcard if you use it. As good as free as far as I am concerned.

EAC is an audio grabber for CD-ROM drives

Anything from Systernals

Anything from AnalogX

Anything from GNU Win II

Anything from TheOpenCD

Not true.

I'm converted by philosophy, but not in practice.

I have this year installed a number of Linux distros (Red Hat, Gentoo, Mepis, Debian, Mandrake) and am yet to find one that recognises all of my hardware (my RME-DigiPST sound card proving impossible to get working) or fulfils all of my software requirements (a contact manager that can sync with both an Ericsson and Motorola phone for example).

I am still finding that each time I look at Linux that I lack things... be it something that replaces ID3-TagIt, or rips and encodes similar to EAC and LAME.

I've knocked together this Wiki page for the forum I run as several of us want to migrate. As you can see... it's not been updated in a while and the few unanswered questions are still unanswered.

Now, the point of this post is this... each time I have looked at Linux to date I find it is not quite ready, but that it is closer to being ready. Each time I find it easier to jump into, and easier to get started on and with fewer outstanding questions.

However... each time it has still failed to do everything I do with my computer. So I stay on Windows and think "maybe tomorrow"... and then get lazy.

When I'm lazy I stick to Windows, because it does work.

Then I read articles like this, which are preaching to the philosophically converted. Articles such as this remind me that I've yet to switch, remind me that I'm being lazy... they remind me that I had some unanaswered questions and that I should ask them again.

I personally think there is a lot of value in this. It's already put it back on my desk as a fun thing to do this afternoon (give Gentoo another try!).

The iTunes software will automatically index it for you. Ripping "100 or so" CDs isn't that big of a deal. Do 10 here, 10 there. In a few days they are all ripped.

Seriously, I'm not even using iTunes but I've literally just ripped about 20 CD's in the time it took me to get through the article and then to this point in the thread. Whether you use iTunes (which I don't recommend for mp3 ripping) or some other app, it's hardly a difficult or even particularly time-consuming task.

Do yourself a favor and download the latest LAME codec, then get EAC as a front end. (This is assuming you're using Windows, although LAME works with other OS's too.) LAME is by far the best mp3 encoder at the moment, and EAC is a powerful front-end that's very easy to use once you set it up once - literally one-click, just like iTunes.

I ripped almost my entire collection of 300+ CD's in one afternoon; I'm just going through now and ripping the stragglers that I didn't find mp3-worthy the first time around. It's really not a big deal to do and I'm sure everybody's got enough music lying around to fill up a HDD-based mp3 player without re-purchasing anything.

I've managed to rip my entire (along with a few samplings from buddies, but don't tell the RIAA) music collection of about 300ish albums. It's much less time consuming than you apparently think.

Cdex or EAC are the two apps I'm most familiar with (stay away from MusicMatch, it's bloated beyond belief) and I'm sure someone else can offer even more options. Both of these programs will rip/encode (into FLAC, LAME MP3, or Ogg Vorbis)/tag in a single click of the mouse. As long as you've got a web connection they'll look up the tag information via CDDB and even set up your ripped files into a directory structure (artist/album/ or year/artist/album or ... well.. pretty much anything) to keep all those MP3's organized. Heck, even if that fails there are programs like The Godfather that can help you mass edit and identify those tags you forgot to get the first time..

I don't know if it's any harder to transfer these files to an iPod than the AAC's you get off iTunes, but I haven't heard any complaints about it so I'm sure it's intuitive enough. Personally, I prefer my Rio Karma for its vorbis/flac support as well as gapless playback (even on MP3's, which don't natively support gapless playback).

Heck, most players (not my Karma, but I digress) are recognized as external USB hard drives (via MSC, so they should even work on Linux) nowadays. All you have to do is drag and drop your MP3's onto the disk (possibly a specific directory, but still no big deal).

Anyway, I'm rambling.. Bottom line is, ripping your CD collection is terribly easy, and with hard drive prices what they are, you really have no reason NOT to back up your collection (FLAC is best for archiving purposes, once again keeping in mind that storage is dirt cheap these days).

Or use a 3rd party program that supports many formats, like EAC. It also downloads ID tracks, but not disc covers.

But then, I dont need disc covers for my indash mp3 player. Oh wait, mp3 is dieing....

I have yet to find any DRM which (even on Windows!) can circumvent the following:

1. Turn off auto-run on all CD drives.
2. While the computer is off, put in a CD in the drive.
3. Upon boot, retrieve the music you paid for using a program like EAC.

Most DRM relies on #1 to begin with.

Now once Longhorn comes about, that's a different story (for Windows users).

For example, their compendium of software includes:

A workaround for EU volume limitation
Ripping, encoding and tagging recommendations.
A utility to mass export Outlook contacts
News and Weather syndication downloaders.
By far the best way to retrieve your MP3s (a utility that sits on your iPod itself and is executable over a network!)
The fantastic iPod Agent, which creates beautiful XML music lists as well as performing loads of useful functions

Every other area of the lounge is equally as exhaustive - from iTunes configuration (you can do amazing things with smart playlists!) to headphones and case reviews. Visit the site instead of buying a book.

(Oh, and I'm in no way involved with the Lounge other than being a fan.)

You may want to give EAC a try. It's widely regarded as the most bit-accurate ripper availiable, and while slow, I've never had it flounder on a disc either. I haven't used iTunes much, just touting my favourite software ;). It's also easy to integrate it with any external encoder, so you can create nice LAME VBR mp3s instead of AACs, if you want.

As far as I'm aware, iTunes is a fairly primitive burst ripper, and lacks things like reader and writer offset correction. EAC's Secure mode remains the most trustworthy ripping method, and it's easy enough to set up to automatically fetch data from FreeDB etc. It can also rip to arbitary formats, including command line encoders, so lossless wise you're not limited to the largely untested, unsupported and sub-par Apple Lossless (which I've already heard truncates samples in some circumstances) or WAV.

In terms of high quality, sure, AAC's not bad, but MusePack still consistantly beats it in listening tests, is faster to encode, and is fully open source. It's a true VBR codec too, and quite happy to scale up to half a Mbit when the music demands it; last I heard AAC was still limited to ABR.

As far as comparing the iPod to a 20 quid player, that was purely from a format support standpoint; I'm well aware that the iPod is likely to include higher quality components which will likely impact sound quality. It's just not much use if it doesn't actually play most of my music in the first place :)

Plus, I find iTunes' UI absolutely disgusting. My preffered player isn't exactly a looker, but at least that's just because it has conservative defaults, not because it's using some weird and extremely slow GUI library with next to zero configurability. Foobar more than beats iTunes in features; and it even has an iPod plugin ;)

Well, frankly, it can't be done... At least not within the CD. My only guess is that the CD has software that auto-loads, tells a server that the CD has been burned n times and that it now can no longer be burned. If I change my hosts file, EAC is not going to care what the CD is doing. In fact, all "copy protected" CDs I've been able to rip or make copies of for myself using EAC (including this very excellent one:Soulive's Turn It Out Remixed ). Once you rip the WAV files and copy that, the little auto-run software is gone.

That's the problem(?) with DRM. You need to implement it in hardware AND software at the same time for it to be able to "work" (see: DVD Region Codes) and even then it's not really going to work (ibid).

Now TO BE FAIR, this idea has its heart in the right place. I don't think anyone but the most extreme zealots would argue that a person should be able to make 10,000 copies of a CD by another artist. But where is that number? It's higher than "just a couple" but probably around "several".

Or, this could be a way to make DRM seem friendly and logical, have everyone implement it, then change it so it's what we all know it's going to turn out to be: crippling and crippled.

Copying from one drive to another on the fly like this can introduce lots of tiny errors. They're not that noticable, but the preferred method of getting an exact copy is to use something like EAC to extract to the hard drive first, then burn to CD.

Umm... Sorry, no.

Although errors can theoretically occur, for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an enormous amount of corruption over a small area, that produces reproduceable false reads, with the correct CRC. Not bloody likely.

Copying from one drive to another on the fly like this can introduce lots of tiny errors. They're not that noticable, but the preferred method of getting an exact copy is to use something like EAC to extract to the hard drive first, then burn to CD.

I see someone already mentioned Audacity, but I also wanted to mention that Exact Audio Copy will do exactly what you want, despite primarily being a cd ripping tool.

There aren't many CD's that can't be riped with 99 - 100% quality with this program.

You can also set it up to use LAME to encode to mp3 as it rips.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

I don't really understand the problem you're talking about. I have yet to encounter a copy protected CD that good ripping software couldn't just bypass in error recovery or secure mode. In fact, I cazn generally bypass any protection on a CD with the NORMAL ripping more at like 6x or so for accuracy.

Some of the programs I use include:

- Easy CD-DA Creator
- EAC

ECDDA is the easiest and most robust tool I've found, and it rips straight to any of about 10 different codecs including Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, WMA, etc. EAC is nice in that it has a secure mode that "guarantees" you get an exact copy of the music file, but it doesn't rip straight to certain standards and can be a bit irritatingly complex.

In the case where I did encounter a protected CD I couldnt bypass I would just return it to teh store and tell them that I couldn't use it per my rights under fair use (i.e., it didn't work) and I want my money back.

-rt

One of the things that drove me to get a record player was to digtize my father's large LP collection. He has hundreds of "classic" Salsa and Disco albums that will never be sold again. I got a nice Sony LP player and I'm using EAC to dump it to MP3. He'll have blast hearing those old albums in his car!

What the hell? I couldn't bear using iTunes. It's bloated and featureless. Its sole purpose is to help me steal music over the school network with the assistance of MyTunes.

I use EphPod to put music on my iPod. When I'm using GNU/Linux, XMMS is my musical staple. If I'm booted into Windows, I'll use WinAMP 2.x to play my music over iTunes every time. iTunes has shitty encoding options - it doesn't even come close to EAC with LAME or whatever your encoder of choice is. However, my biggest complaint about iTunes is its insatiable hunger for resources and slow response. Plus, it takes up half my screen, has zero customisability and I can't find a half-decent visualisation for it anyway.

Good software, my eye.