Good Ripper?

Use Exact Audio Copy for your ripping needs. Then use LAME 3.90.3 for your encoding. For LAME use the --alt preset standard setting to get the most bang for your bits.

Also head over to http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ for all your encoding and ripping questions. Just do a search and check out the stickies at the top of the MP3 General forum.

Both are free tools and will give you the best resaults posible with the MP3 format. Some thing you might want to consider is ripping your music to MPC and then transcode it to MP3 for your iPod. This is what I do and it works great.

I know that you loose some quality when you transcode but I can't here the difference. BTW, MPC is a far better codec then MP3 for lossy compression.

Originally posted by Doc Holiday
Use Exact Audio Copy for your ripping needs. Then use LAME 3.90.3 for your encoding. For LAME use the --alt preset standard setting to get the most bang for your bits. Definately the way to go - EAC is the best ripper, and LAME the best MP3 encoder. "--alt preset standard" should be enough for you, otherwise there's also "--alt preset extreme", but of course file sizes are bigger for not much return. As ever, it's your ears that count.

Also head over to http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ for all your encoding and ripping questions. Just do a search and check out the stickies at the top of the MP3 General forum. Some serious audioheads over there. Currently there are a few discussions about AAC on Windows iPods :)

Both are free tools and will give you the best resaults posible with the MP3 format. Some thing you might want to consider is ripping your music to MPC and then transcode it to MP3 for your iPod. This is what I do and it works great.

I know that you loose some quality when you transcode but I can't here the difference. BTW, MPC is a far better codec then MP3 for lossy compression. Or rip to a lossless codec, like Monkey's or FLAC. I'm considering doing that - got a number of CDs I need to re-rip now I have an iPod, but not quite ready for AAC. So been thinking that I'll rip to a lossless codec, temporarily encode with LAME to MP3, and then when things are sprted out on the AAC front, re-encode from my lossless audio files to AAC. I personally would not transcode (i.e. WMA to MP3, or MP3 to AAC), but it's your ears that count. Just if you are considering trabscoding, check the transcoded file with the CD, not the original file!

EAC, with accurate stream enabled, c2 disabled, audio caching disabled, lame 3.90.2 and --alt-preset standard

works wonders with scratched cd's

I use CDex and love it.
My only problem is playlists. I have it create a M3U playlist for each CD and it never transfers to the iPod. I use Xplay and it seems to skip those files.

So, maybe CDex doesn't create the playlists the way the iPod likes to see them?

Or, most likely it's user error

Jeff

EDIT:
Looks like it is user error, CDex creates the playlist with the same name under each folder (playlist.m3u). Oops.

Well im not sure if any of you have tried but i use ez-cdda extractor http://www.poikosoft.com/
it uses a lame encoder but can do many formats.. wma, aiff, ogg, and even aac for windows and the newest version of winamp supports aac so get that and you dont have to worry about a player on your comp

I have used everything from CDex as my first ripper to MMJB then to winamp ripper to the poiksoft ripper which costs $$$ and i am currently using EAC as my ripper because it was free and almost unamously the best. I stopped using CDex simply because on my windows xp machine it doesn't show the files right away when they are encoded. As far as the installation goes for EAC, it could be about 50 times easier if the designers took some time to do so. For example, including all the necessary files for installation all in one download rather than 4 or 5 different files?? Once you get EAC working however it is very useful. Produces great rips, and i particularly like how it has the uncanny ability to get track info even off mixed cd's.:eek: