Suggestions for a good, free cd to mp3 ripper

December 21, 2003 1:08 PM

I need a good, free cd to mp3 ripper. Preferably one that can run pretty quickly. Any suggestions?
posted by SpecialK to Computers & Internet (20 answers total)

iTunes
posted by boaz at 1:12 PM on December 21, 2003

I use Alto MP3 ripper, the free version can only do the first 12 or so tracks, but otherwise it has worked fine.
posted by drezdn at 1:17 PM on December 21, 2003

This thread offers some good suggestions.
posted by boomchicka at 1:25 PM on December 21, 2003

Wow, we're already having ask.mefi double posts. iTunes is my suggestion, or CDex, too.
posted by gramcracker at 1:37 PM on December 21, 2003

I second CDex. I always come running back to CDex.
posted by mcsweetie at 1:45 PM on December 21, 2003

CDex and Blade Encoder are my personal weapons of choice. (CDex to WAV files, then Blade them to at least 192k.
posted by woil at 1:57 PM on December 21, 2003

Depends on what you mean by good. From what I understand, in windows, the best quality mp3s are achieved with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for ripping, and LAME for encoding. Here's some kinda faq about it.
posted by duckstab at 2:00 PM on December 21, 2003

I also recommed CDex for ripping, but for converting back to CD format (along with ripping) and light editing of music (splicing, cutting, fading out, etc...nothing too fancy), I've started to convert to Audacity.
posted by jmd82 at 2:34 PM on December 21, 2003

I'm using Easy CD-DA Extractor at the moment at it's been a neat little easy to use item.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:48 PM on December 21, 2003

On a side note, drive space is so cheap now.. If you're not playing them back in some proprietary device that can only use mp3s, I'd just go with flac. That way you don't have to think about any of this. Thats my plan.
posted by duckstab at 3:45 PM on December 21, 2003

Response by poster: Thanks, all! Downloading & trying out to see what meets my needs...

duckstab - I have a file server in my apartment with two 80 gb drives mirrored with Raid 1. I have a 30 gig and a 120 gig drive in my main box. I've got a web server with another 40 gigs of space that I do most of my software development on.

Most of the drives listed above are at least half full. The 120 gig is almost all the way full with the mp3s I already have and CD images of various pieces of software. I've got about 100 CDs that I want to rip & put on the file server so that I can listen to them anywhere in my apartment. I need a fast ripper and a relatively small but decent audio format, and mp3 and/or OGG work just fine.
posted by SpecialK at 4:03 PM on December 21, 2003

I'll chime in for EAC too. Best quality of any I have tried, and I have tried many.
posted by Nothing at 4:18 PM on December 21, 2003

SpecialK, with multiple computers available to you, maybe aorta is worth checking out. I haven't played with it, but it looks pretty neat.
posted by duckstab at 4:19 PM on December 21, 2003

i recently tried out dbpoweramp, and i can say nothing but good things about it. everything is pretty straightforward, and the automatic tagging is executed VERY nicely.
posted by lotsofno at 4:20 PM on December 21, 2003

One more for CDex; I spent a long time looking for a good PC CD ripper and that came out top. For Apples, iTunes clearly rules.
posted by adrianhon at 4:39 PM on December 21, 2003

I'll chime in for EAC and LAME (but you might want to search for better-than-default LAME settings; not sure if it now defaults to the best possible settings.)

You may want to rip to OGG. It sounds better than MP3, and has better compression.

You may also want to consider SHN, which is lossless, yet achieves 30-50% compression.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:07 PM on December 21, 2003

EAC all the way
posted by muckster at 6:22 PM on December 21, 2003

Response by poster: (and by the way, apologies for the double post -- but there's been some stuff in here that I've never seen before, like Aorta, that I'm going to be using to toy with other things.

The master goal is to add yet ANOTHER raid-1 box that acts as my central mp3 repository. ;)
posted by SpecialK at 12:52 AM on December 22, 2003

With the kind of horsepower you're talking, why not use SHN?
posted by five fresh fish at 10:06 AM on December 22, 2003

five fresh fish, why use SHN instead of flac? .. that's not supposed to be snarky, I'm curious.

I'm going to be ripping everything to something lossless at some point soon, and had planned on flac. Do any hardware devices support SHN? I know the Rio Karma does flac, dunno if any others do.
posted by duckstab at 5:16 PM on December 22, 2003