2. digital
  3. 1409100427

Ripping CD's - Bypassing Computer CD Player

At the risk of sounding stupid, could someone point me in the right/best direction of how I can rip my CD's to a hard drive while maintaining fidelity? Hold on, I know how to do it with my computer and I know the difference between lossless and lossy files. My concern is that the CD players on computers are not of sufficient quality to do a really good job. I've tried to find the best CD player for my computer, but I know it's not nearly the quality of my stereo componentry. My thought is to use my "audiophile" quality CD player(s) to rip to a storage medium. Is there a component that I can attach to one of my current CD players that would seamlessly backup the CD's and/or a combination CD player/hard drive that would do the same thing?
Ag insider logo xs@2xnab2

Showing 2 responses by mapman

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,838 posts
 
Good software for ripping is the key. End of story.

For .wav on WIndows, I found free Windows MEdia Player included in Windows to work very well in general for many years.

I am in trial period with DBPoweramp for ripping to FLAC starting last night with a few CDs ranging from very good to questionable condition. IT provides a lot of useful information and options for ripping. It resorted to a block rip mode for a few tracks on CD that were apparently damaged. This was dog slow when it occurred and I had to skip those tracks. It seemed fast and reliable under most circumstances though. ALso the way it auto tags using multiple database sources and provides supplemental album art choices off the internet as a contingency when needed is the best I have seen so far for tagging at rip time. I would pay to use this over EAC I think in that my recollection is EAC auto tagging may not be as sophisticated? Mediamonkey RIP to FLAC has not floated my boat at all to-date in terms of speed and overall user friendliness, especially for tagging.
mapman's avatar
mapman
21,838 posts
 
RL, So far I am using mostly MusicBrainz Picard to autotag FLAC after ripping. Is there a tool from dbpoweramp vendor that enables tagging similar to while ripping that automatically pulls best metadata from the 4 multiple metadata DBs dbpwoeramp rip software uses?

Musicbrainz/Picard is a great tool but only uses Musicbrainz and none of these DBs seem to always trump the other. Each has different content available and tagging works best by using multiple source DBs still these days it seems/
More to discover