Ripping CD's to hard drive

@sd40 

Exact Audio Copy does flac as well, but you have to get a plug in.  All my older “mono” rips are in flac.

Never rip to anything less than flac or aiff. Disk is so cheap and getting cheaper every day. 

I just used my PC CD player and FreeRIP to make 16/44 flac files.  There is no advantage to upsampling. I tried EAC. It's very slow and I could not hear any difference. "Bit perfect" is a bit of a fools errand. Even the factory CDs and players are not bit perfect and 99 times out of a 100 the dropouts are too small to be audible. Every part of the reproduction chain can have drop outs. There is no retry strategy or error correction  built into USB, SPDIF, AES etc nor I2S, only ethernet.

Another mention for Innuos. The Zen Mini S is more affordable than the Zen but also acts as a CD ripper, NAS and streamer. Its a good solution if you don't already have those components. For clarity, it is not a DAC so it needs a DAC connected to play music.

I’ve used JRiver to easily rip thousands of CD’s flawlessly to FLAC with excellent metadata results. I’ve tried Exact Audio Copy but it didn’t get the metadata correct, but maybe I didn’t have the settings correct because EAC wasn't very intuitive for me. 

Someone here said 192kbps MP3 is all you need, but that is laughable in this day and age. It’s highly recommended for you to use FLAC or better.