CD Ripping Help Needed

[AndrewC]

I'm off to India shortly so wanted some form of mobile music player to take with me for the flight and for some relaxation in the evenings.

I wanted a good capacity & long battery life so have ordered an M5L which should be with me soon. [excited]

Never used any sort of MP3 player before, hardly ever copied CD's either.

I believe Ogg Vorbis is the file format of choice for good quality so can some kind person please recommend an easy to use piece of software that will let me copy CD's onto a Windows XP and hence onto the player.

All other hints & tips welcome

[doniago]

Audiograbber is the best user-friendly ripper that I know of. Once you're comfortable EAC is a better ripper but significantly less user-friendly.

[TedJ]

G'day Andrew, and welcome to iAudiophile. [smile]

I'll second Doniago's suggestion for Audiograbber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/), although I also recommend having a look at CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) as well.

EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) is considered the best ripper currently available under Windows, although it does have a steeper learning curve than most. Fortunately, this mainly applies to the initial configuration, which is handled by a rather friendly wizard in recent releases.

My personal experience with these apps are somewhat limited however, since I haven't run Windows on my home machine in many years now.

[AndrewC]

Thanks for the replies.

I remembered I had Roxio 9 on my PC and copied a load of albums onto the PC at 320k. From there onto a Flash drive which was copied to my office PC and from there onto the M5 when it turned up in the post!

So far it seems to be working well, got to read the manual properly though!

Nice sound, far better than my old cassette Walkman!

Is it worth sticking with Roxio ?

Supplied phones seem OK but I'm guessing there are better out there?

[TedJ]

I'm not familiar with Roxio's software, so I can't answer that question. I will say that if you're planning on encoding your music as MP3s, you definitely want a ripper that supports the LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php) MP3 encoder; it's considered one of the best currently available and is very thoroughly tested.

320kbps is probably overkill for use on a portable, I suggest a variable bitrate encode of around 192kbps should be indistinguishable to the original recording, to most ears at least. If Roxio is unable to handle VBR encodes then I'd definitely consider upgrading to a different package.

Cowon's bundled phones are reasonably good, but upgrading is always a good option. It all depends on your budget... I suggest you have a browse through the Portable Gear forum for some ideas.

[AndrewC]

Roxio does support MP3 VBR as well as Ogg & FLAC. It's easy to use and very quick but I suspect it doesn't do much in the way of error checking.

[TedJ]

Ah. That's why EAC is so highly regarded... generally speaking it's error correction is nearly bulletproof.