What is the best FREE CD ripper?

[Helevitia]

I never rip CDs but I want to start. What would you recommend?

Thanks,

Dave

[Wulfman]

CDex should do the trick.

or EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de).

mfg
wulfman

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm with Wulfman: CDex is an excellent place to start. Get it here;

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

Dr. Mordrid

[Helevitia]

Thanks guys. I downloaded it, tried it out, loved it! It makes things so painless and puts on the music in the exact folders I would anyway.

Thanks again.

Dave

[PAugustin]

EAC is the ultimate !

[az]

If you want quality, EAC is the only way to go.

AZ

[Gurm]

EAC = Best quality. Hands-down.

- Gurm

[HedsSpaz]

If you fiddle with the settings in CDex you can get it almost up to the same quality as EAC. Personally I prefer CDex cause it has true built in support for OGG Vorbis (ie. can write the tags). EAC can only encode to OGG if you use the command line version of the OGG encoder and can you can't export tags to the files that way.

Also, as I take very good care of my CD's so that they don't get scratched I've never had a single problem with the ripping quality of CDex.

Just my .03 cents.
Ian

[DentyCracker]

EAC roxx for quality.

[Drizzt]

Ok, I have one question for everybody: if an audio CD contain binary datas, and the CD rippers simply read the binary stream from the CD, how can a program have a quality better than another? He wash and clean the bit while reading? O_o

[UtwigMU]

Well first it's not binary entirely as jitter may cause errors and better software reads multiple times to get exact output.

generally audio CD lacks ECC code compared to data CD.

Check readme at cdrlabs.com or cdrinfo.com

[HedsSpaz]

Drizzt, basically it comes down to error checking of the data stream. Most rippers only do a single pass and assume that whatever they pull is correct. They will only error check if something is obviously wrong. EAC by default (iirc), runs a default of like 5 passes for each bit of data. If it doesn't come up with a 1 or a 0 every time then it runs does 32 (default, this is configureable) passes to attempt to verify what that bit is supposed to be. So, for example, if in 5 reads it gets 3 1's and 2 0's then it will read it 32 more times. Suppose now it gets 24 1's and only 8 0's. It is fairly safe to assume from that ratio that the actual data bit is a 1. Compare to another program that only does a single pass, if it gets an error and reads a zero the first time round, well, it's going to record it as a zero even though it is actually a one.

So, EAC is reputed to be the highest quality ripper because it has the best error correction algorithm to date for verifying that what you are recording to your wave is what is actually on the CD.

Hope that answers the question. Take a look at EAC's home page for a better description of how exactly it works.

Ian

[William]

Essentially, you can have the drive do one of two different things if it has a problem reading part of the CD. Option one is to interpolate, which is what many CD players will do. Option two has the drive have another go at reading that section of the disc. In general; option 2 is innapropriate for real time playback, because you don't have enough time to do multiple re reads.

[az]

Option two WOULD be appropriate for real-time playback, if CD audio drives would spin at more than 1x. This introduces jitter and general error problems though, so it isn't done, except in mobile players

AZ

[William]

Actually, the simplest (and therefore often used mehtod) is that CD is read for enough data to fill buffer, CD not read; buffer empties to a certain point, CD is read again until buffer is full and so on. Mostly spin speed is about 2x.