And then, after the ripping was done, I noticed that my relatively small CD collection, even in FLAC, was < 15G. So actually, I ended up ripping to FLAC anyway, intending to re-encode to MP3 as needed for my phone. There are also solutions like Plex - I have my CDs ripped to FLAC on a Plex server, and then when I sync to mobile devices I can have it compress (the medium setting is good for my mobile listening, mostly train and subway commutes, but if you drive you may want a higher quality).
#Free cd ripping software art portable#
You can always rip to lossless and use whatever music manager you have to do a folder conversion to mp3s for using on your portable device.but you can't convert back to lossless from lossy. In about a year or two, everything will fit on a micro sd card losslessly and I am very glad I don't have to do the job again when that day comes. A 128 gig micro sd in flac quality files is not quite 15 days of unrepeated music (just eyeballing that at around 5,000 songs on my system to fit 128 gig - edit of 14,300 total). That said, your recommendation of EAC is well taken. Not sure why one bothers with mp3s in a world where 4tb drives are 100 bucks and once done, you have a proper lossless copy foreverīecause I don't have 4TB of space on my phone? Any CD that had errors got reripped in my nice Plextor drive that was known to be extremely good at CD rips. The extra drives I had weren't as good as my main one, but as long as their rips were matching AccurateRip, I knew they were fine. And if you can scrounge up additional CD drives (I had 2 internal and 3 connected over USB), it will use them all at the same time and you can get through dozens of CDs an hour. It automatically rips, tags, and ejects CDs and you just need to feed the drive a new CD each time it pops one out. going one at a time with EAC was taking forever, but I found that dbPowerAmp has a Batch Ripper which is perfect for that. I used EAC for years, but for a while I got out of the habit and ended up with a large stacks (100+) CDs that I hadn't ripped yet. I think it prompts you to fill it in, but since I use Musicbrainz Picard to tag/organize all my music, I just filled in enough that I could identify the rip later when I went to clean up the tags and move it to my NAS> I can't remember exactly what it does with missing metadata. Anything that still doesn't match is tagged with the failure, so you can listen to see if they're good enough or acquire a better copy at a later point. I was able to rip them successfully on a Linux laptop using CDParanoia (which noted that there were errors and corrected them), but I would really rather not have to spin up a Linux VM or something for the sole purpose of ripping my CDs.ĭbPowerAmp is comparable to CDParanoia/EAC for ripping quality, with the bonus that it uses AccurateRip automatically, so most of your CDs will get ripped at a speed comparable to burst mode in EAC, but tracks that don't match the online checksums will get reripped with slower/safer settings that can deal with scratches and other disc errors. How good is dbPowerAmp at detecting and correcting glitches? I have a couple of CDs which play fine, but have glitchy tracks when they're ripped. I've tried Freerip and FSCDripper, and neither has ALL of these (although I believe Freerip does if I buy it, which I might if recommended). 256Kbps MP3s are a reasonable size/quality compromise. VBR MP3 support is nice, but not required. Start the rip process as soon as a disc is inserted, without requiring me to push any buttons Pull metadata from freedb or another reliable source So, I'd like a ripper that can do these things: Yes, I know it sounds odd to play from the CD when I have burned MP3s already but it was an enhanced CD. My problems with WMP include its tendency to quietly glitch on damaged CDs, automatically PLAYING CDs when I'm just trying to rip them, ripping CDs without the vital metadata if there's a network glitch instead of waiting, and automatically ejecting a CD when I AM trying to play it if I have the "auto eject after rip" setting enabled. I still have many CDs to rip to my media server, so I'm looking for a better ripper than Media Player.