What do you use to rip CDs?

[AtmaWeapon]

I like to make copies of my CDs so that when they eventually become unusable I can make something usable out of them. I make two copies: one in lossless Windows Media so I don't get crappy copies when I do need to make them and one in 192 APS MP3, a format that I've seen touted as about the best that MP3 can do.

I've been using CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) and have been very happy with it up until now. It was always slow ripping CDs on my laptop, but I chalked it up to a stupidly slow system bus because burning and lots of other CD tasks were slow as well.

On my new computer I'm not as convinced. It took WMP something like 2 minutes to convert Cake's Pressure Chief to lossless WMA. That is from the time I put the CD in the tray to the time WMP said it was done. CDex, on the other hand, takes 10-20 minutes to do the same thing.

I understand compressing the MP3 probably takes longer, but that's not where my problem lies. I am ripping the tracks impossibly slow, encoding still runs pretty fast.

I'm tired of waiting and eager to rip a few CDs. What do you guys use? I have a few requirements but they are vital; any program that doesn't give me these features will not do: I must either be able to specify my encoder and pass command-line arguments to the encoder or I must be able to otherwise configure it to 192 APS. It must read CDDB information; I don't like typing all that mess

So what is there anything else that can give me decent ripping speeds?

[Masamune]

Heh, I just use windows media player or winamp 5 pro.

[DsS Game]

recordnow and nero.

[Solaris_Omega]

I am pretty sure Alcohol 120% can do this, and there is a freeware version of it.

[gdorf]

I use the version of nero express than came bundled with my cd-rw drive.

[Starkist]

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

Free, easy, and high quality.

[AtmaWeapon]

dbpoweramp was looking like just what I wanted right up until it decided that it wanted to start up and sit at 100% CPU usage for an eternity. I was just about finished configuring the program when all of a sudden it stopped responding. Now, every time I open it it goes straight to "useless" mode.

Today is just not my day :/

*edit* oh and some of you seem kind of confused about my question. I am fully capable of burning tracks to a CD and I do not need a program that does that. Nero actually can do it but only with a finite list of codecs and even though I bought Nero I still have to pay separate licenses for these codecs :thumbsup:. The other programs listed are for copying CDs, which Nero handles fine as well. At minimum, I need tracks ripped to .WAV and I guess I could manually set up LAME to encode them, but for all that trouble I'd rather just run CDex slow.

[theplustwo]

I don't know about CDex, but I know programs like Exact Audio Copy take a long time to rip CDs, because they read each block of the disc multiple times until two reads match up *exactly*, and use the error-correction data in the surrounding blocks to fill out their reads. That way you get a much more accurate read (especially from scratched discs) but the ripping process takes a lot longer than with "single pass" rippers, like WMP.

[gdorf]

*edit* oh and some of you seem kind of confused about my question. I am fully capable of burning tracks to a CD and I do not need a program that does that. Nero actually can do it but only with a finite list of codecs and even though I bought Nero I still have to pay separate licenses for these codecs . The other programs listed are for copying CDs, which Nero handles fine as well. At minimum, I need tracks ripped to .WAV and I guess I could manually set up LAME to encode them, but for all that trouble I'd rather just run CDex slow.

Nero express works fine for me. I like to save tracks to my hard drive as well. I just tested it with my old sugar-ray cd and was able to copy the entire cd to *.wav files in about one minute and 30 seconds (and my computer is nothing compared to yours). My version of nero also supports mp3's, which is what I usually burn to.

[ZTC]

have you tried jetAudio 6?
the ripping is pretty decent, and it can also transfer tags if needed
(not sure on what the pro version can do, though...)

[Michaelk88]

I use WMP, but use firefox to browse windowsmedia.com

[AtmaWeapon]

Bah, I decided to put up with CDex. I solved my problem with the ASPI layer by copying the Nero winaspi32.dll I had into the CDex directory. Turns out there's no speed advantage, but theplustwo's multiple-pass explanation makes sense to me. I figure I'll stick with CDex and just put up with slower ripping.

[Raichu86]

I use CDex as well. I can't say I've noticed it being slower than other programs I've used. When I turn off "on the fly encoding", I find that the encoding process (after the initial ripping of the data) is what takes the longest.