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 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?
Heh, I just use windows media player or winamp 5 pro.
I am pretty sure Alcohol 120% can do this, and there is a freeware version of it.
I use the version of nero express than came bundled with my cd-rw drive.
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/
Free, easy, and high quality.
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.
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.
*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.
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...)
I use WMP, but use firefox to browse windowsmedia.com
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.
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.