[darrenyeats]

But I will agree that my comment of "never use max compression" was ill-advised.

Also I admit my comment of "always" use max compression was ill-advised!

If you have an old computer, encoding wav files into flac on 8 may crash your computer. It does with my 5 yr old 1.8 Ghz/512 Mb RAM HP laptop. 5 seems to work out well for me

My standard response is http://folk.uio.no/hpv/linuxtoons/dilbert-unix.png. How about my wife's 8 year old laptop 0.5Ghz 256Mb RAM doing max compression with no problem (other than lagging behind the rip a bit)!
Darren

[cloudbaseracer]

dbPoweramp will grab the artwork as well or allow you to acquire it from a TWAIN source such as a scanner.

For items already ripped you might want to check out the Picard tagger from MusicBrainz.org. This a free open source tagger and while a little effort is needed to learn how to use it, it works quite well and also pulls artwork from Amazon. It's written in Python and they have Windows and Linux versions available and are working on a OS X version.

As others have posted a compression level of 5 or 6 is the sweet spot for FLAC.

Mike,

I notice you use dbPoweramp and I believe you are a knowledgeable AC member so I thought I would ask you a key question.  Why did you choose dbPoweramp?  Most times I see an article written on ripping music the program of choice is EAC.  Do you have any data that shows they are equal? Does
dbPoweramp make numerous passes on the cd to ensure that it gets it 100% correct? It seems like it just compares it to some "known" reference?  How do we know that the file being compared to is accurate? 

On another thread...

I've been using dbpoweramp to rip recently and I like the fact that it grabs the cover art from off the web and is at least as accurate as EAC.

At least as accurate?  What does this mean? If EAC gets perfect rips then what does dbPoweramp get?

Thanks,

James

[darrenyeats]

A lot of the discussion of EAC revolves around the mis-perception that (good) ripping engines somehow get it wrong all the time. There are some alternative rippers that do a reliable job of ripping CDs without noticeable scratches. When I say "reliable" I mean they rip CDs without noticeable scratches 100% correctly down to the last bit.

This is based on my own tests of repeat cdparanoia rips done on different machines and CD/DVD ROM drives rather than any theoretical 'received wisdom'. If someone else has some other experience, fine. I'm just giving you my experience based on bit-wise comparisons.

The question then comes, what if I have a noticeably scratched disc? If cdparanoia cannot get the data off accurately...then I doubt EAC will despite trying over and over. EAC WILL be in a position to notify me of an error. The fact is cdparanoia (and cdparanoia-based rippers which are available on all platforms) do a darn good job. Unlike some, and especially older, audio CD transports.

Also, I think people overestimate seriously the effect of being unable to read a few samples with certainty in 700Mb of data (in the case of some visibly scratched discs). That is likely not audible. There are so many bigger fish to fry it's not funny.

So to people who like to use EAC I say good call...knowing you got the rip right can't be bad can it? To people who insist EAC is the only choice, relax (or stress about other things?  ) there exist alternative rippers which perform reliably in practice.
Darren