[Tirade]

Just a quick list of utilities that I use (some for a while and some just recently) to help make the chore of ripping your CD's to a format a little less painful.

Ripping:

dBpoweramp - My personal ripping software of choice. Most people know/use this as an MP3 converter but its ripping capabilities rival pretty much anything out there at the moment. The latest beta includes support for retrieving metadata from All Music Guide (subscription required), MusicBrainz, and freedb. Supports AccurateRip verification so you can compare your results to others and be sure that your music was ripped accurately.

Honorable Mentions - EAC, Plextools, and Easy CD-DA


Tagging:

Jaikoz - Ive just recently discovered this excellent program. There are a ton of great tagging programs out there but the problem that almost all of them have in common is that you can't do automated tagging. Jaikoz first checks/creates a MusicDNS PUID for each individual track and can then submit the album to the MusicBrainz DB for accurate tagging. You can configure accuracy thresholds and specify tagging requirements so that you can do batch automated tagging/cover art downloads for all of your rips.

Honorable Mentions - Tag&Rename, Tag Clinic, MediaMonkey, and MP3 Tag (if you are ripping to MP3, TagRunner is probably the best automated tagger out there)


Cover Art:

Album Art Downloader XUI: While "the best" tagging and ripping software is debatable, the nod for best cover at downloading goes to Album Art Downloader XUI. There is not another cover art program that I'm aware of that hits as many sites and has as much functionality as AAD XUI. Definitely worth your donation dollars for this software.

Honorable Mentions - None I can think of that even come close.




I am not affiliated with any of the above companies. Using their software may cause your computer to explode, you amps to leak the magic blue smoke, and sudden hearing loss. This post is a work in progress and I will try and update links and info over the next few days (when the office slows down!)

Note: Ive been asked to make it clear that I do CD ripping on the side. This post however is intended to help those who wish to tackle ripping themselves. I have been and always will be available to help those who want to have questions with ripping. I'm not an expert, just a guy who rips a lot of CD's.

[Cacophonix]

Great post there, tirade.

I've been trying to rip CDs onto my hard drive since quite some time, and have always had problem trying to tag CDs or downloading the cover arts.

I'll try the suggested utils and see if they ease my pain.

[woodsyi]

Thanks Tirade.  These are very helpful informations.    I will have to check out the tagging method.

[BradJudy]

Cover Art:

Album Art Downloader XUI: While "the best" tagging and ripping software is debatable, the nod for best cover at downloading goes to Album Art Downloader XUI. There is not another cover art program that I'm aware of that hits as many sites and has as much functionality as AAD XUI. Definitely worth your donation dollars for this software.

This looks interesting (I have been using Album Art Aggregator), so I downloaded it, installed the required .Net 3.5 and installed AAD, but every time I try a search, it crashes.  I'll try it at home under Vista later, but no luck on this machine.

[Tirade]

This looks interesting (I have been using Album Art Aggregator), so I downloaded it, installed the required .Net 3.5 and installed AAD, but every time I try a search, it crashes.  I'll try it at home under Vista later, but no luck on this machine.

If youre using a 64bit OS you will need the 64bit version of MediaInfo

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mediainfo/MediaInfo_0.7.6.0_DLL_Windows_x64.7z?modtime=1204285826&big_mirror=0

[BradJudy]

If youre using a 64bit OS you will need the 64bit version of MediaInfo

Nope, 32-bit XP on this machine. 

[Scott F.]

I'll toss this one into the fray too.

Recently I've been having all kinds of conflicts with my internal drives and writing data DVD's. So I went out and picked up a Samsung USB DVD/CD R drive from Best Buy. It's the Samsung SE-S204. It was fairly inexpensive at about $100. This thing took my rip time down from about 8 minutes with an internal Samsung drive using EAC to (on average) about 2:45 for a full CD. Compared to my internal drives, thats smokin' fast. I haven't had any tagging issues either where I did with the internal drives.

If you've got a ton of CD's to rip and your existing rips are slow, this might be worth looking at.

[daz_bike]

Hi,

Thanks for the ripping programs and info.  I will check them out.

Does anyone know if there is a program that will automatically create a folder for a bunch of FLAC files.   I have a lot of FLAC files (tagged) in a single directory but I would like each album in its own folder (named by the artist).  Is there such a program and/or easy way than to manually have to create the folder, cut and paste?

Daz

[Tirade]

I'll toss this one into the fray too.

Recently I've been having all kinds of conflicts with my internal drives and writing data DVD's. So I went out and picked up a Samsung USB DVD/CD R drive from Best Buy. It's the Samsung SE-S204. It was fairly inexpensive at about $100. This thing took my rip time down from about 8 minutes with an internal Samsung drive using EAC to (on average) about 2:45 for a full CD. Compared to my internal drives, thats smokin' fast. I haven't had any tagging issues either where I did with the internal drives.

If you've got a ton of CD's to rip and your existing rips are slow, this might be worth looking at.

The problem with external drives isnt usually the drive as often as it is the quality of the IDE/USB bridge and solid ATAPI support.

Are you doing secure rips or just burst? Its usually during secure ripping that the IDE/USB bridge issues become apparent.

[Tirade]

Hi,

Thanks for the ripping programs and info.  I will check them out.

Does anyone know if there is a program that will automatically create a folder for a bunch of FLAC files.   I have a lot of FLAC files (tagged) in a single directory but I would like each album in its own folder (named by the artist).  Is there such a program and/or easy way than to manually have to create the folder, cut and paste?

Daz

A lot of taggers will allow you to create folders (and rename files) based off of the tags. The program I mentioned in the OP (Jaikos) has that option.

[JEaton]

MP3 Tag (if you are ripping to MP3

If you're talking about Mp3tag (at www.mp3tag.de/en/ ) it is most certainly not for tagging Mp3 only.  Far and away my tool of choice and I've used many.

[Scott F.]

Are you doing secure rips or just burst?

Good catch. Sure enough, my internal drives were set to Secure Mode but when I set up the USB drive I missed that setting.  I just reripped one of my CD;s just to see how long it would take and its at about 6 minutes. 

[Tirade]

MP3 Tag (if you are ripping to MP3

If you're talking about Mp3tag (at www.mp3tag.de/en/ ) it is most certainly not for tagging Mp3 only.  Far and away my tool of choice and I've used many.

I think you misread my comment (then again my typing skills suck). MP3tag is great for FLAC, what I said was if youre ripping to MP3 then TagRunner is one of the best taggers out there for automated tagging.

[Tirade]

Are you doing secure rips or just burst?

Good catch. Sure enough, my internal drives were set to Secure Mode but when I set up the USB drive I missed that setting.  I just reripped one of my CD;s just to see how long it would take and its at about 6 minutes. 

Its better to catch it now instead of 1000 CD's later 

[BradJudy]

Hmmm...here at home it crashed the first time I tried a search and now it's working fine.  I'll have to play with it at work more. 

[JimJ]

For ripping, I like using EAC in secure mode and the FLAC frontend to convert.