EAC is very good. It would be my second choice over Audiograbber - if I needed to deal with a problem disc. I can assure you that I have a couple of discs that EAC would not be able to deal with. In fact, no program s likely to get far without changing drives. The Plextor is light-years ahead of Yamaha for DAE (I also have a Yamaha burner) but unfortunately there is one Ministry CD that I can ONLY rip with a crap Toshiba drive I have in another machine. If you look at the bottom of the disc, you can see a somewhat differing track spacing, but the disc is not damaged or scratched in any way.


I've also got a plextor, in fact, I have 8 of them available to me. Maybe it's a problem on mine, or possibly I have a better Yamaha, but my mileage HAS varied. Some discs rip better on the plextors, some on the Yamaha. But, I've to run into one that I can't rip on either using cdparanoia. From that standpoint, I'll still recommend EAC or paranoia.


Given a good drive and suitable software, you can get perfect rips without resorting to a "safe" or "secure" rip. However, YMMV and you have no proof of the quality unless you involve some additional manual steps - including the possibility of listening.


Yup. and I'd rather listen later, when it's on the empeg.



Any problems that have been introduced into my wavs have been due to me messing with the computer at the same time as the ripping. I am keeping a list of possible problem tracks to re-rip, but so far it's only three items long. And one of them I'm pretty sure has nothing wrong with it (I have to verify with the actual disc when I get the chance). Otherwise I can't really tell the difference between the CD tracks, the ripped WAVs and the encoded LAME VBRs.



That's all the more reason to use a secured rip. I'll admit, I beat the crap out of my PC's when I'm ripping, as I have multiple lame processes going in the background when I'm doing it. It's quicker on high level hardware. For me, the ability to be able to rip and encode at the same time, without worring about the quality is the plus.



Most people are satisfied with far inferior rips and encodes than we are. This can be seen by how many people use XING just because it's super fast. Or how many people use brand-X all-in-one program just because it was free with something else they bought or downloaded. Let alone people who encode at 128Kbit or less (especially without using Joint Stereo at those low rates).



Yeah, I think that's apparent, when we are discussing the best possible rip, using plextor drives. I spent a considerable amount of money installing my car stereo system in the 'teg. I want it to be as perfect as possible. Therefore, I'm not willing to shave two minutes off of my rip time, hoping that the hardware will catch it. 95% of the time, the plextors will. 85% of the time, the yamaha will. 99.9% of the time, paranoia gets it. That .1% that I have encountered were from discs that... well, looked like they were used for sandpaper demonstrations. Even with the paranoia time, overall it's faster in the long run to do both at the same time. And I don't worry about the rip anymore.