As I said in an earleir post, I am new to empeg and just ordered the 30 Gig Blue. So now I'm faced with the seemingly daunting task of converting my CD collection to MP3. What is the preferred software to do this? If anybody has any good suggestions on how to go about this I'd appreciate it.

Joe

Well, I use Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/eac6.html to extract to WAV then I use LAME http://mitiok.free.fr/ to convert to MP3. Just noticed LAME 3.91 stable is up there, too....

As for settings on LAME, I am starting to use the --alt-preset extreme switch...just because storage is not an issue for me.

For Windows:

Audio Grabber (AG) - USD$20
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) - Free
CDEx - Free

They should all be able to use LAME as a plugin encoder - through DLL or external executable. You should most definitely use LAME 3.90.

You should also make sure you have a CD-ROM drive capable of digital audio extraction at decent speeds and decent quality (Plextor has no competition in this regard - their CD-ROM drives being better than their burners).

AG is friendly and simple to use. It also has a forum full of helpful people that will guide you through any problems. EAC support secure ripping - it will read your disc over and over making sure it gets the correct data. This can cause a rip to take much longer even than 1x, but it will be perfect or next to it.

I've personally used AG with a Plextor UltraMax40x with great success. Encodes with LAME 3.90

Bruno

Look in the MP3 creation and playback questions in the FAQ. Under Windows, most folks like to use EAC or MusicMatch (I prefer EAC). Under Linux, use CDParanoia (which is available for Linux, but not other Unices). I don't think anyone has any exceptionally good suggestions under any other OS.

Hello All

I have been using various versions of Music Match Jukebox for some time and am very pleased with the results. I paid $36 (CDN) for my most recent copy (v6.0) which I then upgraded to version 7 for free. I use 100% VBR to encode my music and I can't tell the difference from the source CD through my home stereo system...

John

Here is my favorite site for pointing people with questions about ripping and encoding.

Things like ripping and encoding tend to take up an almost religious ferver... but I've had very satisfactory results using EAC and Lame.

Congratulations and welcome!

Use EAC. Rips with similar or better quality than most, and
has excellent error recovery and cd support. Free.

AG has a forum where people answer your questions
by asking you not to use return keys in your messages.
REAL F'ing helpful. NOT. AG has problems with various
cd drives but does seem to try and resolve them. Costs $.

[Lame 3.90(beta) is the best external encoder for quality
that I have found. works with either]

Ed

Sounds like a SCSI CD player is a requirement for performance. What SCSI adapter are people running? I have an Adaptec 2900 series in my home PC. Is this adequate? I am very psyched about getting this thing up and running. (I have to get it first - I hope the order isn't delayed. I got a confirmation from Sonic Blue that it will ship soon...)

Joe

SCSI is not required. I do great rips on my IDE CD-ROM drive. It's likely that you can do rips just fine on your existing drive. Try it first.

I've seen different pieces of software that had compatibility problems with certain drives, so it may take some trial and error at first. For instance, everyone raves about EAC, but I could never get it to work with a certain drive I had, whereas WinDAC32 worked perfectly on that drive. So you never know.

I now use CDex, back when I switched over from Audio Grabber. I did some ripping tests both in the inner and outer tracks of cd's.

Audio Grabber, EAC and CDex ALL ripped the tracks EXACTLY the same. I used a CRC check to compare the files.

I was using a Panasonic 32X CD-Rom back then.

So if you use LAME 3.90 or higher you’ll get the same results with all of the above packages if your cd-rom supports ripping of course

Using this Plextor, the much more intuitive AG interface, and its other small features, were enough for me to pay for it and skip over all the free software available, including EAC. I always do recommend EAC for someone who wants a free product that will work well with drives that don't have their own very high quality jitter correction.

BTW, I posted quite a bit to the AG forum and was quite helpful. I know that the regulars there are also very helpful, so maybe you caught someone on a bad day.

You can't compare any forum to this one though. I don't think an equal exists anywhere for any topic. In here, even if most of the database was wiped out, as long as Tony's user account remained, you'd pretty much still be able to get an answer to everything. :) Hehe.

Bruno.