Most info on the Dope is older. I’d like an up-to-date recommendation on a program to use for ripping my pile of CDs to my hard drive. It’s an older tower system running Win 7 professional (it won’t upgrade to Win 10/11-another question for a later date). We’re moving and I’d put the chore off.
I’ve got two CD/DVD drives hooked up so if I can swap drives while loading another CD. A program that would do that would be great. They are going to an internal 2TD hard drive with later backup to an external hd.
Format to use? What’s current (I’m certainly not)?
I’ve used Exact audio converter, have done for over 20 years. If not relatively obscure it should be able to look up the meta data from online. Rips to mp3s
CDex. Rips to virtually any format, as well as downloading metadata. Be sure to use this ONLY for legal purposes, where you have the right to make a copy for personal use.
I’ve been using CDex for almost 15 years and it always worked like a charm (I own about 2000 CDs and got most of them ripped in a ripping marathon of several weeks about 12 years ago). But the last times I used it, the link to the online database from which CDex gathered the metadata was broken, and I seem to remember having read that this database has been taken offline. Most modern CDs include the metadata, but for older CDs you’re now out of luck.
Rips and converts in any format. Pulls meta-data and album art from up to four sources and has a slick interface to resolve discrepancies.
It also has a “Multi Encoder” which can rip simultaneously into two files. I have mine set for FLAC (lossless - for archival purposes) and MP3 VBR (lossy for playing on devices)
When I started ripping cds to mp3s, Windows Media Player didn’t offer this option.
I just tried it for the first time on a CD which Exact Audio Copy failed to look up, and it successfully looked up the tracks. But it failed to rip. It told me to upgrade from Windows 7. I’m on Windows 10. So it didn’t work.
I’m interested in a new solution for ripping (with better track lookup), and tried this. Norton refused to open it. The wiki says that “This project should be considered as exploited by the new maintainer and should not be trusted”.
That’s really a shame. I’ve always liked the program and it worked well for me for quite a long time, but it seems that some shady people took over the project.
OP here. That’s the one I chose. So far, it’s been great. Just shuffling the two CD/DVD drives. I’m encoding FLAC lossless too.
Somewhat curiously, single artist CDs copy at around 30-35X speed; compilation albums with multiple artists only copy 8-12X. Perhaps getting data for each artist?
Actually, the CD I was using for this which is relatively “famous” but failed was the Soundtrack to the video game Control. EAC failed to look it up. Windows Media player did (but failed to rip it).Picard looked good but didn’t find it.
In reality I buy a lot of music at gigs (like 90% of them), and they’re very unlikely to be in an online cd lookup, when they are playing to 50 people. As a programmer, I wrote some perl scripts which extracts out a text file template to fill in for EAC unknown rips, I look them up on discogs.com, cut and paste the info into place and run the script to update them. Works well.
I do think there are better solutions than EAC, some even paid (dbpoweramp for instance), but none will really solve the problem I already did by hand.
Picard and most of the programs use MusicBrainz, which is a free online database. It is possible that your CD was not yet in there. Perhaps you should add it Assuming it is a commercial or otherwise famous album that many people will try to rip.
ETA Actually, according to this page, Exact Audio Copy does have MusicBrains and discogs, but you need to enable the plug-in
Assuming it is a commercial or otherwise famous album that many people will try to rip.