DescentBB

Well, I've finally decided that with my abundance of hard drive space being what it is, its time to re-rip my entire CD collection at a higher bitrate for personal listening and backup useages. So, what CD ripper programs do people use these days that give excellent results, and are preferrably freeware, and can also get around multi-session, cd-extra, and other data tracks with clear ease? I'd also like whatever program I eventually use to be able to have extreme customization in the way outputted files are named. And some interface with some database like CDDB (if thats even around anymore) would be great, so I dont have to manually type everything in for my 200+ CD's. Oh, and VBR options would be nice too.

Also, I'd like to use this last line of my post to tell Mobius not to waste his time posting to me, as he is a source of unreliable information.

if you want the multi session cd, then any program that can dump CD images will do.

Nero, I think that CDburnerProXP can do that.

If you want to compress the audio, and keep the data tracks, thats a bit more work.

I just want the audio, and to hell with any data tracks.

With some ripper programs Ive used in the past, certain data tracks have been able to prevent them from working properly. In fact I know the RIAA has employed data tracks as a way to specifically mess with ripping programs, so I'd like a ripping program that can just completely ignore any data tracks and just treat the disc like a 100% pure audio CD.

Don't laugh but I've used Windows Media player to rip a few cds and they all work fine.

I use CDex to rip my audio. I find you get better performance if you disable on-the-fly ripping so you won't be as likely to get jitter errors. You can encode to any format you have a codec installed for.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos

if you just want the audio, use Exact Audio Copy, and either WavPack or FLAC.

I perfer wavpack, its faster on the encoding.

WavPack works for lossless, but the method it uses of creating two files for every track is a pain when you want to use it as an archive format. Use FLAC if you plan on keeping it on your hard drive, Mokey's Audio (APE) works too. I say lossless is lossless, no matter which format you use you should get the same WAV back, and the compression is about the same for all three formats.

Why bother with the lossy component of wavpack? Wavpack has only created one file per track for me.