[Empeg-general] Re: I've never ripped CD's and I want to do it right

[Andy Fox]

The best compromise that I've found for encoding is to use Audiograbber as the front end, and Lame as the encoder.

Audiograbber is the front end that Xing use for AudioCatalyst, and it is certainly the best that I've found. You can find it at http://www.audiograbber.com.

I did try EAC, but found that it was too slow given the number of CDs that I had to encode (over 400). I have found that the combination of a 32x Plextor SCSI CD-Rom drive and AudioGrabber gives equal quality. I have never encountered a single pop or click in any track grabbed with this combination, and I've now grabbed my entire CD collection.

On the subject of encoding, AudioGrabber has a great feature which allows you to grab multiple CDs into one directory, whilst preserving the ID3 header information in the WAV header.

You then simply drag and drop all of the WAVs from Explorer onto the AudioGrabber window and it begins encoding them all. The best bit of all is that it creates a directory structure of:

Artist -> Album Name -> Track.mp3

and then deletes the original WAV when it's done encoding.

Using this technique I was able to grab about 40 CDs at a time to WAV, and then simply leave the computer overnight to do the encoding of all of them.

Andy.