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

[Michael C. Grant]

Dylan,

That CD jukebox sounds nice, but you need to be aware that you will not get the same results as you would with a more, um, "persistent" program like Exact Audio Copy. Your CD jukebox will indeed stream digital data from the CD player, but it will likely not be as error-free. You may not realize this because your CD player's error correction and error masking system may do a good job most of the time of covering up those errors. So it will be fine to listen to, most of the time; but the data won't be clean, and then you'll be encoding an imperfect copy---and what's the point of that? It might be hard to believe that CD transports are so unreliable when it comes to extracting the data; but I encourage you to read pages like <A HREF="http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/eac3.html">this one<A> to understand the trouble people go to to get "secure" extraction.

Besides, if you use your jukebox in this manner, aren't you still going to have to manually intervene a lot to extract each track individually?

I really want to encourage you to make that initial investment to rip your CDs cleanly and encode them liberally. Disc space is cheap, and ultimately so is your time, since you will be using this MP3 player a lot longer than you will spend encoding your collection. Once you get a good rhythm, you'll be able to rip and encode in the background while you work on other things.


Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266