Good CD ripper proggie??

[Paul Mather]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 11:22 +0000, M Holmes wrote:
> Doing a Hawk compilation for someone (he's near retired, but hey, he
> might start buying 'em...).
>
> So I need a proggie to grab individual tracks from CD and then I need to
> put 'em all on one CD. In the old days I used to do it all with Easy CD
> Creator but that doesn't work any more.
>
> I have Nero, but that just seems to write CDs. It doesn't help grab the
> tracks to the hard drive. Itunes does seem to grab tracks as .wav but
> with live albums has its own weird ideas about where the tracks start
> and finish.
>
> Just copying the tracks from a CD from the drive doesn't work either
> since they don't copy over as .wav
>
> So what's the simplest way to do the bit that involves copying tracks to
> the hard drive?

If you are interested in the quality of the copy, I suggest you use
either ExactAudioCopy (EAC) [http://www.exactaudiocopy.de] or dBpowerAMP
[http://www.dbpoweramp.com] if you are using MS-Windows.  EAC is sort of
the "gold standard" for digital audio extraction (DAE) quality on
Windows.  Both EAC and dBpowerAMP now support AccurateRip, which allows
you to compare checksums of your DAE with those of others around the
world, to be more confident of having made a bit-identical DAE.  (Hey,
if you use either of these, you might be able to confirm my AccurateRip
checksums for the Hawkwind remasters.  I think I'm the only one to have
submitted results for Hawkwind CDs.;)

IMHO, it's very worthwhile using a good quality DAE program, even if you
believe your CD hardware to be good and your CDs pristine.  My *BRAND
NEW* never-been-played copy of Hawkwind's _Take Me To Your Leader_ CD
would not extract the last track cleanly, leaving skips and static at
places in the extracted audio.  I had to set EAC on it to get a clean
DEA finally, and even then I had to increase EAC's timeout for giving up
because it was taking so long.  (In the end, it took almost 50 minutes
to extract just that one track cleanly!  When I did visually examine the
CD it did look a bit scuffed/grubby, which seemed odd for something just
out of the shrink wrap.)  But, luckily now I have a backup of a clean
DAE of the entire CD in FLAC format, and so if/when my retail CD goes
pear shaped I can burn myself another copy.

For live tracks, the "weird ideas where the tracks start and finish" is
often down to the person laying down the track markers when mastering
the CD (unless you mean iTunes is being weird on top of that:).
Sometimes, the index points result in a segue that's just too
abrupt---at least for my tastes.  In those cases, I suggest if you want
to go the whole nine yards then you extract the live tracks either side,
too, and then concatenate them together in an audio editor and trim off
the parts at the start and the end, along with adding fades, to get it
precisely as you want it.  You can then save the edited version as a new
WAV file and use that in your compilation.  There are lots of free audio
editing applications, like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
and the likes that will let you do editing of this sort.

Cheers,

Paul.
--
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa