The Glade 4.0

Okay, so I've got a new phone coming in, and will probably be taking the opportunity of it not having a microSD slot to freshen up my CD rips which, I think I've mentioned before, are sprinkled with maddening glitches on a few tracks.

I also haven't bothered installing iTunes on my new (well, since the last time I did my own rips) computer, so it's not just "handy" as a default option.

I prefer to rip at a 160-192 (uh.. I can never remember for sure... kilo-?)bitrate

Does anybody have any recommendations for a good freeware program that'll rip CDs to mp3 quickly and cleanly? Bonus points for auto-populating track & album metadata.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I use Windows Media Player.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Okay, wow. Problem solved beyond my wildest expectations. It's not speedy (it's ripping at ~5x right now), but it's good at catching and correcting errors. And that means it's faster than proofing each track by ear.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is on Windows, I assume?

Probably nothing will ever beat EAC + LAME.

EAC is both very sophisticated and easy to use. It is especially good for trying to rip from problem discs/tracks. It can query online databases to fetch all of the album information. And I do mean all. This can (optionally) include cover art and lyrics. It stuffs the lryics into an Lyrics3v2 tag, which I had no idea even existed until now. I'm not sure if there's even any players that use this information (VLC doesn't seem to, FWIW), but its neat nonetheless.

A note on EAC's default encoding options for LAME:

Since EAC defaults to using "--vbr-new", the "Bit rate" dropdown actually has no effect. If you have "High Quality" selected, it will encode with the "-V 2" quality setting (~190 kbps VBR). If you have "Low Quality" selected, it will encode with "-V 5" (~150 kbps VBR). It's pretty well accepted that anything beyond -V 2 is like buying $300 gold plated audio cables. And it's pretty debatable whether -V 2 really offers any statistically significant benefit over -V 3. Even at -V 5, most people will have a hard time distinguishing between MP3 and uncompressed original. At the same time, I don't doubt that you can get a slight "castanets" effect (pre-echo on strong impulses like high-hat hits) at -V 5 that won't be audible at -V 3 or better.

Personally, the only thing I might change is bumping the high quality setting down to -V 3. It would be somewhat closer to your target bitrate range, since -V 2 would lay on the upper edge thereof. In other words, change the "Additional command-line options" to:

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yeah, EAC is what was recommended to me. It's already fixed one of the songs I knew I had a glitch on from ripping with iTunes.

Thanks for the heads-up on the command line options overriding the bitrate dropdown. I only got ripped the one test CD last night, so not much backtrack work to keep consistency.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I also vote for EAC and LAME, I have ripped hundreds (if not thousands) of CD's (converted my entire collection to lossless a few years ago) and it's always caught any disc read errors.