iTunes doesn't work for you?

You might want to see if grip will run on it, I use grip to rip all my CDs at home on my linux box. It hits CDDB, and makes nicely named files, all that. It can bet set to rip to ogg format or mp3, but for mp3, you'll need to get LAME or NOTLAME or something similar. But yeah, grip.

I want my Mp3s to not be protected. Doesn't iTunes auto protect them? If not - I'm going to feel pretty dumb.

Flesh for Lulu - wow forgot about them.

Can I follow the other comment and ask why not itunes?

Hi Ray,

iTunes does not auto-protect MP3's ;-) I use it all the time for ripping.

Sweet. I feel really dumb now. ;)

Let me just say - this CD is probably the best CD I've gotten in a VERY long time. Thanks to Michael White for the wishlist purchase. I'm 5 songs into CD1 and love it.

Ray, iTunes is the way to go, no protecting - just make sure that you go to preferences and set it to MP3 and the bitrate that you want them ripped at - it does all the CDDBing for you, only thing is that it doesn't grab album covers. This site http://art4itunes.com/getar... will find the covers for you.

First install Fusion.
Second Install Windows XP.
Third install Exact Audio Copy
Fourth follow instructions to configure.
Finally enjoy Bit Accurate Rips.

P.S. yes I know, no Mac software listed, but hey when does one get the chance to ding a Mac (I ding my iMac with my Win XP laptop all the time :D )

P.P.S. Roxio Toast. Also check this link (the site is awesome for info in general)

http://www.hydrogenaudio.or...

WOW! That is an awesome collection of 80s Tunes...and I am especially impressed at all of the "deep cuts" that are included. I am adding it to my Christmas list!

iTunes will work great, but you will be ripping them into your Mac first, so there will be some quality loss. If you want an *exact* duplicate of the Audio CD, us Roxio Toast and its ability to clone the whole disc...byte for byte.

Ray,

Is there a reason for wanting to stay with the MP3 format? Because AAC is really superior to it in all tests. If all you are going to do is play them on iPods and your Macs, I'd recommend going to AAC instead of MP3.

I rip at 256kbps AAC myself.

I use MP3 because thats God's format.

(Kidding.)

No real reason I guess - just more used to it. As it stands - happy to know iTunes can rip it and I can copy it out.

Ray,

iTunes is about average. Toast or the other things I mentioned (follow link ) are the way to go.

The real key is to get bit accuracy. I can tell you my 128k MP3 rips are better than a lot of stuff. Also iTunes is not the fastest ripper on the planet.

Now EAC what is nice is that it ties to a user database,so many times I am able to get album info for obscure stuff.

Oh just checked that CD at Amazon, I own almost all those albums they come from.

this isn't what you are asking for but for general burning I love Disco www.discoapp.com. Although macs builtin burners are far better than windows I still like that app.

I recommend using iTunes AAC at 256kbps. iTunes DOES retrieve the cover art, too.

on the other side of things, burning software for OS X; "Disco" Is the way to go!! I highly recommend it, it's freaking wicked sick!

http://www.discoapp.com/

It reminds me of how much I dig OS X, everytime I burn a CD!!

By far the best audiophile ripper on the Mac (like EAC on windows) is Max:
http://www.sbooth.org/Max/

It has been my sole ripper for a long time now.

I second Max ( http://sbooth.org/Max/ ), it does MusicBrainz lookups, lets you edit the metadata, rips and converts on the fly (to one or multiple types at once). It just rocks!

iTunes (at least on a Mac) will not place the album information, etc on the MP3 ID tag, which makes it a bit hard then to ever switch that collection of you to another program. Learned it the hard way, and never touching iTunes again.

A CD ripping program is the only thing I miss from my PC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, one could use iTunes, but it doesn't really allow you any control over the ripping process. I'm still looking for the OSX version of CDex. So much more control over how much you want to squash your music. I use my ripped music to run sound before & after concerts over big systems so I want everything as high a quality as I can get it, I just don't want to hassle with changing cds all the time.
Maybe I don't want to use the CD is iTunes, but do something else with it. I also don't want to have to pay for the program as I didn't have to with CDex.

stick with 160k mp3s unless you posses superhuman dog-like hearing

Don't know about hearing like a dog, but I have played violin since I was 3.5 years old and am used to hearing all sorts of small changes. I mean, you tune a violin by decreasing the number of warbles/# of cycles of difference in pitch between two strings. Also in college when we were studying hearing in Physical Science class, we all had to keep our hands in the air as long as we could hear something coming from the tone generator. I was the last one to put their hand down at well over 20k hertz. If there are enough TVs out of tuning/alignment at a store I have to go to another part or leave the store because it annoys me as I can hear that noise.

Anon mac head & Brian, cheers for the tip.
Max is exactly what I have been looking for. Its tweekable, informative and sturdy. I now use it so my new rips go into a seperate folder from my iTunes library. Max will then import them to my local iTunes library, and I can take my folder of new rips (and they're guaranteed to have ID3 tags, unlike iTunes) with me to work, to painlessly keep my other iTunes library up to date.

Mr Epp, I guess you'll want to encode your music lossless-ly then... I think Max is OSX's answer to CDEX. Also maybe invest in some ear muffs before for your next trip to the store. ;-)

Thank you for the info. Max is GREAT! Big help to me. Thanks

For whoever recommended Max, THANK YOU! I have been missing EAC-style advanced cd-ripping ever since I ditched the windows platform for OSX. One less reason to use Parallels, much obliged!! ;)

XLD http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co....