As above, been meaning to get round to this for an age, not really up on the subject

Have a Windows laptop, will stick files on a couple of separate drives (one a back up), file size not that important

What’s everyone using?

Windows Media Player worked fine for me, until I upgraded to win10, then it stopped working.

Edit: more helpfully, perhaps – I now use fairstars CD ripper, which works fine. I’m sure you can get software that’s much smarter/more functionality etc, but this is fine for me, using it for exactly what you describe.

I use handbrake, works really well. Or if you have iTunes on, I’m sure that can do it.

I used dbPoweramp on the recommendation of a friend who is into hifi stuff. Ripped everything to FLAC (and MP3 for the car). No issues with it, easy to use. Cost a small amount of money.

Windows Media Player worked fine for me, until I upgraded to win10, then it stopped working.

WMP works fine on both my w10 machines

I use iTunes, you don’t need an Apple device to use it, just a free registration.

It defaults to .m4a / Apple lossless which is a nice format but only Apple stuff plays it I think, they also do MP3 and other formats if you want to use them on other devices.

It also does this clever thing that if your CD is a bit scratched or whatever and doesn’t play perfectly it’ll ‘fix’ the files with data from its database and add Album art etc.

I use Exact Audio Copy and rip to FLAC. Bit of a faff to set up but works well.

Always used Cdex
mp3 at vbr

For format, use FLAC if you have plenty of space. It would probably need about 300MB per CD. It is lossless, and can be easily converted to any other formats if necessary.

For software, Fre:ac is pretty good, fairly easy to use, and free. https://www.freac.org/

Can’t you just find sombody else’s rips? It’s much faster and easier.
Otherwise:

I use Exact Audio Copy and rip to FLAC. Bit of a faff to set up but works well.

I’ve finally started ripping my CD collection, and went with dbPowerAmp. EAC is good, but more difficult to configure, and has fewer features.

The killer feature for me was the batch ripper that comes with dbPowerAmp. Once you set it up, all you have to do is load a new CD every time the tray ejects, and close the tray. No buttons to click, or dialogs to acknowledge, it just chews its way through whatever you feed in, which makes it a lot easier to rip a pile of CDs while you are doing something else. Any failures are reported so you can tidy up and rerip at the end, if necessary. If you have two CD/DVD drives, it will rip from both simultaneously. It’s a lot eaier than having to load CDs and launch a rip manually each time. dbPowerAmp’s metadata lookup (to retrieve disc information) is also very good).

As above, FLAC seems to be the most popular high quality format, or Apple ALAC.

Ooh a bit late now but I might give DB Poweramp another try. I did use it on a free trial but didn’t realise it did the batch rip – could’ve saved hours by the sound of things

EAC to FLAC.

Used to be some apps would rip via analogue and any skipping in the CD would be copied. I used to, ahem, “borrow” ripped MP3s from people that used rubbish software and often they’d be skipping, odd volume levels and terrible compression. EAC if set up right does it perfectly.

Thanks for the replies, I’m going to give dbpoweramp and flac a whirl

dbPoweramp will rip to multiple formats and folders at the same time. I rip FLAC to one folder and MP3 to another. MP3 is better for my phone etc because of the size and the FLAC copy so I have an uncompressed version that I can transcode to any future format that may appear because I NEVER EVER WANT TO RIP ALL MY CDs AGAIN. EVER.

ps keep a back up 🙂

Rubber_Buccaneer – Member

dbPoweramp will rip to multiple formats and folders at the same time. I rip FLAC to one folder and MP3 to another. MP3 is better for my phone etc because of the size and the FLAC copy so I have an uncompressed version that I can transcode to any future format that may appear because I NEVER EVER WANT TO RIP ALL MY CDs AGAIN. EVER.

ps keep a back up

I need this in my life! Will it do AAC using Nero or QuickTime?

I have about a 5 stage process at the moment. Tedious to say the least.

I do like dbPoweramp, especially watching each core doing a separate conversion from FLAC to MP3 simultaneously!

Conversion to other formats, I use foobar2000 which is an audio player with a transcoding component. I convert to MP3 what I want, although my mobile devices can play FLAC also but MP3 does take up less space.

At home my NAS just streams FLAC to various devices around the house including a Squeezebox hooked up to my amp.