Best CD to mp3 ripper?

Avoriaz

Hi, what is the best software for ripping CDs to mp3 for playback on a small portable player that supports mp3 and wma only?

Is mp3 better than wma for quality? I don't care about file size.

EDIT: Thanks, but I don't want or need to know about other formats such as FLAC as my current player doesn't support them.

I have a powerful Windows7 laptop. I'm ripping my own CDs for my own personal use.

Quality is more important for me than minimum size files.



For a few years I have used a Sony NW-E407 1gb flash player and I ripped my CDs using Sony’s ATRAC3 .oma file format.

I have now bought a Sony NWZ-B143 4gb player that irritatingly doesn’t support .oma files. It supports only .mp3 and .wma

I’ve ripped a few CDs to mp3 using Windows Media player, as supplied with Windows7, at the maximum 320 kbps and they sound fine.

Is Windows Media player as good as anything else for quality or could I do better with another ripper?

Is .mp3 better than .wma?



Thanks.

iam007

If you're not concerned about file size and are just looking for quality, then FLAC (rather than mp3) is your best bet.

If you download the full version of Winamp you can listen to and rip CDs to FLAC.

It might be worth you reading up on FLAC online first though, depending on where you are going to play your music... as come players don't support it.

As for MP3s, you can change the quality you rip at - known as the 'bit rate'. The higher the bitrate the better the quality, but unless you have superhuman hearing there's no point going higher than 192.

Hammyman

The OP says the player only supports MP3 or WPA. Windows Media Player will rip MP3 in lossless so its about as good as it gets.

Lincoln_Imp

Agree with WMP ,does all you need it to do really

Avoriaz

For clarification, I only want to know about mp3 or wma as that is all my current player supports.

I have no plans to archive my CDs to a PC.

Thanks.

Chris55_2

mp3 is always "lossy" to some degree - though personally I find stuff at 320 / 256 is fine for most uses. I'm amazed that 192 is thought to be acceptable - even my old ears can tell the difference - maybe it depends on what the source music is. I agree with the recommendation of Exact Audio Copy (it's really a wrapper around the actual ripping process) I find it really good, and it has excellent features (e.g. comparing your rip to other copies in the database to check your rip was a good one), links to freeDB for automatic identification of tracks. You can choose the converter it uses.

Donnie

Hammyman wrote: »

The OP says the player only supports MP3 or WPA. Windows Media Player will rip MP3 in lossless so its about as good as it gets.

What are you talking? MP3 Lossless? No.

Maybe you mean WMA Lossless.

As Chris55 has stated, MP3 320 is fine.

esuhl

WMA files sound much better than MP3s of the same size (to my ears, anyway) and variable bit rate WMAs sound better still. As mentioned above, Windows Media Player is all you need.

weegie.geek

Go for VBR mp3. If you change your mp3 player in future you'll be limited in choice if you choose to rip everything to wma.

Use Exact Audio Copy to rip, that way you'll be sure to get the best quality rips possible, no skips etc.

Use Lame to encode to mp3. V0 is probably the best profile to use, 320CBR is of course as good as MP3 will get, but it's very inefficient.

There are codecs that give a better quality/filesize ratio than MP3, but there's not much in it, and you know that in future, everything will still support MP3.

googler

weegie.geek wrote: »

Use Exact Audio Copy to rip, that way you'll be sure to get the best quality rips possible, no skips etc.

Use Lame to encode to mp3. V0 is probably the best profile to use, 320CBR is of course as good as MP3 will get, but it's very inefficient.

Seconded. EAC is de biz.

dave2

WMP does for most but then if that was enough you wouldn't have asked I suppose!

EAC or CDex. Little to separate the two tbh, unless you're going for a level of quality your player is unlikely to be good enough to use anyway.

With CDex, go into options and check Encoder is LAME, Quality is "--alt-preset standard" with VBR Quality at "VBR2" for a good balance between good quality without very big filesize. Can use Bitrate Min and Bitrate Max to tweak your preference for quality/filesize (personally I put Min to 192 Max 320, seems to workout about 2mb/min on average).

Personally, I'd always suggest going for MP3 format than WMA. Everything supports MP3. With WMA you can find yourself needing to re-encode your collection, either taking forever by doing it all again from CD or losing a lot of quality by converting the WMA's to MP3.