Cd to Mp3

[monkeyville]

Right guys i've decided to back up all my cd's i've accumulated over the years as i stupipdly left a good chunk of my cd's on a train. Anyway all the cd's i'm going to be copying are going to be stored on a new hard drive i've purchased so storage and space isn't going to be a problem. I do however want to try and keep as much of the origianl quality as possiable.

The problem being that apart from using media player and getting an entire collection of relativly untransfearable WMA's i think it might make the process of adding all my songs to an MP3 player all the more hard. The advantages of media player though is that its very easy to update the album info and get all the tags right. Anyway the question is:

"Does anybody know any free software or a program that i can use to copy all my music into MP3's or something just as universal and also be able to update all the album info"

Please note that although i don't actaully own an MP3 player yet i do plan on buying an Ipod/Iriver or something in the near future so i'd like the format to be as universal as possiable to make the process of adding all my files as easy as possiable without having to be limited by the file formats.

[Stubzz]

One of the best programs is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), then you just download and use the LAME mp3 encoder. I think its the alt extreme preset that gives the best quality, someone will be along to correct me soon.

Personally I encode into Ogg Vorbis, with the same size file ogg gives better quality. However most mp3 players dont support it, the iRivers and the rio karma do iirc.

[Agent]

Ogg is much better than MP3. I use it on my P900, and the quality difference is noticeable !

[monkeyville]

Cheers for the replys guys. So will this EAC encode into OGG because i've obvioulsy done a bit of research into this and it does seem to be recommended by a lot of people. Will it also download all the audio tags so that i don't have to type them all in. I don't fancy typing in over 400 cds worth of data especially when i'm meant to be revising.

[Stubzz]

Yup it will, you'll have to get the ogg encoder from www.vorbis.com and tell EAC where it is and you're sorted.

[monkeyville]

Rightio. I'm gonna download this EAC and get the encoder from the website and see if i can get it to work. Do you know if it can get all my alnum info??

[Stubzz]

Yup, EAC gets it all through the big web cd database thingy (meh, my minds gone blank )

[Trash Man]

I use a programme called Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.de

It's free and regarded by many as the best you can get, although some people don't like it. You will need a MP3 encoder to go with it, as all EAC does is extract the audio to .wav format. For this I use LAME, there is a link to this is the EAC options.

http://users.pandora.be/satcp/cd2mp3-en.htm That's a great EAC & LAME setup guide, follow that and you will have no problems at all.

[unrealrocks]

Although OGG is good - its quite rare to have MP3 players that support it. I find VBR MP3 good ... takes a while to encode but seems good. Encoding I use CDEX although I wouldn't recommend that for what you want todo as its only really good for one off tracks.

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by unrealrocks

Although OGG is good - its quite rare to have MP3 players that support it. I find VBR MP3 good ... takes a while to encode but seems good. Encoding I use CDEX although I wouldn't recommend that for what you want todo as its only really good for one off tracks.

None do, not on a firmware basis anyway. Afaik the ogg firmware is still beta.
I used to use ogg vbr but gave up and went back to mp3 256k or vbr.
Easy CD-DA extractor here.

[Allen]

I use Audiograbber. It encodes into MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Easy to use too.

Might check out this EAC actually, since you guys are recomending it. Ahh, Google is my friend.

[Stubzz]

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

None do, not on a firmware basis anyway. Afaik the ogg firmware is still beta.
I used to use ogg vbr but gave up and went back to mp3 256k or vbr.
Easy CD-DA extractor here.

Eh so how do current played play ogg files then

[Allen]

Umm, www.vorbis.com is down?

Anyone have it or know somewhere else where I can d/l the encoder?

[directhex]

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

None do, not on a firmware basis anyway. Afaik the ogg firmware is still beta.
I used to use ogg vbr but gave up and went back to mp3 256k or vbr.
Easy CD-DA extractor here.

FUD, FUD and more FUD

if anyone ever paid attention to the frontpage, they'd see i already reviewed a happy little ogg/mp3/wma/flac player here. the iriver supports ogg, as do the xclef, neuros & more. the main players who don't support it are creaive ("lazy ****ers") and apple ("we don't have an agenda, honest").

vorbis is a completely royalty free standard, it costs between $0 and $0 to implement, save paying a programmer in beer, and there are no funny licensing concerns. the only reason for players not to support it are laziness or politics.

[Stubzz]

Originally Posted by directhex

~~what he said~~.

And vry good players the iRivers are, well my iHP one alway. Ogg is ther way to go now. MP3 was good but has been replaced IMO.

Vorbis.com is down for me too, http://www.ogghelp.com/ogg/codecs.cfm has the codec but I dunno if its the latest

[Aaron]

I use CDex with the LAME encoder. Ogg is superb at relatively low bitrates but there's really no difference between Ogg and mp3 at 192kbps and above.

If space was a concern, I'd go for Ogg. Personally, I prefer mp3 for universal compatibility though.

Back to the original question, you're probably looking at something like MusicMatch Jukebox (basic version is free) or iTunes (free). Both are bloatware like Windows Media Player though.