Ripping Software
There are many software CD rippers available for PCs, Macs and Linux. However, not all ripping software is created equal. Some rippers perform better than others. The rippers built in to Windows Media Player and iTunes do not guarantee a good or secure rip, hence are not the best applications to optimise your listening experience. The following features will help to ensure the best possible rip, and hence the highest quality audio data for your enjoyment
- Secure ripping. This ensures error free rips by checking the integrity of the data across 2 or more disc reads. If a clean rip cannot be achieved (for example due to a damaged disc) these will inform the user to this affect.
- AccurateRip checks rip against a database of known good rips. Can speed up secure ripping dramatically by cross-referencing against many known good rips of same disc
- Automatic transcoding to FLAC or other lossless compressed format. All rippers rip the disc to WAV format, and many support the transcoding of this to a format of choice as part of the process. Using lossless compressed format minimises storage requirements without degrading audio quality.
- Automatic metadata and album-art gathering. Adding correct tags and artwork to ripped files without further user intervention
dbPoweramp CD Ripper (MS Windows)
Information, downloads and purchase from Illustrate
- Secure ripping to ensure error-free rips
- Checks rip accuracy against AccurateRip database
- Metadata from multiple sources
- Automatic inclusion of album-art
- FLAC, Apple Lossless and many other codecs available as plugins
- Recommendations
- Use Power Pack or Reference versions as these include extended access to metadata and album-art information
High quality ripper with excellent metadata and album-art support. Easy to use once setup.
EAC (MS Windows)
Information and downloads here
- MS Windows only
- Secure ripping to ensure error-free rips
- Checks rip accuracy against AccurateRip database
- Metadata from freedb only
- No automatic album art
- Requires separate download and setup of FLAC encoder
High quality ripper, limited by metadata and album-art support. Correct setup is vital, but unfortunately rather complex - see here for more info.
Max (Apple Mac)
XLD (Apple Mac)
Some Mac users also use windows applications using Parallels or Crossover
Grip (Linux)
Grip is a graphical ripper frontend which uses cdparanoia as its default ripper.
