Best way to rip cd collection to mp3's?

I’m in the process of moving and need to deal with a huge vinyl and cd collection. The vinyl is mostly being dumped or sold but I would like to rip the CDs onto a drive in mp3 format with album info. Anyone done this and can recommend a process and software? I’ve googled this but results just yield services for hire of sites selling programs. Any info appreciated. My ripping PC is online BTW

UPDATE - I tried Windows Media Player and it worked okay to retrieve cd data and burn. Just curious now if anyone has used a faster method

I’ve used WinAmp and Windows Media Player. WMP’s codec now is much better than WinAmp which seems to have a LPF with a cutoff at ~20kHz.

To answer your “is there a faster way” question, my experience has been “no.” But when I ripped my 300+ CD collection, I simply did it while I was doing other stuff on the computer. In other words, I never even thought about the time to rip.

i ripped 500+ CD collection onto my PC using Windows Media Player. i seem to remember me being able to do so at a rate of about 6 x CD’s per hour. The complete collection still took weeks to do as there is only so much you can mentally stand at one time !!

On one of my XP PCs I have a Creative Audigy sound system. The included Organizer software is fast and ideal for ripping and organizing my entire CD collection which then exists on a server drive for the entire network. My vinyls (a few hundred) I digitized and digitally cleaned (Steinberg Clean Wavelab and Magix) and then burned CDs and made MP3s as well. The latter though, is probably not an option for you as it took over a year to process all the LPs.

Try CDex if you are on the PC.

Thanks, I’ll check this out.

Its got a huge feature set, more than most others I’ve seen, and can compensate to some extent for jitter. Multiple options for encoding too, if you want to go direct to MP3 or whatever, instead of WAV

From the features page…

What’s CDex?
CDex can extract the data directly (digital) from an Audio CD, which is generally called a CD Ripper or a CDDA utility. The resulting audio file can be a plain WAV file (useful for making compilation audio CDs) or the ripped audio data can be compressed using an audio encoder. Many encoders are supported, to name a few:

Lame MP3 encoder
Internal MP2 encoder
APE lossles audio format
Ogg Vorbis encoder
The Windows MP3 encoder (Fraunhofer MP3 encoder)
NTT VQF encoder
FAAC encoder
Windows WMA8 encoder

In addition, WAV files on the hard drive can be converted to a Compressed Audio File (and visa versa). CDex also supports many audio file tag formats like the ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags, which can be automatically inserted as part of the ripping process.

Feature List

Direct recording of multiple tracks
Read / store album information from/to the cdplayer.ini file
Read / store album information from/to a local and/or remote CD Database (CDDB)
Support CD-Text (if your CD-drive supports it)
Advanced jitter correction (based on the cd-paranoia ripping library)
Indicates track progress and jitter control
Normalization of audio signal
Supports many CD-Drive from many manufacters
Conversion of external WAV files
Support for M3U and PLS play list files
Best of all, it’s free (GPL license, source code available)
Serveral languages are supported

Audiograbber

Excuse my ignorance, but what the heck does jitter do in ripping audio from CD? AFAIK jitter only happens during A/D or D/A.

Best as I can make out, its not quite the same reference… I think they are referring to inaccuracies produced by mechanical issues with the optical drive.

Some explanation here…

http://www.jitter.de/english/what.html

Yes, that’s what I use as well.