Laziness gets you far in life, right?

My burning software is causing me problems - that is why i am looking for a program such as this. I have a cd i am attempting to copy, but i can't. It fails everytime, and i NEED a copy of it. so i figured i would save all the files as mp3s on my hard drive.

make sense?

and btw thanks dtk - should be helpful

nicholle

Yep, you can never go wrong with CDex (unless it's with one of the constantly crashing builds, heh ). Light-weight, easy, fast and powerful. Oh, and also open source

Extra bonus for being able to rip to .ogg right out of the box.

You don't need to convert to MP3 then. If you do that the end output will be of considerably lower quality. AFAIK you should be able to make a direct CD to CD copy with an appropriate program or if you don't have 2 drives, you can first make an ISO (or some other type of image) of the original CD and then burn that onto a new blank CD. I usually use Nero or CloneCD for that and they have always worked fine for me. The only problem you might have is if the original CD is somehow copy protected and CloneCD can't get around that. If that is the case then it would be much easier to just download an MP3 copy of your CD...

There's allways grip. Or you could go command line and use cdda2wav and then an encoder.

Derezo: I've tried Audiograbber. And I found CDex to be simply better actually - they are equivalent in both features and UI (insert a CD, select files you want to grab, click a big shiny grab button, done), but CDex is smaller, faster and free... so the choice was obvious for me

My pick of the pack: dBpowerAMP - [url http://www.dbpoweramp.com/]

It is an MP3 ripper that can convert from CDs, WAVs, or any other sound format, to many other sound formats including MP3, MP4, WMA, OGG, FLAC, WAV and may other formats. Amongst it's features are volume normalisation.

It's free, but there's a non-free plugin (with 30 day trial) that adds all sorts of extra features such as DSP effects.

AE.

I have some depressing news.

I created roughly equally sized .mp3 and .ogg versions of my sekrit projact's music (the original is .it). The .mp3 was encoded with LAME at 192 kbps, and the .ogg with oggenc -q 8 (which resulted for this file in an average bit-rate of 201.3 kbps).

To me, the .mp3 sounds better than the .ogg. The .mp3 is slightly muffled compared with the original, and has suffered slightly from pre- and post-echo effects - but the .ogg has altered the sound of the high hat quite noticeably (both in headphones and speakers, quite unpleasant in headphones).

.ogg does win at low bit-rates though (e.g. 64 kbps stereo), because .mp3 forces downsampling to 22 kHz and then sounds really muddy at these rates. (No, the downsampling by itself does not make it sound muddy.)

Of course, in this particular case, the .mp3 and .ogg are over 10 MB while the .it file is 634 kB.

I use AudioCatalyst for ripping CDs. Has quite a few ripping methods. It's my personal favorite. But since Real bought Xing (the creators), I think you've got to fill out a small forum to download the trial.

What you want depends on what you need. If you have a 7.1 speaker system, and need 24-bit sound (e.g., HQ music creation), go the ZX.

If you've only got a 6.1 or a 5.1 but still need the heavy audio stuff, you can shave off $50 USD and get an Audigy 2 Platinum EX (same thing, one less audio channel).

If you game, listen to music, and don't really do any heavy music (dev) stuff, an SB Live will probably be more then fine. My brother has one, and it's amazing.

So far, OGG have sounded better to me. But I don't have any right now, because my cd-ripper doesn't auto-encode ogg files. But I think from now on, I'm going to rip to oggs.

The reason oggs sound different then mp3s (and why some people say ogg sound better, and some say mp3 say sound better) is that MP3's and OGG's remove different portions of the audio. And that also means that if you decode an mp3 and encode it to an ogg, it'll sound like trash.

[edit] Derezo: Remember! PriceWatch is your friend!

for windows ... IMO there is nothing better than CDex. you can get things from cd's to wavs/mp3s. you can go from wavs to lots of different types of compressed formats (like mp3 and ogg, never used anything else) and back again. it has a really wide range of formats to choose and of course ... it's free.

I'm Canadian, so we have PriceNetwork
I get decent discounts on that site though (5% - 30%), because I have a premium membership.. so I see a different price than you do

Sounds like the SB Live! is what I'd want. I just game and listen to music on a 2.1 system (mind you, a very nice altec lansing 2.1 system ).

I'm considering just getting a decent 5.1 surround system for my room now though, after thinking about it.... which would mean every bedroom in our house will have one
That way I'd be able to watch DVD's with surround too... sounds like it'd be more worth my money.