MP3 ripping

[Mr Pump]

Whats everyones recommended prog to rip MP3's?

Been using the playcenter that came with my soundcard but want to try someting else.

[Edame]

I use CDex mostly but I've also heard others swear by Exact Audio Copy.

[Kotatsu Neko]

iTunes all the way. Ripps everything without complaint, including CDs with non roman character filenames. Kanji is no problem at all for iTunes. It also supports non MP3 formats like AAC.

I love the way it organises everything too, can browse by genre, artist, album.. even by bizarre things like 'beats per minute' if you like.

And of course it's essential for my iPod too.

[yosai]

LAME.

iTunes is bent. And soo last year...

[StanBush]

A mate lent me mp3maker titanuim by magix , really good can convert formats and bitrates and rip songs into ogg vorbis as well as mp3.

[Ish]

I use iTunes too. I have an iPod and an AirTunes setup in the house so it makes sense...

[Combination]

Once EAC has been configured there's no going back to anything else

Part #1
Part #2 (LAME is what you want for MP3s)

[Mr_Sands]

I have always used CDex and never had any problems.

[mid]

If you need it in mp3 format, than either EAC or CDex are fine as long as you link them up with LAME to perform the actual encoding.

Personally, I much prefer iTunes for organising and playback, but they will happily co-exist anyway.

[kernow]

MPC as a frontend
CDPARANOIA for ripping
LAME for encoding

whoever said itunes is essential for their iPod is speaking BOOLsheet. I haven't used my iPod with it in over a year.

[djjimbob]

CDEX all the way. Especially for mix albums.

[Mr Pump]

Started using CDex with Lame, seems to do the trick

[EvilBoris]

You can set windows media player 10 to rip to MP3, its in the options

[gizmo1990]

Another vote for EAC although I've always only used it to rip uncompressed wavs.

I'm going to start ripping my cd collection to mp3 soon and have a questions regarding this?

What compression ratio should I be using? I want a nice compromise between quality and size obviously but since this is for archival purposes too it should be slightly weighted to quality?
This being the case what sort of file sizes should I be seeing for a standard track length?

EDIT: Not to worry I think I've just found a good tutorial!

[Combination]

Another vote for EAC although I've always only used it to rip uncompressed wavs.

I'm going to start ripping my cd collection to mp3 soon and have a questions regarding this?

What compression ratio should I be using? I want a nice compromise between quality and size obviously but since this is for archival purposes too it should be slightly weighted to quality?
This being the case what sort of file sizes should I be seeing for a standard track length?

EDIT: Not to worry I think I've just found a good tutorial!

With LAME I'd recommend the commonly used --alt-preset standard but do have a look at this thread for settings that may suit you better.

However, for archival purposes I'd suggest that you go lossless, that is, if you have the space to accomodate the larger files/images produced by this method. The benefit is that you have the option to restore a copy that is identical to the original in both quality and structure (gaps, ISRC/UPC codes etc.)

Personally I like to use FLAC as it has a nice frontend for speedy encode/decode operations. (flac->wav & wav->flac respectively)