Ive used Makemkv
There are a number of programs that can rip an audio CD on Windows. Despite what anyone says choice is pretty subjective.
Much of my CD collection was ripped on Windows Media Player to 320kbps MP3s and I really can't tell the difference between those and my more recent FLAC rips.
If you don't want to use WMP for some reason, you should look into VLC (although it is harder) or FooBar2000.
Recently Clementine added CD ripping, which I have found is reliable and offers several formats.
There is no "best way". Go ahead and rip to 320kbps MP3s using WMP:
imgburn
Use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with Accurate-Rip or you're just a pleb making shit tier rips.
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic-technology/accurate-rip/
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Exact audio copy, also go learn about the recommended settings for it.
Once ripped, use dbpoweramp to transcode it to the formate of your choosing (flac, mp3 (320/v0/v2), acc, ogg, opus) and then check the tags with Mp3tag, then sort them using the software or your choice (mine is tag & rename)
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Just go on any torrent site and download a copy in like 3 minutes, why waste all this time trying to find disc ripping software, actually putting the discs in and out of the computer and waiting for them to rip and convert when it's dirt simple to just download the things?
Because you have no idea how those files were ripped. When you rip them yourself, you can be assured you have a quality rip (as long as you use Exact Audio Copy. There is no better ripper).
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Most of the FLAC rips I see include the rip info and accurate rip data too. So... there is that.
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FLAC is the best format
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Well played...
Yes, when they include the rip data, you know how those files were ripped.
I would suggesting giving the Illustrate dBpowerAMP Music Converter suite a try. It has so many options. It's been reliable for me since 2003
Fuck. Looks like I really need to look into how to get VLC media player working for ripping. Just looking back at your post and saw that WMP doesn't support ripping FLAC and doubted it so I had to look for myself and what do yah know... fuck...
I still can't get VLC to work for some reason, but seeing how far off that's going that seems like that's an entirely separate matter to post about/for.
You can rip to .wav and then convert with Flac Frontend (link to sourceforge page). That's a free tool which allows you to add replaygain etc as well. I absolutely swear by it, every single song I rip or download goes through Flac Frontend.
I recently switched from WMP to EAC because I had some issues with some WMP rips, but still rip in .wav even though I probably can rip to flac now.
I don't think EAC rips directly to FLAC. You still have to rip to wav, then use the FLAC encoder, but I swear by EAC, and FLAC Frontend makes it easy for everyone but the most casual computer users. When I finish transitioning to Linux, I'm going to have to find a worthy alternative.
Update
EAC does rip to FLAC.
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It doesn't? Oh.
Can't say I spent too much time looking at the options. As soon as I noticed .wav was in the list, I selected that and moved on.
I occasionally kept encountering songs that skipped, hung etc. Seeing as I store my music on a ZFS share, file corruption is impossible so it must have happened during the rip itself. So I said "screw it" and just re-ripped everything (somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 CDs) even though the vast majority didn't have audible issues.
Unfortunately, that's the only way to be sure, and now that you've ripped them with EAC, you shouldn't have to worry about rip quality anymore (until someone comes up with something better) but there just doesn't seem to be anyone else concerned with making perfect rips, other than the developer of EAC.
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I still find its funny that claim a lot of these flac encodes are better
that come from retail discs
Most Audio cd's are still 44-48k , you cant increase shit
A lot of the recording ANALOGUE mactards are still using outdated macs with firewire with 44-48k interfaces , so the recording will always be bad compared to recent new 96-192k USB2/USB3/Thunderbolt interfaces on digital recording setups
That is not actually how that works.
You can get very nice audio using 44.1. Insanely complicated and still confused by some it.
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I use Musicbee because the options menu is a bottomless, uncharted ocean. I have it set up so that, when I rip a CD, it checks the rip against accuraterip and encodes them as flac -v8 (doesn't add any time since reading the disk takes longer). I tried using VLC as a library manager, but nothing seems to work right. It's my go-to for opening single files or videos though.
Redbook standard for a CD is 44100Hz. This was set by Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem to give maximum reproducible frequency of 22050Hz.
Human hearing is within range 20Hz-20kHz at best.
Hearing frequency range decreases with age and any loud noises, even assuming perfect hearing genetics.
Unless you have an audiophile dog and have spent thousands on high end audio gear, higher sampling rates won't make much difference
EAC is the goto standard for archivists and anyone wanting closest to bit-perfect CD rip.
EAC doesn't often report 100% successful rip, usually 1 or 2 tracks at most on even brand new CD
Give EAC a badly scratched CD and it can take hours of multiple attempts to rip a single track
I used to use Foobar in winXP with kernel-streaming (bypassing most of windows audio sub-system). I could tell sound quality was improved compared to other players, but most of my friends couldn't
I abandoned Windows at 7, because I considered the audio sub-system inferior to XP.
Some of those same friends have become interested in my use of Linux, because they do notice a small improvement in sound quality.
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