So a few months ago I finally caught up to the rest of the music-enjoying world and got an iPod. It was great for all the music already on my computer through entirely legal purchases, however I do also have a reasonably large collection of CDs that I found myself staring at in dread. Having a mountain of plastic staring me in the face I just couldn’t verify chewing up all that bandwidth BitTorrenting it all down, so I dug into some open source audio ripping tools.
Ripping
“Why open source?” you say? Well, I have this nagging dread that the programmers tuning the MP3 ripper in iTunes are going more for filesize optimizations, rather than the pinnacle quality that I’d prefer as an aspiring audiophile. Lo and behold I’m directed to the fine program Exact Audio Copy which works in concert with the LAME MP3 encoder. The beauty behind these programs is that while commercial software like iTunes may be written by very skilled general programmers, the gents behind EAC and LAME are nothing short of the most hardcore of harcore audio geeks constantly tweaking the code to make sure every nuance of your music remains perfectly intact.
Using the programs are fairly straightforward, though I recommend selecting the “Secure” copy method for your CDs which will test your tracks before and after extraction to be sure you’ve got the most accurate rip possible. To setSecure mode go to the ‘EAC’ menu > ‘Drive options…’ > ‘Extraction Method’ and check ‘Secure Mode’ and the first 2 options, but do not modify the C2 option since some drives don’t support it.
Additionally, if you’ve got a CD that’s in bad shape then Secure mode won’t work since the laser might follow scratches and dust instead of the actual tracks. You can tell if the CD is too damaged for Secrue if it takes hours to rip and doesn’t make any progress. Using the burst mode [also under 'EAC' > 'Drive options...' > 'Extraction Method'] will force the laser to read around the track, and past any blemishes. This method might result in poorer quality rips, but it usually works where Secure fails. Make sure to listen to your songs after a Burst rip since a really badly worn CD still might not yield any better quality than what you can download from the internet.
Tagging
Now onto the one aspect of the process that used to give me nightmares… Back in the olden days I tried organizing my MP3 collection with a more uniform tagging scheme, but I was bereft of the appropriate tools and ended up burning myself out very quickly editing tags one at a time, by hand, using Winamp. *shudder*
Enter MP3tag, the savior of metadata editing. Very easy to get into and use, offering automatic detection and correction of tags using free online databases, but still including many powerful tools for generating tag information based on filenames or other tag fields. Regular expressions! ’nuff said.
Denouement
I hope this was helpful to you aspiring rippers out there, and be sure that you keep your newly sharable digital music library under tight lock and key, because sharing music without paying a royalty to a bloated, archaic music empire is totally wrong and stuff…
FIGHT THE POWER!