Erm, sorry if this is duplicate, but I can't find the link I was looking for.

I wanted to find out some stuff about mp3's and ripping.

Like which applications are good (by that, read easy and hopefully good quality) for ripping cd's into mp3 format?

Or maybe someone could post the link to that nice application comparison table that's floating around hereabouts?

What is the actual quality of mp3 when compared to vinyl/tape/cd etc etc (maybe a 1 for best and 5 or 10 for worst)?

The apps that do cd rips, is it just a case of hitting a rip button and then save as .mp3 or is there more to it than that ??

thanks in advance for any hints, tips or links you may have.

regards

John

check grip
I've been using it for a long time for converting CDaudio to ogg.
You may also rip and encode audio to mp3 with "one click"

You can do it on the command line using cdparanoia and lame:
Where n is the track number. The above command has the advantage that it does the rip and encode in one go, without the need to write the track to a Wave file first.

Grip and most of the other GUI rippers are frontends to cdparanoia and lame. Grip writes the track to a wave file, and then encodes it to mp3 or ogg as a separate step (As far as I know)

Compared to cds, there is a noticable difference in quality, but that depends on how good your sound system and ears are. For most cases, mp3s are fine.

--Ian

sound juicer is another good ripper.

Ok, I understand that.

Grip is looking favourite too start with - I seem to remember seeing that working once before (plus even after 2 years or so, I still prefer GUI stuff to CLI hence not really wanting to go directly for cdparanoia).

So bearing in mind the difference in quality (I'm actually more of a vinyl person than cd - I feel that cd sound is compressed, with a lifeless quality too it - vinyl, hisses/pops/crackles, but it still seems to have a bright, up front quality - well IMO anyway), what about this format that the ipod uses, is it better, can cd's be ripped to it (not too sure of the name - AAC rings a bell though)? Or is it only windows/Mac proprietary??

regards

John