CD ripping/mp3 encoding

From: Marcus
Message:

ok time for me to interject.

so u wanna get tracks off several cd's onto an audio cd.

first off u r going to have to rip your tracks on to your pc.
don't use windows media player, itunes or musicmatch cos tbh they just
don't cut the mustard. nah, what you need is eac, combined with the
lame mp3 codec. all of these are totally free.

eac is a ripper, it will extract the raw audio off your cd.eac has some
clever error correction which can extract high quality wave (.wav) audio
even when the cd has surface defects. eac requires a third party codec
(encoder / decoder) to convert audio to high quality mp3's though.
lame is the codec, which takes the raw wave and converts it into an mp3
file. there are many others (such as Fraunhofer, Xing, GoGo, etc.), but
lame is totally free and generally regarded as being one of the best mp3 encoders.

once you have the ripper (eac/cdex) and codec (lame) you'll need to
configure the ripper to use the codec, and set up your parameters for
your mp3's. you'll need to choose various compression parameters such as :
CBR/VBR (constant or variable bit rate) - VBR files are smaller, and
higher quality generally but may have problems with some mp3 hardware / software.
Full / Joint Stereo - Joint Stereo files discard low frequency stereo
information. of course they keep all the midrange & treble stereo but
for most people there's no discernible loss.
Bitrate - anything from 64kbps to 320kbps. the larger the number, the
bigger the file, the better the sound quality. personally i rip 192.

here's a simple guide to setting up eac and lame:
http://cd-rw.org/articles/archive/eac_and_lame_setup_guide.cfm
and a guide for the more hardcore:
http://mp3.radified.com/

eac - http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
cdex - http://www.cdex.n3.net/
lame official site - http://lame.sourceforge.net/
lame downoads - http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html

so you've got all that sorted and you've got a bunch of mp3's.

use eac again to copy the mp3's back onto a cd.

ta daaa

marcus takes a bow