After Shakeel re-ripped his music library I’ve started to do the same, brought about by a lack of quality TV at the moment and anticipating some games playing over the next few days. On Windows good quality ripping tools are abundant with EAC almost universally recommended. On the Mac though there seems to be a bit of a dearth when it comes to ripping. Max is often mentioned but I found it a bit buggy so I’ve ended up using iTunes-LAME from Blacktree.
The latest version makes use of Lame 3.97 although the latest latest version available on the Blacktree site was a bit flaky with tags. I have used iTunes-LAME-2.0.9-34.zip without issue so far and I’ve ripped around 30 cd’s today. As for quality settings I’ve went for something a bit beefier than 192kpbs which was my old default. For iTunes-Lame I’m using the following setting:
-V 0 –vbr-new
Visit the Lame Wiki for more info on the numerous command line settings for Lame. What’s nice is that once the ripping is done the tracks are automatically added to iTunes. What’s not so nice is that I’m re-ripping some cd’s so I will lose ratings, play counts, last played details etc…or so I thought. A quick trip to Doug’s AppleScripts and I found a script that would copy my precious meta data to the new rips. Bliss.
Pity I can’t find a script that will rip the other 150 cd’s.
Isn’t there any way you could rip your music from CD into a lossless format once? Then just run a conversion from that lossless format to whatever the current rate is as needed? Perhaps even copying the CDs directly might be an option? With disk being so cheap and available, it would save a lot of hassle on the reading/swapping of physical CD’s.
Your probably right. It’s something I’ll think about and maybe try but would I hear a difference? Longer term it would be great to have them all backed up and I guess lossless would be a good idea. Mmmmm. Options.
If you are worried about not hearing the difference, why re-rip at a higher rate at all? Or why worry about the super audio format…….
Well, I could tell the difference between old rips and new rips so that was why I re-ripped. The hearing the difference was between the new rips and lossless. Thinking about it lossless makes sense so I’ll sort out an external disk and do that for all the cd’s as well. Then I can ditch the cd’s totally.
Would be a lot easier just to use Apple Lossless, as it’s just an import preference on iTunes. Once you’ve ripped all the CD’s you can select all the music and right click “convert selection to AAC” or whatever lossy format you prefer.
Sadly the physical CD’s still need to be around if you want to have a lossless music library, as nowhere seems to offer downloads in a suitable format. But at least you will only have to rip them once!