audio CD duplication software

I'm looking for recommendations. I am in the process of cataloging my music cd collection - I want to put all my original CDs in protective sleeves that are packed away, and then use only the copies in my CD player. Once that is done, then I will rip every CD to both a lossless format for playing on my home stereo, and to some flavor of compressed format for playing on a portable device.

My questions are:

1)what are the best utilities that will allow me to duplicate an audio cd either to another physical cd or to an ISO file?
2)What are the best utilities for ripping lots of CDs to digital format - I want something that will allow me to control/manage the files on disk, and to easily edit the meta information for a given cd. Itunes and windows media player are of course out. I would also really like to be able to control not only bit rate, but also sound levels in the ripping.

I'm just planning this now - no real experience with anything but generic tools, so I am very interested in your opinions and experiences.

thanx much!

scabrous1 said:

My questions are:

1)what are the best utilities that will allow me to duplicate an audio cd either to another physical cd or to an ISO file?
2)What are the best utilities for ripping lots of CDs to digital format - I want something that will allow me to control/manage the files on disk, and to easily edit the meta information for a given cd. Itunes and windows media player are of course out. I would also really like to be able to control not only bit rate, but also sound levels in the ripping.

ImgBurn is a frequent recommendation for duplicating all types of discs. I use it with no problems or errors.

I don't do a lot of ripping, but use CDex when I do. No problems there either, but I don't recall any control for sound levels. You can rip to WAVE or to mp3 as I recall.

Another popular ripping choice is Exact Audio Copy. Exact Audio Copy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

General advice is to rip to lossless when possible and then convert the lossless files to the lossy format of your choice with your chosen bitrate.

I use mp3tag to control the data, but don't know if you plan mp3s.

imgburn is the best application and it's free. i wrote a .bat file to handle copying cd's:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\ImgBurn\ImgBurn.exe" /mode read /src <drive of source cd, for example f:> /dest <temporary file to store the ISO image, for example: "e:\cd images\audiocd"> /verify no /start /closesuccess /overwrite yes /eject yes /waitformedia
sleep 2
"C:\Program Files (x86)\ImgBurn\ImgBurn.exe" /mode write /src <temp directory of ISO image, for example: "e:\cd images\audiocd.cue"> /dest <destination drive of writable cd, for example g:> /verify = no /closesuccess /start /waitformedia /eject yes


just put the two lines above in a .bat file (fill in the source, target and temporary directories) and execute the batch file. if you have only a single cd/dvd drive then you can change the sleep to a wait and put the writable cd in the same drive as the source cd.

schleprock