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#11
Windows Media Player works well for me, but I rarely ever rip Cd's; just my opinion.
Windows Media Player works well for me, but I rarely ever rip Cd's; just my opinion.
HandBrake is a GUI that uses h264 codec, and so there is no doubt that the outcome would be brilliant. There are more GUIs that uses the same codec ... but among them handbrake is most easy to operate. So it is a better option to rip DVDs with that program. I always rip my DVDs with handbrake. I am not a master in bitrate calculation ... but if I set the output size properly, the intelegent program calculates bitrate itself
I assume you're running iTunes, if you have an iPhone, right? In that case, the simplest thing would be to use iTunes to rip the CD's. It may not be the absolute highest quality way to do it, but for most people it's perfectly fine.
EAC can be a little confusing to set up and learn how to use, if you're not familiar with it. I would say for now, just use iTunes, and enjoy your music on the iPhone....if you decide you want to get a little more serious about the whole digital music scene, look into the other suggestions here in the thread at your leisure.
There's an awful lot of stuff to learn, if you decide to explore it further.....it's been a hobby of mine these last couple years.
Yup iTunes it is. Tried mediamonkey out for a while didn't like the interface. I like shiny things.
Recently I have started to get into the music scene way more then I ever thought I would. Not sure what there is to the digital music scene besides ripping?
I plan on buying lots of cds off ebay keeping the ones I want and selling the rest. Digitally archiving the ones I keep is something I would like to eventually do. When I get the money I'll proabably build a cheapo pc with multiple mounts for HDD's and then map it to a network. But for now I just want to learn more about ripping and anything else that is useful for managing music.
Believe it or not, even though it hasn't been updated in a bit, this app works in Windows7:
Audiograbber, free CD ripper, mp3 encoder and audio recorder for Windows
The UI is a bit quirky, but if you have a .wma player this will rip CDs to .wav, then you can convert tracks to .wma. I can't detect any difference between .wma @192 and .mp3 @320 except the .wma file is smaller. Great for sticking a lot of tunes on a CD for your car stereo if it has .wma playback capability.
I set both the installer and program compatibility mode to XP SP2.
If you plan on sticking with your iPhone, and using iTunes, the highest quality would be the "ALAC".....Apple Lossless Audio Codec. These would be pretty big files, but you could use iTunes, or other programs, to convert them to portable-player friendly formats, like mp3, or the Apple default AAC, which has the extension m4a.
Actually, Miles summed it up correctly. wma and Apple's default m4a are more efficient than mp3 as far as quality-filesize ratio. But at high enough bitrates, they will all sound good.....so it depends on what your needs are. If you are looking to stuff as many songs as you can into a portable player, you can fit a lot more wma's/m4a's at 160kbps or 192kbps onto a player than you could 256kbps or 320kbps mp3's.