I haven't had a seriously focused system for ripping+encoding+tagging set up for a while now. For a long time I was using the Rio Central, but that went on the fritz a while back (hard disk failure) and now it is no longer my solution.

In the meantime, for my occasional CD purchase, my system has been to use Windows Media Player to rip the disc and then hand-tag with MP3 Tag Studio. This is not very good because I have less control over certain things and it's also not very scriptable.

I now have a stack of backlogged discs which I purchased and haven't ripped yet. I realized that one of the reasons they're not on the Empeg yet is that I don't have a streamlined system for doing that any more, like I used to have.

Most people use iTunes for this process, but I have several reasons for not wanting to use it for this purpose. I'm looking for something other than iTunes that will fit nicely into my workflow, potentially something that is powerful, highly configurable, and supports scripting. I've been so out of touch in this area for so long that I don't even know what's out there. Google seems to show a lot of "stuff" but I don't know what's good.

Anyone have an recommendations?

I use dBpoweramp.

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/

I used it when I re-ripped everything to FLAC* 8-ish years ago. I use it because it has really good tagging and the most accurate ripping I found.

It uses the AccurateRip databases to compare your rips against clever hashes of other peoples' rips. That means it can rip at full speed and also know when it gets a 100% accurate rip.

The tagging uses multiple sources and presents conflicts in a way that makes it quick and easy to choose the best tag data from between the sources. It is also good at getting album art.

When I re-ripped everything I spent ages getting my setup just how I wanted it. I was also sure at that point that I'd not want to mess with it again and just wanted it to keep working. So I built my preferred setup in a VM (turned out to be a WinXP one, as I wanted to run as fast as possible).

I ripped on two different machines with three different CD drives, one machine was running two copies of the VM. Now I just move the VM from machine to machine as I upgrade things, I've basically not changed the ripping setup since I got it working how I wanted.

When I first did this it was a bit of a pain to get VirtualBox talking to the host CD drive natively, but that seems to have got less painful in recent years. I've run my ripping VM on Windows 7/Windows 10/OSX/Linux hosts.

I'd highly recommend dBpoweramp even if you don't opt for my nutty VM approach

What sort of scripting are you expecting to need to do ?

* I transcode all my FLACs to MP3 using https://github.com/robinbowes/flac2mp3 and use those MP3s on my iPhone (and would use them on my empeg if I was currently using one)

It occurs to me that it is probably time to start stockpiling well known good CD drives for ripping. Can't be too long before they become hard to obtain.

Just ordered a LiteOn IHAS124-14, which is supposedly a good ripper. At £13.60 if it is any good I'll buy another couple

dbpoweramp.

tanstaafl.

I'm still using Exact Audio Copy. I believe it also uses the AccurateRip databases.

Where from? And let us know if it's good as I need a new CD drive too

http://amzn.to/2gJxOhO

I haven't tried it yet, hopefully later this week