Hi guys,

I'm reading a lot about rippers, I have a relative old notebook (don't laugh please) :-) Toshiba CDT660 Portege 32 MB RAM 2GB Hard I think PII 300 (I'm now at work) well I read about combination EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and Lame or Audiograbber + Lame...any TIPS...e.g. what do you use?

by the way read FAQ as well!

thanks
Mario

Works REALLY well (Even on my Ancient Dell Lattitude (PII))
I sat down with my stereo and Empeg with the same song ripped on 128, WMA,and VBR. At VBR Level4 I could not discern between original and Mp3 so that is what I use (VBR Level4). File sizes are a bit larger but worth it. Experiment on your own to see what you can hear. Keep in mind youll spend some time ripping your CD's so it's worth it to do it right. In a few years CD players will be obsolete and we'll all have computers as part of the sound systems in our house (or built into recievers).

I had some trouble ripping with 40X Plextor so I used the lame setting to limit ripping to 12x and everything is fine

Old Toshiba desktop drives only rip at 1x. And, I have yet to get a laptop Toshiba drive to rip at all. If you must use this setup, I think you will be unable to rip with Digital Audio Extraction (DAE). This forces you to use the analog audio output to get the music on your hard drive. If you must keep that laptop, it may be good to get an external USB CD-ROM for ripping.

If you must use the analog outs to rip, I would suggest using MusicMatch Jukebox. This is the only ripper/encoder I've used that yeilded good results with analog recording.

What is this "Exact Audio Copy" and where can I get it ?

Exact Audio Copy copies audio exactly.

Except that it copies digitally copies audio exactly, but the acronym doesn't work that way, I mean who would remember DCAE.

Mind you, EDAC has a nice ring to it.....

alright it has come to my attention that i dont know as much as i thought i knew.
what the hell is LAME.EXE and where can i get it.
I thought it was just a plugin but i guess i am wrong.

Lame.exe would be the binary of the LAME source. You can get it here:
http://home.pi.be/~mk442837/

There's lame.dll and lame.exe - lame.dll works as a plug-in to for instance audiograbber and is limited by the GUI interface of audiograbber as to what tweaks you can do. lame.exe is a free-standing program (which can be called from inside audiograbber to automatically be run on ripped tracks, just like the dll) and offers you more command line parameters to play with. Command line parameters can be used when calling the program from inside audiograbber too, when/where you specify what program to use as the external encoder.

/Michael

Thanks
I think i have it figured out now.
Does it always rip this slow? ...1.5 to 5x

I have found its usually better to run lame.exe rather than the DLL provided that you have the disk space.
Also, if you are using EAC, configure it to run more than one concurrent encoding session, given the computing horsepower.

Rip speed is mostly dependent on your CD drive...
On my machine I get 12-15x ripping, but at that speed it gets pretty sensitive to what else I do on the machine, so I've limited it max 8x rip speed where it's rarely affected by what else I do...

People seem to generally report 20-24+x rip speed with Plextors, which seems to be the drives held in best regard as to ripping.

/Michael

And if you gonna use LAME (for link see older replies), use the "--alt-preset standard" arguments for optimal quality/size mp3's (that setting is the currently most tweaked one).

EiSl