Many of us are music lovers and have a large selection of albums that we enjoy listening to in our homes. Of course, you didn't just run out one day and buy them all, they were slowly accumulated for years, for some, maybe even decades. Everyone can appreciate how long it takes to build a collection like this and also the cost of such an endeavor. These days however, we are noticing a bit of an evolution out there, one that is showing a consumers desire for their music to be portable too. Because of wonderful advances in technology, millions can afford to own an MP3 player of some sort to accomplish that urge for portability. Maybe even one with a hard disk drive of a 20 or even 40 gigabyte capacity.
You could download some music off P2P to fill it, but maybe you didn't buy a player to have to worry about litigation or you just don't think it's the right thing to do. You can get plenty of music from the legal online services, but they're loaded with DRM annoyances that your player doesn't support. Then, there's the price! No one other than the very well off could begin to gather all the music they would like at 99 cents a track. Even if you could afford it, the distribution network being the Internet, many online services offer only 128kbps files for quick downloading. Maybe that just isn't good enough for you.
Today, we will look at leveraging your existing collection with the ripping program, Exact Audio Copy. This is a Freeware program written by Andre Wiethoff, who is presently residing in Germany. He is a student of computer science and mathematics at the University of Dortmund. Aside from being a student, he has started working for Pinnacle on Video programming and general additions for InstantCD/DVD.
Mr. Wiethoff wrote this software as he was fed up with other audio grabbers. He didn't like to to listen to every grabbed wave, because other audio grabbers only do jitter correction while CD-ROM drives reading scratched CDs often produce distortions. In his eyes, listening to every wave file is a waste of time. He decided to take matters into his own hands and wrote his own audio grabber, mainly for friends and his own personal use. He is rightfully proud of his program and only wishes to share it with everyone, it's not designed for profit. You can of course visit the Exact Audio Copy home page, for additional information.
For those of us interested in seeing at least one way to rip or copy an album, then encode it for use in a portable player, forum moderator Womble has put together a darn good guide for just that purpose. Here is a snippet of what the guide will encompass:
| Exact Audio Copy: Overview
Software Used In This Guide |
If this looks interesting to you, then pay a visit to our Audio Forum and check it out. Of
course, just like our music, there is no good or bad or right or wrong. If you have a software for the purpose of ripping you like, or a codec that you think is better, mention it here or in the forum thread for others to consider. However, if you are a newbie, Womble's guide will give you a place to start and maybe save you some money along the way. Not to mention, you will have some great quality music for your own personal use.
Source: The Club CD Freaks
