Good ole' CD ripping, CDDB, FreeDB etc... What to use these days?

[frankvw]

In a dim and distant past I ripped all my CDs, using Audiograbber which at the time worked fine (we're talking late 1990's here). Disc and track titles were automatically retrieved from the CDDB online database which is now defunct. I'm not sure FreeDB (the only alternative to the old CDDB I have found) has the same quality of content, but from what I can see most CDs aren't even in there.

Now that I'm married and have gone through my wife's CD collection, I need to do a proper ripping session again so that I can play her CDs in my car (my new car radio having a USB socket with a 32GB pen drive permanently stuck into it) but Audiograbber is a bit long in the tooth by now, and I'm not getting any track info on it, either, CDDB having kicked the proverbial bucket.

What (preferably free) program would the sophisticated CD ripper use these days to MP3-ify his/her CD collection?

Tnx!

// FvW

[ndjamena]

I used iTunes to try to rip my Doctor Who audio CDs.

All the metadata showed up, unfortunately MP4 metadata was never meant for episode sound tracks.

It should work fine for music though.

(Windows Media Player can rip CDs too...)

[detmek]

For best ripping quality use EAC or CUETools. Those are not the most user-friendly programs but it is not hard to use it as there are a lot of tutorials how to use it. Or you can use DBPoweramp. It is not free but you have 3 weeks free full funcional trial.

All of these programs support secure ripping, auto tagging and can verify your rip with Accurate Rip database if you rip in lossless format.

Foobar2000 (audio player) also support FreeDB and secure ripping.

[SeeMoreDigital]

For best ripping quality use EAC or CUETools. Yep, I use CUERipper (which is part of CUETools) to back-up my audio CD's to either Flac or AAC (or both). And then use MP3tag to correct any meta-data anomalies ;)

[foxyshadis]

The Foobar MusicBrainz plugin is my go-to. FreeDB is pretty good, but MusicBrainz is much more comprehensive with weird foreign stuff or pure digital albums.

[qyot27]

I usually use EAC to generate the CUE file against FreeDB, and/or ImgBurn to read out to WAV/CUE.

And then I push it through multiple other conversions:
1) Convert the WAVE main file to FLAC
2) Use foobar to split the WAVE by tracks
3) Use CLI tools to convert the tracks into AAC (qtaacenc) and Opus (opusenc)
4) Generate a tags file against the track naming and other information I lay out in a standard fashion
5) Use Mp3tag to add the tags to the tracks from the tags file

Back up the FLAC/CUE, AAC, and Opus files.


If it's an Enhanced CD, rip as BIN/CUE, use ffmpeg -f libcdio to convert to WAVE, and trim out the silence with SoX. Then see the above steps.

[Ghitulescu]

I use EAC but I don't use its CUE sheet, which is hardly compliant with the rest of the software.
It's rare when a CD-DA comes with CD-TEXT, so I either recreate the CD in the burning software (adding the titles by hand) or rename (equally by hand) the singer-title.

Not much to work, unless one has billion of CDs. Most of the times I copy them 1:1 for car use.

[frankvw]

Thanks for the advise, everyone! Obviously things are not as simple as they used to be... :-)

[chainring]

I have a registered version of DBPoweramp Reference, so that's what I use these days. In the old, old days, it was EAC to single FLAC with a cue file, then tagged with The Godfather, which can pull from Allmusic.com (great site).

[ndjamena]

Is there any way to split a cue file IN HALF rather than into each individual track.

That's all any program I've found seems to want to do.

[detmek]

Only way to properly split audio data is to recompress it. Doing it without recompression might split file on wrong place and create audible glitches. With lossless formats that is not a problem as there is no quality and data loss.

You can use foobar2000, load CUE file, select songs you want, right click, convert and under Destination select Generate multitrack files and name it. Repeat process with rest of the songs. CUE file will be integrated into resulted audio file for FLAC and ALAC format. I didn't try with other formats. Foobar tends to create integrated CUE file. CUETools may be able to do that, too. I didn't try as foobar2000 is my main audio player/converter/ripper/tagger.