hi.

just simple question: is there any other good ripper around here besides EAC? may be even almost-as-good, but more user friendly.

thnx.

CDex.

http://cdex.n3.net

It has a good error correction scheme (CD Paranoia) and is very user-friendly.

(You can expect some bias from me because I'm a CDex project admin)

Regards;

Roberto.

thnx. i'll give it a try.

there is no _alternative_ to eac. eac uses a unique extraction technique which no other program can match in regards to quality. however, this improvement is only made on scratched cds. a new cd will be extracted identically by eac and cdex.

the second-best extraction program is cdex [cdparanoia for linux].

if you are ripping mainly new cds then i wouldn't even use eac...cause eac has been known to cause drive failure due to the high strain it demands on equipment [and in some cases, even with new cds...don't ask me why]

...but those are isolated cases.

"newbie-ness" shouldn't matter though, as you have to set both programs up to fit your drive's specs, and eac now has a newbie friendly gui.

later
mike

in fact new EAC isn't so friendly as... let's say CD-DA.
i asked for an alternative, because of my younger brother (13), who's really not interesetd in having 'identical', bit-by-bit rips. if it sounds good, then it's OK for him (from a certain point of view it's a good rule i think). but he's fed up with typing different naming schemes again and again and so on...
i just don't want to suggest him some crap.

I have found audiograbber to be very easy to use, and it does a good job of ripping. add lame as the encoder and you have a nice all in one solution.

First of all I don't see why EAC should be that hard to set up.
It's only hard if you aim for perfection.

Second: Audiograbber does not have secure ripping (as far as I know - there were talk about it getting it some time).
If you don't wanna use EAC use CDex.

I agree. (me being biased again)

From my experience, the CD must be pretty badly scratched for EAC to noticeably outperform CDex.

And, well, the new main GUI might be "newbie friendly" (and sucks resources as hell), but the various configurations you must set up to get a secure copy are really frightening.

In CDex, to get a secure copy: Settings -> CD rom, Ripping Method: Paranoia, Full. Easy.

I can only recommend EAC as secure ripping program. CDex can't rip securely when drive caches audio data.

Agreed about the new GUI in EAC (I'm back to Prebeta11), but what's so frightening about the parameters? It takes maybe 15 minutes to learn what you need to learn, set it up... then you can forget it.

Agreed,I find EAC much better to use than CDex,and I may be wrong but I haven't noticed anyway with CDex where you can implement switches,i.e --alt-preset-?? Of course I could be wrong (and usually I am)

Encoder -> External encoder.

Select the encoder and put whatever you want in the parameter string.

It doesn't "suck resources as hell". This must be a misconception coming from the bugs in beta1, that caused system crashes after having killed all GDI resources.
Beta 2 still had the bug, but only with Windows9x, and Me. It was solved for NT, 2k, and XP.



In two years, I only heard one, maybe two stories about people having let EAC trying to read a completely unreadable CD all night long, and the day after, the drive was damaged.
Where did you hear that it had happened with clean CD ? Was it more than two years ago ? Maybe with the obsolete "paranoid" mode that Andre warns us against.

Well, I use Win98SE, and it still sucks so much resources that Opera refuses to open new windows when EAC is running. (I even got a blue screen once saying that "The system is dangerously low on resources. You should save your work and restart the computer" or some shit like that.)

That never happened to me using CDex.

Regards;

Roberto.

Well, I'm riping right now in secure mode and it uses 17mb and 40% cpu...
I'm on a p2 333 128mb using the lastest eac beta and WindowsXP®© :cool2:

on my machine with Win98SE, EAC and CDex both use about the same CPU, as judged by Process Explorer. Both in the teens usually, with EAC on secure and CDex on full paranoia. EAC is more likely to all of a sudden lock my computer, though. Moreover, it sometimes has problems with my drive (a cheapie); cdParanoia used by CDex does better with cheap drives I think. Moreover, the cdParanoia scheme is easier on the drive than EAC's, as judged by how often the speed changes and the laser head moves around when using EAC on a scratched cd.

As for the scratched cd's, EAC will give more consistent rips (bit-for-bit more similar when ripping a scratched disc multiple times for comparison; CDex will give similar-sounding reads but the error correction it makes varies a bit more with each read). That said, I have scratched discs, that I keep for testing purposes, that CDex gets better-sounding reads from than does EAC. Though on the whole, EAC does better here. It's also nice to have a progress window; in CDex the only way you know that cdParanoia is having trouble reading is when the % progress indicator gets stuck on a certain value for awhile.

In my experience CDex is a bit easier to set up but has fewer options and isn't quite as cusomizeable. EAC's wav editor feature is very nice. I use it frequently. Just finished going through a cd by Tourniquet, a heavy-metal band that is melodic and amazingly technically proficient but has an annoying screaming/growling vocalist... I clipped out all the vocal portions and merged the leftover sections in rhythm so that the "seams" aren't noticeable. Time-consuming, but what's a man to do in a year off?

@ Roberto (and perhaps John33),

It would be cool, if you're managing CDex, if there could be some sort of ripping dialogue box developed. More than just the % of current track and jitter errors thing that it has right now. Would be cool if it got closer to matching EAC in this department. I've mentioned this before, and don't know how feasible it is... I have no programming skill myself.

Then you're using beta 1 or 2.
Get beta 3 for ripping, or prebeta 11 for ripping + burning with cuesheet.

I had more problems with Beta 3 locking up my computer and/or forcing me to restart my machine in order to use EAC... currently I use Beta 2 and Prebeta 11

what about Feurio?? (Ive never used it, but I read somewhere that its a very good ripper and could be an alternative to those who cant/dont wanna use EAC )

X-Tractor 022:

http://xtractor.sourceforge.net/

Very simple and ease to use.
Clean interface no frills.
Freeware, uses Lame.dll.
I used it many times, and did
fine rips.
Has error correction and seems
to perform a extraction in a very similar
way of CDex.(uses Akrip routines).


LIF




http://xtractor.sourceforge.net/

But do Feurio or xtractor detect scratches ?

I may be wrong but I think that the actual issue here is not EAC but whether the CDrom is using DMA or not. Also, if the CDrom is on the same IDE cable as the hard drive you can get really slow reads. I had the same issue and had to play around with DMA settings to get things right.

Ideally the CDrom would be on it's own IDE cable with DMA enabled - if it supports it. Not sure how you do this in Windows but on Linux it would be 'hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hdc' There must be Windows software that can turn on DMA too.

That can't be right. How come, it is the same CD-rom, at the same IDE place. EAC suck the resources, and CDex doesn't.

I don't agree the problem is in the hardware, or CDex would have the same problems.

Look, I use EAC and CDEX.


THe two leapfrog each other.

When I first used CDEX (1.2) , it sucked, even EAC was better.

When CDex 130betas came around, i tried it again, good stuff against EAC which created spurious errors.


I will try eac again, but I find a clean CD being ripped at .1 again, and no option to reduce CD speed (thanks AL, CDEX does this).

And by the way, I will not accept a viewpoimt(!) that EAX is better at ripping until I have a study that can ABX it

an abx isn't necessary if eac produces an identical wave as the source and cdex doesn't.

this is simple logic

...and i question whether or not you set up eac correctly in the first place...

later
mike

Rjamorim,



Actually according to my tests it is the other way around. EAC is nice, reliable and fast in secure mode (Nothing runs like a Plexie), BUT when the reading gets tough EAC gets into trouble. It very often jams, reading the tracks for ages, and results errors.

I recently recovered some aged & scratched CD-Rs where one tiny scratch was through the reflection layer. CDEx was able to recover without audible problems.

I prefer EAC, but I agree that for newbies, CDex is a lot better.

seaeye: I have made a modified distribution of CDex 1.40, pre-configured for LAME ("--alt-preset standard") and Vorbis support. IMHO you won't find anything easier , because the only things you have to configure manually are the output path and the paranoia ripping mode. Give it a try:

http://free.pages.at/volcano/files/cdex140.exe

I haven't changed any source code (I wish I were able to ), just modified the INI file (kick out system-specific values, set general values) and configured the installer to insert the path to LAME.EXE correctly.

CU

Dominic

Thats good stuff Volcano,a guy from work has been hassling me to help set him up for ripping and encoding properly,I dont really have the time so I shall send him the link to this thread
You've just saved me a few hours work

[img]19bf9fa9cb[/img]

thnx. i'm downloading it right now.

oh man... i just wanted to ask 'bout a similar program to EAC for my lazy brother and i started another eac <-> cdex war

maybe not for you, maybe not for me - for other people the answer is probably 'yes, it's complicated'. comapring to.. let's say cd-da.

ok - doesn't matter. i got modyfied cdex

My point was that just getting EAC to work is not tricky.

the wizard should get it working.
It's not harder than any other program as long as you don't care about off-set and shit like that.

If EAC rips a clean CD at 0.1x, there's a problem, what are your extraction settings ?

possible solutions :
Try "read comand MMC1", try to enable DMA, disable offset correction, enable "spin up drive before extraction", change the "allow speed reduction setting", install ASPI 4.60, or ASAPI, and enable its use in EAC (avoid ASPI 4.70 for the time being).

The ripping speed, and the above settings might not be available in beginner mode.

Last, ripping is a lossless process, so ABX won't give anything, unless (very unlikely) differences in the hard disc positioning and fragmentation of the extracted wav file.

CDex is easier to use from the get-go (especially if you use the Vorbis DLL encoder). Just turn on paranoia mode, change some encoding settings, and your basically ready to go.

Some things I liked about CDex more than current EAC:
- Easy to use, I'll recommend it for my non techie friends.
- The naming files works a lot better, I like to setup my music as "artist / artist - album - year artist - album - track# - track name - year" and EAC can't handle the directory stuff (well it can, just won't work with that much stuff) and CDex worked fine.
- The playlist option worked (and I coudl change the name of the playlist), as opposed to EAC where only the wav's are entered in the playlist.

But, after that CDex was not much different than EAC. Seeing as how I rip basically new CD's, or barely scratched, I don't really have a huge need for most of what EAC claims it's good at.

Though, I'd still really like a "two encoder" option. The ability to send the same wav to two encoders would be great (FLAC and Vorbis), and be able to keep the same tagging info and what not.

Right, and I'd add that these interminable discussions about which is better overshadows the fact that for some folks who _aren't_ newbies, Cdex feels better. Yes, I used that word 'feel'.

Programs are designed in myriads of ways. They're not much like command lines, which you just learn and do: easy to get used to. (Okay, maybe MessyDos is an exception - cough) Programs with various UI's hit you differently. And that's how I feel about EAC and Cdex. I don't *like* EAC. It's written from a headspace that doesn't vibrate my medulla.

So I prefer Cdex and it's not because I'm a newbie (I've designed programs for 20 years), or because I don't understand how to use it. I prefer Cdex because to me, it's written with style, verve, brio and ease. EAC - to me - is a laborious undertaking, a bit like Nero, which I use extensively, appreciate enormously, but dislike intensely.

However in the case of Nero I know of no Cdex-like sibling lurking in the background that I could use. (haven't really looked, I admit)

As far as presets and EAC vs Cdex, the command line in dos works fine. But I don't use those presets much anyway. For those who love them, today's Cdex has them all pre-done and clickable.

I'll use EAC if I need to. So far I haven't needed to.

My 2 cents. Nex

And EAC "feels" better to me (and I would assume others). Though, yes this does have a great difference on the way people do work, if you don't like the GUI you don't want to use it. Which is why having CDex and EAC is a good thing, it's two competing programs that do essentially the same thing, but because there just a little different some people will like one and some the other. It's the way life was meant to be, choice.

No point in starting a yes/no argument, but still I must comment the ease of use issue.

For quite some time I've seen people write here that CDEx is easier to use than EAC. I can't really understand that statement since CDEx has a terribile GUI. The thing I hate most is the "output directory" that must be cofigured separately, while EAC asks for it aty the beginning of the process.

I have to wonder if people have really had a look at the most recent EACs with new GUI and setup wizard?

If you want the fastest Ripper, go for dBpowerAMP Music Converter, it has the best range of codecs available and it is free.

www.dbpoweramp.com

[img]ef9585be41[/img] *LOL*, what a hoot! I don't see why they're so excited about that result - their program may do a CD in a matter of minutes, but what good does that do if errors are not detected?

I also find it hard to believe that CDex and EAC, both used in Burst Mode, are that much slower than the rest. On my system, no matter what ripper I use, Burst Mode (or whatever the program calls it) always brings roughly the same speed.

Anyway, Ill try that program as soon as I get home.

CU

Dominic

<sigh> Laugh it up...

>why they're so excited about that result

Because if you can successfully stream the audio off a CD lightening fast just like dBpowerAMP does, you have less block matching to be done (a potential glitch - yes dMC block matches each segment before you say...).

dBpowerAMP has about 1 Million users and guess what I have had almost 0 complaints about ripping quality.

I have to giggle at anyone who rips to anything other than lossless compression...

Guess what MP3 encoder is used by even more users and probably doesn't have had much, if any complaints about quality either...

--
GCP

It's unlikely, since the wizard is not lauched when you upgrade from prebeta to beta.

Let's recall that installing EAC beta, unlike SatCPs tutorial states (it was made for EAC prebeta), all you have to do is choosing between "speed" or "quality".

Then you click the wav button to extract to wav, and the mp3 button to extract to mp3.
For the mp3 quality, you can choose between "low" and "high".
"Low" automatically enables lame --alt-preset 128, and "high" enables --alt-preset standard.

That's all.

I think the problem we've got with EAC is that the wizard and beginner mode are completely undocumented.
All that we have is SatCP's old and huge encyclopedia with thousands of necessary fine tuning, that are not necessary anymore since Beta 1.

I'll agree with that.

I don't claim to hear like a dog nor am I trying to preserve the last pefect copy of some copyrighted artist's work for all eternity. I just want a fairly accurate duplication of a song so I can listen to it on whatever hardware I own.

dbPoweramp Music Converter in my opinion is a "must have" tool. It has more flexibilty and format conversion support than any other application I've seen.

For me it's a secure ripper.
If you have a drive that can report C2 errors reliably, it's safe.

No C2 errors reported => Perfect rip.
C2 errors reported => Maybe perfect rip, maybe not (probably not).

So, I only use EAC when I find C2 errors, because Feurio is much faster (it reads in burst mode).

Coupled with the best burning engine and my favourite system of compilations, I find it great for making perfect copies and my own mixes. (It only lacks offset correction compared to EAC).

For making MP3s it's not that great, because you can only use the LAME DLL, and you have to change the settings for ripping, destination, etc.

It seems that I'm one of the few that also find EAC a bit strangely
programmed... why secure mode with C2 enabled (no reread) and no caching (no flushing) isn't as fast as burst mode? in fact, it's much slower...

Anyway, with scratched CDs there's nothing that can beat EAC in my system.

I completely disagree.
I've tried to rip several scratched cds with eac, and it never works. What happends is that when eac finds an error it just stops and tries to correct it for ages (several hours). And then it just stops ripping and reports it found an error. I don't even get the rest of the track.

But for clean cds I've never had a problem with eac.


What about feurio?

I've lately tested feurio cause I read it should be great with scratched cds....and it really was.
I had a cd that feurio reported having over 11000 c2 errors, and I couldn't hear any pops or clicks in the resulting wavs. Great!
But I wouldn't use it for other than scratched cds, because the result from clean cds differs slightly from the result from eac and other cd-rippers.


I also like the internal-ripping prog in winoncd 3.8 burning prog. For my cd drive it gives exactly the same results with clean cds as with eac, (I compared lots of times with eac). And with slightly scratched cds it works just as well as feurio.
And it reads cd-text so that with those cds that contain cd-text you don't need to type in the name on the track.
But I know this ripper don't work well with all cd-drives.

So I use eac or winoncd with clean cds.
And feurio with scratched cds.

My cd-drives are: Teac 540e (Supports c2 correction)
Goldstar LG 8040 (Supports c2 correction)

Keep in mind this thread's over a year old, perhaps software has changed and improved since then.

Concerning performance issues, I have to say that the IDE system in most modern PCs is the source of some of the strangest and (on the surface of it) most illogical seeming performance issues affecting computers.

1. I have to shift the primary IDE channel on my 500mhz celeron down to ultra dma mode 1 before it will stop having kernel in_page errors while doing certain things (maybe pci bus intensive, who knows).

2. On my more up to date PC, my CD writer seems, or seemed to cause huge increases in CPU usage for access to itself, and any ATAPI on the same channel in certain situations. I noticed it eventually after playing a DVD and noticing that it seemed a tiny bit choppy. Leaving it to have it's own channel solved that problem. I have since recently reinstalled my OS after my IBM deskstar 75gxp crashed for the last time, and haven't tested it much yet. If it was a software issue, it was certainly an elusive one.

My point is, the precise methods EAC uses for extraction could differ enough from CDEX to cause dodgy-seeming slowdowns in some cases. I certainly don't know enough to know for sure, but I certainly won't ignore the possibility either.

Edit: on top of that there's the situation where devices will occasionally decide to operate at a different IDE rate, even when the windows xp ide driver is reset. Failing hardware? Maybe... who knows...

why would you need to ABX two different rips? just compare CRCs. if they are the same, there's no point.

For me, with a Memorex DVDmaxx 1648, it is quite as fast as burst mode.