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Best RIP software vs Mac (as good or better than EAC)?

post #1 of 61
2/20/08 at 2:42pm
Thread Starter 
I'm Mac based and bought a PC solely for the purpose of using EAC with excellent results. Now that iTunes has become such a great music server I'm moving to computer based exclusively.

We all know the issues where wav files don't contain the album info within them so bringing them into iTunes means manually typing all of it in.

I tried Max and EAC was better. A friend deeply involved in this recommended Bias Peak 5LE because its ripping engine is superior to iTunes and possibly EAC and it works on a Mac. Here's a link BIAS Peak LE 5

Is there any other Mac based rippers that now compete with or supersede EAC?

TIA!
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post #2 of 61
2/20/08 at 2:50pm
Max is unfortunately the best..but you could always boot camp/vmware and rip with eac.
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post #3 of 61
2/20/08 at 2:52pm
There is not any OS X application that actually supports secure ripping. Max is the closest it gets. I don't have much confidence that any further progress will be made in this regard, either, as Intel Macs can run Windows natively and therefore take advantage of secure ripping programs. Not only that, but Apple is now popularizing the idea of buying computers with no optical drive at all.

Anyway, I like my Mac, I like Max, and I probably would have written a more cheery post if I hadn't just worked 12 hours with no food and commuted back and forth another 2 hours .
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post #4 of 61
2/20/08 at 2:53pm
Thread Starter 
I'm trying to avoid the whole bootcamp/windows/eac for reasons I mentioned. I did tests in the past between Max/EAC/iTunes using all possible formats and EAC always won out. Max/AIFF was second but a distant second.
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post #5 of 61
2/20/08 at 2:56pm
Thread Starter 
Jaska, save the cheese get some sleep. I know the Macbook Air is a sign of what's to come but Mac's have always been the base equipment in the recording industry and now film editing so they'll cater to that audience. No one thinks anything of that link/product as being better? Supposedly error checks millions of times etc....
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post #6 of 61
2/20/08 at 3:04pm
As repeated often, the hardware is at least as important as the software. So it's somewhat mute to discuss software differences if hardware differences are involved. I kept a PC around for EAC use only for a year before finally moving over to iTunes error correction. My experiences were it really depended on type of disk damage which preformed superior and I chalk this up much more to the two drives than the software. My favorite feature of EAC is its reporting, something often missing elsewhere.
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post #7 of 61
2/20/08 at 3:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by zzodhi View Post
Jaska, save the cheese get some sleep.
That's good advice, and I really should take it.

I think Macs are "better" than Windows PCs in enough ways that I've bought 5 or 6 of them over the past 10 years, and have used them very heavily during that time. Among their strong points, however, is not CD ripping. Apple has a long history of producing computers with optical drives of marginal quality at best, and made even worse with crippled firmware. A huge portion of their computer lineup over the years has been based around machines with built-in drives that can't be swapped without considerable trouble, whereas run-of-the-mill desktop PCs offer the possibility to add/swap optical drives to their owners' content (well, Windows registration issues being an unfortunate side effect--I'll say no more on this subject lest I be called "Mr. Negative").

I will continue to use Macs for the foreseeable future, but I will likewise continue to rip my audio CDs on my Windows PC with PlexTools Professional LE and transfer the FLAC files to my Mac.
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post #8 of 61
2/20/08 at 5:44pm
Sadly there are no Audio CD ripper for Mac OS X that beat EAC when it comes to secure ripping. [http://www.sbooth.org/Max]Max[/url] come close, but not quite there...

We can always hope that teh future will be brighter.
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post #9 of 61
2/21/08 at 4:43pm
With macs in general, its a lottery with the optical drives. If you dig around enough forums, you can find out which make and models they use for each mac. If you don't like the one you have and you are still under warranty, you can try to get it replaced. My friend had really bad noise issues with his mac book and it couldn't read half of his burned DVDs. He had it replaced with a different brand drive and now everything works great.

I still have to rip DVDs and CDs for my Mac buddies on my PC because they have optical drive issues with scratched discs and poor media quality.

If you are serious about getting the best ripper, I suggest buying a super cheap PC, install Windows XP, and buy the latest and greatest ripper mentioned at cdfreak forums. I found no ripping software that can beat EAC or DBPoweramp.
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post #10 of 61
2/21/08 at 4:47pm
Thread Starter 
Pedxing. If you read my original post I mentioned I do own a PC for just that purpose but its a hassle getting wav's into iTunes. Being in the entertainment industry most of my life and working in the studio where everything is mac bases - recording and editing - I just can't believe the mac platform can't make great rips.
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post #11 of 61
3/1/08 at 5:31am
I'm about to switch over to OSX myself... Actually I've used OSX traditionally but I was stuck with Windows until I regained my sanity and decided I must get back

What about Rubyripper?

It's based on the high quality Linux ripping application cdparanoia, and is inspired as a bit-perfect ripper by EAC.
I'm not sure if someones directly compared a file ripped with EAC and a file ripped with Rubyripper, so I couldn't say if really it's as good... But I was optimistic, and from what I hear of how it works, I don't see why it wouldn't be as accurate.

Also for those that may be using ... ahem ... "unofficial" Macs, I'm not sure how the majority of Mac OS X rippers would do, as they would assume you have one of the standard Mac disc drives.
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post #12 of 61
3/1/08 at 6:00am
I fail to see how digital data can be read at different qualities depending on software but I guess I must misunderstand how ripping CD audio works.
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post #13 of 61
3/1/08 at 12:05pm
Thread Starter 
No good things to report about Bias Peak at the moment. I bought the software and did a comparison between a ripped song in it and EAC. The EAC was far superior although that rip was done with a lot of power conditioning while the Bias rip was not. Bias said they're coming out with a new version in a couple weeks. I'll try again then. Meantime I'll try Rubyripper. Thanks Damian
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post #14 of 61
3/1/08 at 9:24pm
There's a huge thread where files ripped with iTunes on a Mac using error correction were compared to EAC rips and tests showed there were no differences.

At the moment, I use EAC within Windows using VMWare on my Mac, with the files saved through the VMWare shared folders, so I don't bloat the VMWare disk image.
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post #15 of 61
3/1/08 at 10:29pm
Actually, has anyone tried running EAC within OSX with Wine?

I've heard of people running EAC in Linux this way.

As for using iTunes with error correction as I said this will work for people using standard Mac drives but if you are using a different drive I'm not sure if Apple would be optimizing their ripping to take that into account, they'd just assume everyone has an official Apple drive and build the ripping around that, which may introduce unanticipated errors using different drives.

Of course that's complete speculation on my part, it may still be fine... Again side-by-side comparisons need to be done!
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