[kpxgq]

how does the cd-ripping built into sonic foundry sound forge 5.0 compare to other commercial rippers like xing, lame, etc...

 

[Nezer]

Lame isn't a commercial ripper. It's published under the terms of the GPL I believe. This makes it truly "free" software as in you can do whatever you want with it as long as you make your changes available for others to be "free" to do with it as they choose.

As far as quality I think it works out something like this...

Lame & Franhauffer (very close)
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Xing (Way down there)

Sound forge probably licenses the encoder from either Xing or Franhauffer. Most likely Franhauffer.

If you're looking for a good ripping/encoding package try out Exact Audio Copy (www.eac.de I think) and get the Lame 3.90 dlls for it. You can rip and encode in one package and it's all free of cost (excepting the download). EAC is, by far, the best ripper there is.


Edit: You can find EAC here: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
and the pre-compiled LAME DLL here: http://home.pi.be/~mk442837/

Also, 3.91 is the latest LAME release.

 

[beowulf]

The ultimate ripping pack is EAC, coupled with the latest LAME, and a Plextor Ultraplex SCSI reader.

But then again, MP3s are evil.

 

[rickcr42]

yes mp3 is evil BUT it has its uses dude.I used audiogalaxy to download a crapload of holiday music in mp3 format,converted the music back to .wav with mp3 decoder and burned some discs with music tailored to each person as gifts !
Yeah,I know it was a cheap way out but EVERYONE was pleased as punch with my selections.
Everything from steve vai to the makenzie brothers (12 days of christmas eh)
Sound quality ? Most of this stuff was never high fidelity to begin with so any loss of detail was minimal

 

[rickcr42]

BTW-recently fooling around with a new ripper/encoder pack
CD-DA X-tractor ,
http://xtractor.sourceforge.net/
has jitter correction,cddb support mp3 encoding with lame or BladeEnc,raw,wav,and Ogg Vorbis and at only 1.5 mb it is not bloated.
best of all it is free ! check it out

another nice program,also free,is mp3 decode for converting mp3 back to wav.A must have if you want to make a regular audio CD from mp3 files.Yeah,I know winamp can output a wave file but this is WAY better
http://www.etalonsoft.com/mp3decode.html
I like my programs small,fast and lite.

 

[Uosdwis R. Dewoh]

Ahoy hoy,

I would just like to point out what I consider a fact:

for encoding quality mp3's in higher bitrate than 128, Lame is simply the best. There is no comparison. The idea that Fraunhofer is a top-quality encoder is outdated, it's as simple as that.

For the benefit of the world,

use EAC and Lame 3.91 with one of the heavily tweaked (source) presets like -alt preset standard.

Visit Hydrogen Audio, a community dedicated to discussion and development of audio codecs like mp3.

Cheers,

Uosdwis