ripping cd's to harddrive

petesgalaxy · 2006-11-22, 07:31 PM

what are most people using to rip mp3's and getting album art and song title's. I've tried cdex, and cddb, but doesnt seem to get album art, or gbpvr wont read. thanks

HtV · 2006-11-22, 09:24 PM

If you want the best quality you need Exact Audio Copy: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

drewkaree · 2006-11-22, 09:27 PM

petesgalaxy Wrote:what are most people using to rip mp3's and getting album art and song title's. I've tried cdex, and cddb, but doesnt seem to get album art, or gbpvr wont read. thanks

Let me make sure I understand what you're asking.

You wish to take your CD's and rip them to the hard drive, tag them properly (or at least as properly as most tag databases have them listed), obtain album art for them, and have them show up within GBPVR.

Is that correct? I'm asking for specificity because I'm not sure if you're asking for a plug-in for GBPVR, or why you would have a problem with GBPVR reading the CD's you've already ripped.

GBPVR can only "see" what you point it to as the directory for your music, so the issue with them not showing up sounds as if it's a simple configuration issue.

As for the rest, I'm not certain what will do all those jobs within one program. For myself, I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip my CD's. It has tagging support built in via freedb, but I'd NEVER trust a database to do this automagically. Someone else may have submitted the tagging info in THEIR format, which may be useless for you (syntax, capitalization, file name, etc), or there are instances of several different albums of the same name - depending on where they were released, or perhaps newer pressings include, exclude, or simply have a different song in them.

For obtaining album art, I use this:

http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/

For tagging after the fact, I'd recommend Tag & Rename.

Lastly, Jriver media center will do some of these things also, I just haven't dealt with it enough to know if it'll do ALL of the things you're asking.

Hope that helps, as I'm not entirely certain as to specifics Smile

petesgalaxy · 2006-11-22, 09:43 PM

thanks drewkaree, you got it absolutly right, i can already rip cd's(cdex, i will however try EAC) i would just like gbpvr to display album art, I am using the musiclibrary2 plugin, thus the posting in this forum. everything else seems to be working great. Man, I love this GBPVR.

psycik · 2006-11-22, 10:12 PM

I used to use cdev for ripping, and now use winamp pro.

Album art is kind of manual..see the wiki for the accepted file names.....but I also have downloading of art from Amazon in ml2 and that will save the art if it finds it (works best on albums).

And I agree with drewkaree, I use the freedb stuff as well, but then normally retag it after ripping - if it's one album I retag in Winamp. Normally to sort out the genres (I don't like lots and only tend to use about 6 - 8 genres).

tkgafs · 2006-11-22, 11:12 PM

For ripping nothing can beat Exact Audio Copy

for tagging I tend to use either Eags On! or Media Monkey both are very good

for artwork I either use amazon manually or use "The Godfather" which could also do all the tagging if I could work out how to do it !!

Tkgafs

drewkaree · 2006-11-23, 12:18 AM

petesgalaxy Wrote:i will however try EAC

Here's a writeup to walk you through it and explain what it does. Needs some updating, but there should be some links in there to get you up and running. It's not built for speed like CDEX is, it's built for accuracy.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=19496.0

Dunno if you have it installed, but something that came to mind is that when I used to use MusicMatch Jukebox, it'd find album art, although it was very hit or miss too.

soccerdad · 2006-11-23, 01:39 AM

Since my job here is to ask dumb questions, what is wrong with ripping using Windows Media Player? It seems to work OK and is already integrated. I am NOT an audiophile and I just started doing the ripping since my wife just got our family's first MP3 player. Does EAC have the features to sync to a MP3 player?

psycik · 2006-11-23, 01:42 AM

Personally I didn't like using wma format - and I've always preferred winamp as a player....

There's nothing really wrong with it, but some portable players don't like wma, and I have a sneaking suspicion that WMP to MP3 is only at 96k???

soccerdad · 2006-11-23, 02:26 AM

psycik Wrote:There's nothing really wrong with it, but some portable players don't like wma, and I have a sneaking suspicion that WMP to MP3 is only at 96k???

So 96K would be a low "resolution"? What should it be? I have fairly cheap sound system so I don't know what to expect. So far it sounds OK to me and I guess that is all that counts. I would like to learn more about it though.