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10.16.2007

Best way to rip music from Music CD

My idea of the best rip of music need to satisfy the following criteria:

- Preserve the most musical quality
- Capture and store track information (usually by retrieving data from Internet) based on the Music CD signature.
- Obtain as much add on information on the track itself, such as Lyrics, album art and so on.

Before I explain my solution, let me tell you some schemes which I used and did NOT work as good as I would like to:

- Using ITune to rip Music CD
At first I thought this was the best and most convenient way, but turns out this is probably the worst because:
- ITune's MP3 encode isn't up to par comparing with other encoding scheme, like LAME.
- ITune's album, which can be automatically retrieve from Apple site, are not stored in the file itself, but instead stores in ITune's own database. This is bad as you won't get to see the album art when playing the song in other player.

So instead, I use the following scheme:
- Use Mediamonkey to rip the musicCD. Before ripping, make sure that the album info has been retrieved. Otherwise the filename and directory will be blank. And remember to use FLAC format instead of MP3.
- After the ripping was completed, click "retrieve IDTag from Amazon" in order to get the album art. The album art will be stored in the same directory as the music file.
- Use MediaCoder to convert FLAC to MP3 if needed. When encoding, use LAME codec if possible.

This scheme still has some weakness:
- The album art provided by Amazon isn't as good as those from iTune (Apple)
- I Haven't found a service that can automatically store Lyrics in the ID3 tag of FLAC file. I was also told that the converting from FLAC to MP3 will loss Lyrics.

My solution is keeping two set of files, one in FLAC format and one set in MP3 format. And then use MP3 as the file for storing lyrics, as I use MP3 file more often.

By the way I tried quite a few of music played software. So far I haven't found one that does everything right.

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