After Shakeel re-ripped his music library I’ve started to do the same, brought about by a lack of quality TV at the moment and anticipating some games playing over the next few days. On Windows good quality ripping tools are abundant with EAC almost universally recommended. On the Mac though there seems to be a bit of a dearth when it comes to ripping. Max is often mentioned but I found it a bit buggy so I’ve ended up using iTunes-LAME from Blacktree.
The latest version makes use of Lame 3.97 although the latest latest version available on the Blacktree site was a bit flaky with tags. I have used iTunes-LAME-2.0.9-34.zip without issue so far and I’ve ripped around 30 cd’s today. As for quality settings I’ve went for something a bit beefier than 192kpbs which was my old default. For iTunes-Lame I’m using the following setting:
-V 0 –vbr-new
Visit the Lame Wiki for more info on the numerous command line settings for Lame. What’s nice is that once the ripping is done the tracks are automatically added to iTunes. What’s not so nice is that I’m re-ripping some cd’s so I will lose ratings, play counts, last played details etc…or so I thought. A quick trip to Doug’s AppleScripts and I found a script that would copy my precious meta data to the new rips. Bliss.
Pity I can’t find a script that will rip the other 150 cd’s.