Best free program to make my CD music into mp3's on my comp?

fadingathedges

Title says it all. I've got something or other but it was taking hours for a song, and I'm sure I can do better. There is so much stuff out there though, what is best?

Thanks PA!

finalflight89

Oh man, there's a million of them! The highest quality one you can find is Exact Audio Copy, but it's not the most intuitive.

fadingathedges

Thanks I'll look into this one.
What should I expect for time to convert a single average CD? Is there a way to move the file over first then convert, or would that not be any faster?

Zxerol

Negative, because it's not possible to simply "move" the music over like you're probably thinking. CD audio (the so-called Redbook standard) is a a different disc format from the ones used to store readable computer data. Operating systems often display CD audio tracks as "files" (Windows shows their indices as .cda files) as a matter of convenience, but the audio itself don't actually exist as such, and you can't just drag and drop them over.

That's what a ripper like the aforementioned EAC does in addition to compressing them into MP3, OGG, or whatever other format. They're two disparate operations (ripping and compressing).

As for time, it really depends on your machine. These days, CPU speeds have far outpaced drive speeds (which haven't changed in years), so you'll spend more time waiting for the thing to read off the disc than converting. Maybe like 6-8 minutes a disc I think, but it's been a damned long time since I last ripped an actual CD.

matt has a problem

Try Audiograbber. Just choose the quality you want and set it to export to mp3, and hit grab.

Daemonion

I think it is still free ...

dbpoweramp is my favorite. It has multi-threading support, so an intel quad-core with hyperthreading will encode eight songs at a time.

It is also super easy to download and install codecs for whatever you want, and has convert options built into the right-click menu.