Exact Audio Copy. Open source and guaranteed perfect copy. Most fast ones would have single bit errors.
Same. EAC + LAME using config guides from NMP3s at the SomethingAwful forums, and then later Oink.
what.cd represent! This is the gold standard and if anyone is coming here for advice an what to use themselves, this is it.
EAC is closed source freeware. Still the best tool back then under Windows
Still is, right? (Open for recommendations)
I don’t know, haven’t been using Windows since a long time ago, but given the fact that ripping CDs isn’t that common nowadays I’d be surprised if a new tool came out that is better than EAC.
CDex
I couldn’t remember but knew someone would post the name.
never used it to rip discs, but it was the very first windows program i used for recording analog inputs to convert tapes and records to digital.
I’ve got a white whale album. I routinely bought CDs from a secondhand store and found some half-decent techno labeled Amixiam - Dream Frequencies. Quite possibly just some guy’s personal work, packaged with a modicum of professionalism. No internet search has ever turned up a damn thing, and I no longer live on the same continent as that thrift shop.
But then - a few years ago - I was going through old CDs, ripping them anew for modern codecs and decent bitrates. CDex filled in the track names automatically. A database recognized the disc! Someone out there had this information! And seconds later I realize that someone was me, sending the data to CDDB automatically, when I had ripped it the first time. I played a fifteen-year brick joke on myself.
That’s awesome. I used to manually enter all the info myself too whenever it wouldn’t come up, back in the day
That’s the one. It would pull data from online so you wouldn’t have to enter all the track names.
Nero(n) burning ROM(e)
Later K3B.
Same
Oh my god, how could I not have seen that. Now the icon makes sense too.
I had this kind of revelation like 2days ago when I woke up to go to the toilet, drink some water and sleep again. I don’t even know exactly why this thought came to me, it was a big discovery. Wanted to make a showerthought or til post, but never made. What a cool fun fact.
(Also it’s even more amazing the fact that someone made a post about cd rippers here (on an already obscure platform) and both you and I read this post. Wow.)
Edit: I recently found K3B as I’m in the process of moving to NixOS from win10. Seems like a good program.
Alcohol 120%
Nice, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time!
Didn’t Nero have this on-the-fly (as if flies could burn anything) copying or am I confusing DVD and audio here?
Yes, I remember this. But if the dvd wasn’t closed properly it would have read issues on other computers.
Fooobar2000
Still have so many flac files from that.
Foob is the best audio player/tagger/ripper/converter ever
Something about a Sheep? I don’t remember its name. Just the logo was supposed to be Dolly the Sheep (the one that was cloned).
Elby CloneCD… And how am I just realizing that’s why they used a sheep… Doh
Did they change the name eventually or was their some kind of fork of CloneCD? Because I do remember CloneCD but I also remember using another piece of software later on that was literally exactly the same with just 1 or 2 more features, but had a totally different name and used the same logo but in a different color. Could have been the DVD version, maybe… It’s been so long. 🤔
Elby (still) have a few products, with similar names and logos. I still use Virtual Clone drive sometimes to mount BIN/CUE.
Maybe CloneDVD?
Ah. I think I was thinking of the Elby name.
Windows Media Player did the job for me.
Same until I got an MP3 player and it didn’t know what the fuck a .wma file was. Had to re-rip them to a proper format.
Same. I was a kid. I would get CDs from the library and fill my crappy MP3 player from the files extracted from WMP. My CD collection was mostly burned library CDs. Before my parents got a PC that could burn, I would go to the neighbor’s house and get their dad to do it for me. Simpler times.
You’re going to hate me, I used iTunes for ripping back in the windows XP days. It was the first program I met that would recognize titles and get album art. I used iTunes to manage my collection as well.
I don’t know if I ever used iTunes to rip music but I did buy an iPod in 2005 so I used iTunes for that for a while. I ran into a bug with it though where it would fuck up the song database on my iPod and half the songs showed up on the iPod as unknown, everything was fine in iTunes. Found out pretty quickly after I discovered that that Winamp could handle loading music into an iPod and never had the problem again.
I still do. My iPod classic is still going strong. I use it every day
I miss my iPod so much
I tried turning it into a hard drive and messed up the partitions
It still in a box at my parents house I should pay it a visit
There’s a good mod for it now that replaces the hard drive with an adapter for two SD cards, and it would let you put a shit ton of storage on it. If you’ve got some spare cash and patience I’d definitely recommend it.
Same. Still have a bunch of ALAC files from taking my MacBook to the library.
Lol I’d hit the library on my way home in high school, get a bunch of CDs rip, return the next day and leave with a new batch… The antitheft sticker made the discs unbalanced, so I ended up RMAing my drive three times in 4 months, before the store just gave me my money back and canceled the sale.
At the time ripping library CDs was legal, so I got like 25 albums each week, 4 weeks a months and 4 months total, so about 400 albums, legally (but ethically? No) for free.
I think I just used the ripper in MusicMatch Jukebox that came with my computer. It was only the “shareware” version, so I was limited to 96 kbps.
I still have many of those in my collection. When I throw on the actual CD or hear it in a higher/lossless format, they sound “wrong” because I’m still so used to the crappy 96kbps rips I had with me on my MP3 player for years.
On the plus side, those smaller files let me fit several more songs onto my 64 MB MP3 player from 2001 or so (it used a parallel port to transfer lol)
Winamp
Every time I think back I picture Winamp. And sure enough I looked it up and Winamp could rip tracks and the UI is exactly what I remember
So: Winamp
CloneCD
KAudio…something. It was a KDE tool that could rip and encode in parallel.
Audiograbber with the LAME codec. Actually still have it on my computer. I still buy the random CD now and again and rip it to my media server, and then never touch it again.
