Forgive me if this has been covered here already, but what is the consensus on ripping CD's in terms of audio quality? I'd like to rip all of my CDs to my computer. My AVR (Denon 2112) supports playback from network folders or I could load everything into an iPod/iPad and use Airplay.
Suggestions?
A lot of people on here use Exact Audio Copy with great success. My format of choice these days is FLAC since it works with the devices I need it to and it's lossless. I personally use Easy CD-DA Extractor, which I've found to be the most feature-rich and intuitive of the software I've tried, but it isn't free. I know at least one person uses dBpoweramp. I've used it to convert my audio files before, and it was worth the price of admission for that, though now Easy CD-DA Extractor supports multiple cores as well, so the gap may have been closed for speed.
Everyone has their own way of organizing their folders and files. I'm still figuring my method out. I tend to have artist folders with all of the tracks for that artist in that folder. The filenames contain artist, album, track #, and title. I find having all of this information in the filename helps from time to time on certain devices.
I'm not all that familiar with how Apple's system works, but it seems like a lot of people are happy with letting iTunes take care of everything. I'll let the iTunes experts give their advice.
I have also had good luck and rips using Winamp.
This is a job that you only want to do once, so I suggest that you use EAC, dBpoweramp or something that supports AccuRip, then extract to a lossless format such as FLAC. dBpoweramp is nice as it will compress to two formats, say FLAC for home and MP3 for portable, but conversion to a lossy format from a lossless one can be done after the fact.
Spend a little time ripping a few CDs and try them on your various platforms to make sure that the file names, ID3 tags and album art work as you expect them to. Once that is all settled then rip away, but keep testing as you are bound to find something you wish you had done differently. I'd suggest mp3tag and metamorphose2 to change ID3 tags and filenames respectively after they've been ripped.
Ensure you get accurate rips to a lossless format and you'll have no regrets.
I don't know how different it is, but Easy CD-DA Extractor uses AccurateCDDA, and so far I have faith in it. While it doesn't have the option to rip to two simultaneous formats at once, it's pretty easy to convert after the fact. The metadata editor also seems adequately deep and easy to use. Renaming files using the metadata is also quite painless. I know, I pimp Easy CD-DA Extractor a lot. I've just been very happy with how it helps me wrangle my digital music.