Best Programs for Ripping CDs, Tagging and Normalizing Volume???

[Javery]

I'm about to try and organize my entire music collection on one harddrive. I have about 1,000 CDs and god knows how many mp3s (in 3 different places). What is the best way to go about doing something like this?

I want all of the mp3s to be tagged properly with at least artist, album and covers and I want to normalize the volume levels across everything so when I hit shuffle I'm not constantly adjusting the volume.

What do you guys do?

 

[rynomite]

www.mediamonkey.com

 

[lmz00]

iTunes?

 

[hiccupleftovers]

Itunes sucks for ripping. The best program for ripping and all that stuff is EAC or Exact Audio Copy. CDex isn't bad either for most people who juts want to casually rip stuff. Just set it up right, and you can't go wrong.

 

[Strell]

I use AudioGrabber. It's fast, connects out to a database to get correct tags, lets you set normalizing values, and then rips it to all sorts of formats. Drop in the LAME codec and you can get amazing MP3 files out of it. It's free and small and gets the job done quickly.

Four step process: Set up options (normalizing, VBR vs CBR, how you want files named/folder'd, etc), drop in CD, database, burn. So really a three step process since it remembers what you did after you set the options.

As far as naming existing MP3s with correct tags, that's another story.

For the record, I don't know how Audiograbber stacks up against other programs. I just ran across it years ago and it works amazingly well.

 

[siderealshift]

[quote name='hiccupleftovers']Itunes sucks for ripping. The best program for ripping and all that stuff is EAC or Exact Audio Copy.[/quote]


Yes. EAC takes a little work to set up, but it's worth it. I used Mediamonkey for a little while, and it's alright as a database program, but I still like EAC better for ripping.

I use MP3Gain to "album normalize" all of my MP3 albums so that the levels used in the original record aren't completely discarded. It works reasonably well.