How to Rip CDs at the Highest Possible Bitrate: A Guide for People with Good Headphones

Ripping a CD is really quite a simple task. Pop the CD in the drive, and up comes Windows Media Player. Select the "rip" tab, search online for album information, and push the button. Five minutes later, you're done. However, there are complications. There is the organization problem, familiar to anyone with even a moderate amount of music, and the format issue, familiar to anyone who has used Windows Media Player to rip their CDs into wma's only to discover they were incompatible with their iPods. There is also the quality question. For most people, 128 kbps is a fine bitrate, and anything higher is nothing more than a waste of space. For most people, this is just fine. Why waste space on your mp3 player for an improvement you can't even hear? Doesn't make sense. The only problem comes when you eat the fruit of the tree of nice audio.

At some point, the day will come when your friend says, "Hey, check out my nice new headphones!" Or perhaps instead they will invite you in to watch a movie on their nifty new surround-sound equipped home theater. Either way, it's all over from there. Your trusty old headphones will suddenly sound like crap to you, and will leave you feeling unfulfilled. You will embark on the search for a pair of Good Headphones. You will find these, and then your problems will have just begun. You will suddenly discover that all music residing on your iPod just sounds sort of flat. You have hit the bitrate problem.

The solution to the bitrate problem, of course, will be to re-rip all your CDs at a higher bitrate. However, this time, don't just bump up the little slider on Windows Media Player. Do it right.

Exact Audio Copy is, in my experience, the best CD ripper available. It is free, and relies on the Lame codec in order to be able to create mp3 files. Find it here. Unzip it someplace you'll remember, and configure Exact Audio Copy to use it. You'll have to give it the exact path.

An article at wired.com has a useful tip on how to take the sound quality up one notch further. Pull down the file menu, choose "Compression Options" and, in the empty box, paste the following:
-V 0 --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --tt "%t" --ta "%a" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tg "%m" %s %d
Using these settings, rip your CDs. Using a tagging utility, (the Wired article recommends MP3 Tag Studio) label all your mp3s accurately and consistently, and in a manner which lends itself to actually finding what you are looking for. Classical music listners will have particular trouble with this, because the "Artist," "Album," and "Song" boxes leave no option for composer, ensemble, or conductor. Come up with some system and stick to it. I personally put the composer in the "Artist" box, and then incorporate the ensemble and conductor into the track title.

It would be wise to rip each album into its own folder, and tag it before going on to the next. This way, you avoid any possible confusion. Later, you can organize your music library as you see fit. A good bet would be to use a utility that can respect the fact that your albums are each in their own folders, find them anyway, and synchronize them with your mp3 player automatically.

Done! Maybe it would have been easier to use Windows Media Player after all...

Sources:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-CD-Rippers-Encoders/LAME-MP3-Encoder.shtml

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2005/12/69139