How do different ripping programs compare?
Well I did some comparisons using Musicmatch Jukebox (which is what I used to use), CDEX and Exact Audio Copy a while back. Basically they all worked fine… but this was on a Pentium II 450 with a good drive and clean CDs. I ripped to WAV files, and then did digital compares, and the files were all identical, except for a few bytes at the start and end added on by some rips. I used to recommend CDEX over Musicmatch because: 1) It was free. (But so is Musicmatch now, almost – the free version encodes at all bitrates, and burns audio CDs…) 2) It came with the Blade and LAME encoders, both of which I prefered to the Xing encoder which Musicmatch used. CDex also comes with an MP2 encoder. (But Musicmatch now uses a version of the Fraunhofer encoder, which performs pretty comparably to the LAME encoder, and is actually faster…) You might as well download both programs, and see which you like best. CDex has a simpler interface, and is maybe a bit slower. Musicmatch is fast, and fairly f
