Best quality CD ripper?

[Jammrock]

CDDB's are not equal. The CDDB used for AudioGrabber is practically flawless. If they think there is more than one possible match it will give you a list and let you pick the correct one.

PlayCenter and WinAmp may have used the same/similar CODEC, but Playcenter 2 doesn't. The CODEC they use is really crisp and gives the music nice tone. I've really enjoyed it so far. The only problem is that it's bulky and slow like WMP7.

Jammrock

[Wombat]

When it comes to CDDB, you're best bet is freedb.freedb.org. The company that has the cddb domain is a bunch of ***holes, and reserve all these "rights", and look like they're getting ready to try to charge people for access.

[Indiana]

Fraunhofer's encoder is widely known as being the best one. The second best with similar quality seems to be LAME, the XING is said to be one of the worst.

The LAME folks are doing some kind of "acoustic reverse engineering" to make their encoder better: they're examining the mp3's created with the fraunhoffer codec for various sound files and then tune the Lame codec to give the same results, no wonder they're quite similar in quality...

I would stay away from Joint-Stereo: This IMHO is only usefull for low-bitrate encoding, max. up to 128KBps, while exploiting the given bitrate a bit better it decreases stereo-width and tends to trash the trebles.
BTW, none of the encoders I've tried so far creates mp3's where I can't hear the artifacts (esp. the aliasing) at 128KBps, at 160KBps (without joint-stereo) most songs are nearly artifact-free, some even require 192KBps (try to encode "Voyage, Voyage" from Desireless, I found this track to be very problematic).

As a general setting I use 160KBps stereo.

BTW, I believe DivX ;-) contains the "professional"-version of the Fraunhofer mp3-codec, not the crippled one that M$ ships.

[Greebe]

I would stay away from Joint-Stereo

Is that like doobie encoding? Dual doobie?
Cause if it is PASS IT THIS WAY!