Is EAC/LAME still the best mp3 ripper?

[Spook01]

I need a way to rip my cds into high quality mp3s so i was wondering if EAC is still the best way to go. Ive heard alot about .ogg at 92 sounds identical to the cds too, but its not a mp3 format.

[crazyray]

I'm still using EAC and LAME. OGG is acceptable to most as well. Many are moving to other formats as hard drive space becomes less costly. But I use MP3 for background music through the stereo and as a source of portable tunes through my Nomad Jukebox. Because I am hard to please, I make VBR's using the EAC/LAME setup as recommended by Chris Myden:

http://elitedae.cjb.net/

I have chosen to use --alt-preset extreme instead of --alt-preset standard. Either is very good. Myden's configuration files work well if you follow his directions carefully. Ripping and compressing MP3's this way is slower than many programs because it uses secure mode ripping as well as vbr, but it is worth it to me.

[JohnE.]

Compression formats aside, Exact Audio Copy is still the best CD ripper available. It's certainly not the most elegant or user friendly but the fact that it's still the only CD ripper that can perform Read and Write Offset Correction when ripping/writing puts it at the head of the class for that function alone.

Uncorrected Read Offset is the cause of the pops, clicks and gaps you sometimes hear in MP3's of live albums and studio albums where tracks overlap. All other rippers are "close enough for rock and roll" while "Exact Audio Copy" is appropriately titled.

Add to that "Secure" ripping, the ability to "Test and Copy" (perform CRC checking) when ripping separate tracks, drive cache disabling, advanced error correction, cue sheet burning, etc... makes you wonder why anyone would use anything else.

Man JohnE., that's exactly what I was going to say. That and all I've ever used is EAC/LAME.

[Spook01]

Im using EAC with LAME 3.9 right now. A dos window pops up to i presume encode the wav file into a mp3. Is it suppose to make 2 system beeps when that dos window closes? I say system beep cause the beeps are coming from the tower.. not my speakers.

You can enable/disable most of that stuff through EAC's options.

'Beep after extraction finished'
'Do not open external compression window'