Fastest way to rip audio CDs

[gatorparrots]

If you think iTunes is the best way to rip an audio CD at full fidelity, think again. While iTunes is a great all around audio library management tool, it is very ineffecient when it comes to actually ripping audio discs to AIFF files. (It is Altivec optimized so it makes for quite a workout for your G4 computer--making almost full use of the processor. When ripping with it in the past, I have noticed that my CPU usage on both CPUs goes upwards of 75%-100% and occasionally I have had kernel panics as a result).

The fastest way to rip an audio CD (as fast as your CD-ROM can read and your hard disks can write and uses far less CPU horsepower than iTunes) is to use Disk Copy; also, the resulting CD-quality AIFF files are on a handy DMG for later use.

Here are the steps to rip with Disk Copy:

• 
  1). Launch Disk Copy.
  2). Insert your Audio CD.
  3). Drag the Audio CD icon that appears on the desktop to the Disk Copy window.
  4). It will ask you a name and place to save the converted image (a good name would be the album title and ~/Desktop is a convenient location, unless you have a predefined music library location). Choose read only or compressed, depending on whether read back speed or file size is of paramount importance to you.
  5). Click Save.
  6). Authenticate. It will create 'NAMEOFCD.dmg.sparseimage' on your desktop, then unmount it and convert the format from sparseimage to whichver format you specified above (read only or compressed), resulting in 'NAMEOFCD.dmg.'.
  7). Double-click the new .dmg file to mount it.
  8). Add the files contained on your drive image to an iTunes playlist and you're ready to play them back or burn a backup copy, etc.

The best part about this technique is that your discs will now live on virtual drive images (which can be compressed to save space). iTunes will automatically mount the appropriate drive image when you choose to play the playlist containing songs from that drive image. When you are done with it, simply select it and type CMD+E or drag the volume icon to the trash to eject it.

 

[shatfield1529]

Reading this post, I also found another neato use for this method; say you had a bunch of CD's you needed to convert to MP3, but you didn't want to sit in front of the computer and switch CD's every few minutes.

If you had enough HD space, you could just make images of the audio CD's, and then in iTunes (or other converter of your choice) just convert all of the tracks to MP3 (you should be able to mount all of them at the same time into iTunes).

This is just coming off the top of my head, and I don't have much time to try it out, but it should work. If someone could try it out and post the results (or lack thereof), I'd be grateful.

 

[gatorparrots]

Yes, that's exactly right. You can convert Audio CDs to .dmg files containing full audio resolution AIFFs. Then, convert the tracks to MP3 using iTunes, Sound Jam, or QuickTime Pro. You would accomplish the task more quickly and use less CPU power doing so (enabling you to work while it gets processed in the background).