Decent OS X audio rip software

[Steve Mynott]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 09:26:50PM +0100, Paul Makepeace typed:

> Max seems interesting - it uses cdparanoia and a couple of other
> rippers. It's pretty complex, and encoding to AAC is not obvious: you
> need to select MPEG 4 Audio rather than AAC (ADTS). And then you have
> to take a guess at what Quality: Low/.../Maximum means. Yes, it's a
> separate option from bitrate, and VBR...
> 
> Annoyingly, Max doesn't seem to use Gracenote* out of the box, nor
> does it auto-complete based on existing titles (like iTunes) so
> ripping these uncommon CDs is going to be painful :-/

Max is an excellent piece of software with good support for
many external programs although not that easy to setup.  However
most of the free CD databases don't seem as good as the one Apple
uses.  There is a minimal OS X audio player with FLAC support from the
same people.

Most of the autophiles on hydrogenaudio etc. prefer a recent Lame
with a high quality setting V0 or whatever to itunes encoding. 
Also the AAC is the low complexity one in itunes.

I use the itunes-lame plugin for itunes which means I can encode using
Lame and use the itunes Apple CD database and cover art support.

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve at gruntling.com>