Ripping problem with Windows Media Player 11

[singjai]

XP Pro. WMP 11.

Here is the problem. When ripping a CD toward the end there will be stretch of a few minutes of stuttering, silences, raspiness. This can be fixed by re-ripping the affected tracks. The re-ripped tracks always come out okay, but this seems less than ideal. This problem occurs on both my desktop and laptop. Is there a setting I don't know about that would solve the problem? Thanks.

[Baldrick]

I guess you don't wont to use another cd ripper like eac?

[singjai]

I've looked at several other tools, but did not know about EAC. It sounds like what I'm looking for. Users seem to recommend Lame for encoding to mp3--do you concur? Thanks.

[jman98]

WMP is terrible. For EVERYTHING. Honestly, I really wonder if it would even be possible to make it worse or if it currently is so bad that it has reached the pinnacle of badness. Learning to do ripping and playing music and videos with any other tool will make your life better. VLC is good for playing music and videos and it's free. EAC, as suggested, is a very good ripping tool. Yes, Lame is very good for MP3 encoding.

[t0nee1]

Sarcasm on: WMP is so terrible, I'd even give iTunes a spin.
Sarcasm off:

[singjai]

I rarely rip CDs, so I've never installed dedicated ripping software. I was shocked that WMP did not offer any options to set the speed of the rip. Intuitively one would expect a slower rip to be a more accurate one, and that one should have a choice of ripping speeds, but that is not the case with WMP.

I do have another question if you've a little patience. I've just used EAC to rip a CD and Lame-Front End to encode to .mp3 and at the same bit rate used by WMP I'd swear the resulting files sound a bit better than what WMP produced. There seems to be a way to use LAME from within EAC, but I'm not sure how EAC>Compression Options should be configured. At this point the CMP button on the left of the console produces smaller .wav files. Help a fella out?

[t0nee1]

You need to follow this EAC and Lame configuration guide, for ripping CD to Lame MP3..
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_Lame

[magillagorilla]

WMP murders video. Video playback in WMP is soft and inaccurate. I guess a lot of people like this or don't notice. VLC is my player of choice. It's very true to the source.

If all you're doing is playing MP3s, WMP is fine. But if you install VLC let it handle all your media.

[singjai]

Thanks. Since I can apparently also configure tags I'd better figure out how to do so.

I use VLC to play video captures, but pretty much never listen to audio on my PC. If I want something to listen to I'll play a video in the background. My PS3 has become my DVD/Blu-Ray player.

[jman98]

singjai - You do understand that MP3 is a LOSSY audio codec, right? That means that once you convert a file to MP3, some of the audio is lost forever. Now if you use a high enough bit rate I'm certainly willing to agree that almost nobody could tell the difference between an MP3 file and the original. But it seems kind of pointless to me to get all fussy about the "accuracy" of the ripping process when you're converting to a lossy codec. Exactly how "inaccurate" do you really think a rip can get? It's not like you're ripping Beethoven's 9th Symphony and end up with some song by Kanye West instead.

magillagorilla - Microsoft gets a lot of people to use their products simply because they come with Windows. My dad is a pretty savvy user for a non-IT guy and he is pretty good at determining if something is fishy and he takes security on his PC very seriously. Yet I cannot get him to give up IT. My brother's family is much more lax about PC security but they're quite open to Firefox, Chrome and free programs like Open Office.

[singjai]

Gee, thanks jman98. I really appreciate your condescending tone... and did you actually read what I wrote? Those original rips using WMP11 were ...broken. There were silences, stutters and more. But I wrote that already, in my very first post to this thread. That was the issue. You're very nearly going OT on me.

And in general guys. While I thank you for the actual information some of you have given me I don't appreciate the snarking. That's not constructive.