A New and very good AccurateRip software on Mac: RIP

[leping]

It is quit odd that a good free Mac-only AccurateRip software, now on Beta 1.0 with some minor bugs, but already works very well, caught very little attention in the community. Its creator maybe partially responsible to this, as I pointed out in a "bug" entry, that the name, "RIP", is way too general and therefore deeply buried now in search engine results.

 

http://sbooth.org/Rip/

 

I have maintained a PC just for the purpose of running EAC for AccurateRip. Now I do not touch it anymore, since to me RIP is actually better:

 

1. RIP has the choice of use multiple music tag databases (currently three: FreeDB, MusicBrainz, and CDDB/Gracenote), can set a default while manually check and use the others. Mostly dealing with classical music, to me MusicBrainz tags are the best if available, followed by FreeDB (sick and tired by CDDB now owed by Sony: "In Gm op50 no3 - 01 Allegro Non Troppo" which should has been "in G Minor Op. 50 No. 3: I. Allegro non troppo"!!!).

 

2. Just as EAC it has the freedom on C2 errors, number of section re-read, etc. and automatically "test and copy" if the disc is not on AccurateRip database (not clear if it also submits to though).

 

3. At least on my Mac Pro with my old Memorex 52x reader, it runs about 2-3 times faster than EAC on PC with the same reader.

 

4. It allows user to input Album Artist and CD Title: some bug there for now but I am sure will work well in the near future.

 

5. The ability to find and insert Cover Art into ripped files, if the format support tagging (not WAV of course).

 

6. Support currently WAVE, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, and wavePack.

 

I have no relation to the maker but just an excited and satisfied user.

 

BTW, I am a kind of person who researches into paranormal, and believe in tubes and LPs. However, I have to say on my quite high-end system with my Squeezebox set up properly (feeding to a good DAC) the Apple Lossless (ALAC) sounds exactly as my WAVs, no better but certainly no loss. I also conducted tests of WAV to ALAC to WAV round trip, after bit-level comparison there is no differences, just as now in many reports.

 

I think this site has a bias to EAC/PC and FLAC. If you try out RIP and do fair listening you will find ALAC is the real great choice and you do not need to leave your Mac just for ripping.

 

Thanks,