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How to get the album art of mp3 file?

Ripping the CD collection to MP3, the lazy way?

  • What's the best way for me to rip all my CDs to mp3 and ensure that the files get named the way I want, and everything is tagged the way I want? Ok, so here's my basic problem: 1) I have about 200 CDs that I want to rip to MP3 2) My already extensive mp3 collection is organized in the file format - \ - .mp3 3) I want to rip my CDs to mp3 using the same naming format. 4) I want my resultant mp3s to have proper tag information (all track info including album cover art) 5) I want to be able to do the ripping in one step (ie put in the disc, click "rip" [or even better have the software do it automatically] and the cd ejects when complete) My understanding from http://ask.metafilter.com/124302/Software-for-copying-CDs-to-computer is that EAC is the best quality cd ripper, but I have a few issues with that: 1) It seems VERY slow, considering I'm only ripping to 192 kbps vbr mp3s. 2-3 minutes per track is definitely not ideal. The time seems to be taken in ripping to wave first, as lame seems to encode to mp3 from wav in about 10-15 seconds. 2) It doesn't seem to have the capability to get album art, that I can find Now, I understand that I can use other apps to fetch album art, but I'd ideally like to avoid that if at all possible. Any suggestions?

  • Answer:

    I couldn't tell you how to automate the process, but if you have any badly scratched CDs... don't give up on encoding them until you've tried running them through a ripper that uses cdparanoia. It's not fast, but it's saved several of my most abused discs from the trash heap.

antifuse at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Nthing the suggestion to rip to FLAC in case you ever upgrade your kit or want to make subsequent copies in future. Lossless formats like FLAC are completely bit-perfect, but once you make an MP3 you can never get the lost data back and any further transcoding will cause irreversible deterioration in sound quality. Also whilst iTunes can rip to MP3, it's encoder sounds horrible compared to LAME at the same (any) bit rate. Ripping 200 CDs is time consuming, disk space is cheap. Do it once, do it right - choose FLAC.

dirm

Thirding that you might as well rip to .flac if you're going to go to the trouble. It's very easy to batch convert to .mp3 after you're done.

sockpup

I'm using MediaMonkey, which as far as I can tell is the gold standard for managing music libraries in Windows. I haven't run into the album art problem. It always adds that when I download the tags from Amazon. Try mucking about with the options. MediaMonkey will also do .flac, which is totally worth looking into.

valkyryn

MediaMonkey will also do .flac, which is totally worth looking into. Yeah, if you're going through the trouble of ripping your entire CD collection why not do it right and encode to flac as well as mp3.

Ok, well I'm not too concerned about ripping bit-perfect results to FLAC... These CDs have been sitting unlistened-to in a box for the last, oh, 5 years at least. And to be honest with you, my hearing isn't good enough that I can tell the difference between perfect cd quality and 192 kbps vbr. So let's ignore the "preserving my music perfectly for perpetuity" aspects of ripping. I've given up on finding something that can do what I want all in one step, and decided to just stick with MediaMonkey. It rips the cds quickly, the sound quality seems pretty solid (MediaMonkey actually uses Lame to encode to mp3 as well), and gets them into the file naming format that I want. Having to do the extra step of grabbing the album art/missing track info from Amazon isn't really that huge of a deal, I can do it when I set MediaMonkey going on the next CD.

antifuse

Oh, and I'm on Windows. So far my frontrunner app is MediaMonkey... It seems to rip at reasonable quality, and it gets the file naming convention right... The only thing is, to get album art into the tags I have to do it in a separate step.

antifuse

If you're interested in secure ripping, this http://ask.metafilter.com/150896/Whats-the-best-way-to-preserve-my-music has more information on how to create a long-term archive and work around EAC's slowness. I think http://www.dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper.htm does what you want (not sure since I do not use it) but you have to purchase it - http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc-power-register.htm for a lifetime license to the ripping software, but only a 1 year license to the metadata database access (needed for adding tags and album art automatically), which needs to be renewed each year for $5. You can try it for free for 21 days.

Bangaioh

I still use CDex, even though I gather it's something of a dinosaur to modern kids these days [shakes cane]. It trades user friendliness and a pretty front end for the ability to let you customize a million different things, including the naming convention, file paths, etc.

ErikaB

EAC will give the best results, uses LAME and can use any naming scheme you want. If you want quicker rips, use burst mode or CDex.

turkeyphant

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