Suppose you are going to build a collection of music on a hard drive. Obviously you have bought your music legally on CD, so you will have to rip the music to the format you want.
iTunes
If you have installed iTunes (either on PC or Mac) and you enter a CD, usually iTunes will then start up automatically and read the content of the CD. After showing the content of the CD, it will suggest you import the CD and write it to your hard drive. By default, iTunes will rip to MP3 format. This can be changes by going to Preferences – General – Import Settings. If you want to rip losslessly (without losing quality), select ALAC (Apple’s proprietary lossless format).
Advantages iTunes:
- In my opinion not up to Apple standards, but nevertheless well designed and updated frequently
- Many users already have iTunes installed to manage their music collection
- When inserting a CD, iTunes will recognise the CD most of the times
Disadvantages iTunes:
- ALAC is an Apple format that is not supported by many other media players than iTunes. In many cases you would have to install a separate ALAC plugin to get it working; claims are that these plugins are not always very stable. Alternative is to rip to ALAC first, and then transcode to a different format using other tools (see below)
- iTunes stores artwork (the CD cover) in its own proprietary database. If you use a different mediaplayer not only to play the music, but also to view its artwork, it is sometimes hard to get the artwork to show up
Foobar2000
Foobar2000 is an open source audioplayer for the PC. It has excellent capabilities to convert music from one format to another (‘transcode‘). If it does not support a certain audio format out of the box, you can most likely download a plugin for it (for example ALAC).
Advantages Foobar2000:
- Excellent transcoding, also in batches (to transcode large quantities of music in one go)
- Advanced tagging (although not as advanced as a dedicated tag editor)
Disadvantages Foobar2000:
- Music on CD is not recognised, it is just encoded. This means you would need a separate program (like a tag editor) to obtain the information of the songs, artists etc on the CD
- User interface is not very intuitive, takes some time to get used to it
Max
Max is the Foobar2000 alternative for the Mac.
Advantages Max:
- Supports many audio formats out of the box
- Can do batch encoding (although not as powerful as Foobar2000)
- Can retrieve CD information, which is gathered online through MusicBrainz
- Album art can be retrieved automatically from Amazon
Disadvantages Max:
- Not very intuitive, has a learning curve
- CD information and album is often not retrieved, much less powerful compared to iTunes
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