Phil
mgalusha recommended dbpoweramp as a CD ripper and i have been very happy with it. But now the trial has expired so I need to pay up. It is the fastest ripper I have used so far and it even checks its rip results against an external database of popular CDs. It compresses while the CD is being ripped. I am confident the rips are perfect when the disc allows. I have a really pesky CD that still has blips on it, but silent when played on CDP. The ripping software doesn't seem to matter, so I think the dumber CDP wins on that disk - PC is trying to be too perfect.
Compressing ripped PCM to flac does have one "option" that you can change, but it only affects the speed of encoding/decoding vs. the compression size. Setting the encoder to setting #5 (Default) gives a very fast encode, and easy enough decode for SB/Duet to decode natively. If you have enough drive space to not care about additional slight space efficiency, then choose 5 and fuggetabouit.
I have also used EAC which is good when you need a very stubborn forensic strength ripper to scrounge data off of a really screwedup disc, it will get the most, but it is slow and clunky, IMO. Easy CD-DA Extractor is easy to use, but I am not as confident of the rip results. I hear occasional blip in tracks ripped with it, and it also did not default to create tags by default, which I realized way to late. It can't confirm or guarantee a perfect rip like EAC or db. Forget about Musicmatch, Windows Media, iTunes, etc. They are geared for least error messages, not perfect rips. Good enough for mp3s though, but db is still faster and lets you choose different mp3 compression algorithms. It is a ripper for grown ups.
Like Ken said, any version of slimserver will manage your music files by scanning the music directory and logging tracks into its own database. It can only do this effectively if your songs have tags created inside them (aka metadata) because that is what is used to populate the database fields. So you can't organize wav files in the slim database because they have no tags. You should make sure your flacs are being created with tags. All flac compressors give you the option with or without, most are default to with, but check to be sure, it is easy to uncheck it by accident in some ripper GUIs.
EZ CD-DA and dbpoweramp are both ridiculously easy interface. Pure windows cartoon picture easy. dbpoweramp has particularly good popup help also. Hold your mouse over a strange looking button and the popup appears to explain what that button does. Like pie. EAC was not like that, to change from ripping mp3 to ripping flac involved manually editing the encoding command line which for flac was 50 plus characters. I kept the two strings saved in a file for easy pasting in, but that was ridiculous. I'm glad there are other developers with a sense of the real world. But EAC does have the bulldog instinct when needed.
The remote on the Duet is really an incredible boon to the audiophile. Once you try it, there's no going back! Have fun!!
Rich
