better music paleysr and burners than RealPlayer

[Colin]

any free, with no headroom? lots of features and no web links?

man, can I type fast or what?

[Beetlejuice]

Try Musicmatch Jukebox. I've used it for years. www.musicmatch.com

[Griffinator]

Better player: Winamp

Better burner: Nero Burning ROM

[sc03979]

foobar2000 is the best hands down. It's not super user friendly right away. It makes winamp sound like a pile of crap in comparison or any other player I've heard.

[toddvj]

There is always good old fashioned Windows Media Player. It's free, you can use it to burn CDs (I haven't done this), and it supports just about any format, or it can with the right plug-in. I don't know what you mean by "no headroom."

I use Nero for burning, try it out, you can download a free trial from nero.com.

I also use Creative Mediasource for music, but I think you have to own one of their products to get it to work.

I used to use MusicMatch, as mentioned above, but that was a pay service, although you can use the (crippled) free version. I don't use it anymore simply because when I would rip tracks to my Hard Drive, I didn't like the way it organized the artists names, etc.

[BobbyT]

Music Match is a good one and so is Itunes.

[skonopa]

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) works pretty good and is completely free. It does take a little bit to setup (in that you also need to download "Lame" to do the MP3 encoding, which is also free), but once you do get it setup, it works quite nicely in both ripping and burning CD's

However, it does not play anything, though. For that, I use good'ol Winamp. Been using it for many years, and still find it to be my prefered player. Tried many of the others, but always found myself returning back to the tried-n-true in Winamp.

[LarryC]

I very much agree on Winamp. It has an equalizer, which Musicmatch and the rather elementary Windows Media Player don't. It functions well and is very user-friendly.

iTunes seems to not work on some PCs -- the Apple "iTunes for Windows" chat room (read: support group, as tech support apparently isn't available) has many complaints, notably from Windows XP users with Dell PCs.

Larry

[Audible Nectar]

EXACT AUDIO COPY - The SUPREME CD ripper. The only ripper that makes EXACT copies, sector by sector, of your CD's....and gives you an error report of the rip following use. If the software fails to pick up all of the information (possibly from dirt, scratches, etc), it will tell you so at the end of the rip.

And as mentioned above, it's free

As far as media players go, I want a media player that is free of ad communication stuff - like with Real, which is essentially a spyware device.

[Duke Spinner]

3 votes for exact audio copy .. !

[j-malotky]

I just downloaded EAC and WOW. Ive been looking for a package like this for years.

Thanks for the tip

JM

[Andronicus Dragon]

----------------

On 3/15/2005 12:21:35 AM skonopa wrote:

Exact Audio Copy (EAC)

works pretty good and is completely free. It does take a little bit to setup (in that you also need to download "Lame" to do the MP3 encoding, which is also free), but once you do get it setup, it works quite nicely in both ripping and burning CD's

However, it does not play anything, though. For that, I use good'ol

Winamp

. Been using it for many years, and still find it to be my prefered player. Tried many of the others, but always found myself returning back to the tried-n-true in Winamp.

----------------

Does EAC still burn just in TAO mode? Thats kinda a downer for me as I prefer DAO. Maybe if you are just doing regular cds it isnt a problem, but if you use it to burn DTS cds then every time the track changes your receiver has to lock on the DTS stream again. However, for the purpose it was intended for it cant be beat. I do find myself doing more actual recording than ripping to get past both the DC offset inherent in ripping and to give myself some headroom breathing space because of the massive amounts of compression most recording engineers today seem to love to use.