CD Ripper

The most common mistake we see our clients make is that many of them use iTunes to rip their CDs to create their MP3 files. iTunes does some funky stuff to files. It's fine for consumers but horrible for vendors. Not only does it do a crappy job of ripping, but iTunes' Terms of Use prohibits you from using it for commercial purposes. If you care about your music, don't rip it with iTunes.

We've been testing a few different programs here in the office. So far we're pretty happy with the job Freerip has been doing. It uses the LAME encoder and has some very robust ID3 tag editing abilities. It'll encode wav, mp3, wma and flac.

We encourage our clients to output mp3s in stereo (not joint stereo) at 224 average bit rate. This gives a slightly larger file size than normal but provides a level of quality that the most fanatical of audiophiles should find "acceptable".