just wanted to share with you:

I've just finished ripping ALL my CDs (ca. 350) to WMA losless! I've found a very handy and FAST tool:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

36$ but it is lightning fast.
It was a crap with Windows Media Player 10 and 11 and than I found the dbpoweramp. It is amazingly fast!

It's only slow if the disc is scratched or s.th. like this becaus it than rips the CD frame by frame - in that case you can leave your computer on and go out for a party or s.th. else ;-) 
It can add covers from an internetdatabase or you can manualy add covers that you already have on your computer.

For good quality album covers you should use one of the tools mentioned here:

http://forum.beoworld.org/forums/t/32719.aspx

I think the same work of ripping my original CDs would have taken weeks or months with the Windows Media Player or Beoplayer.

Could you characterize "lightening fast"?  How much faster than BeoPlayer (which, I believe, is just using wmp under the covers so, I assume, the performance between BeoPlayer and wmp are similar)?

Stan

Windows Media Player:

Insert disc,, look up (mostly manualy) for the disc information  (meta data). click "rip" and wait.


dbpoweramp:
Insert disc, wait until it looked up the meta data automaticaly, click rip.

The ripping process is much faster than the WMP.

For me it is THE solution and solved my problems with WMP and Beoplayer! :-)

At the moment I use E(xact) A(udio) C(opy).

This program almost guarantees that the rips are 100%. No glitches in the wma, mp3, wav or whatever.

It reads the cd's like an audio cdplayer, where more error correction is used.

A drive in a pc/mac doesn't check the data properly. So if there is a scratch on the disk EAC will correct the data like an ordinairy cd-player.

The advantage of EAC is that you don't have to check your ripped tracks/albums. If EAC reads the disks and finds a scratch, it will read the disk/track up to 8 times. 

More info:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic-technology/extraction-technology/

It's freeware.

A Disadvantage:  it took some time to configure the program and the needed plug-in (like windows media encoder for wma, or lame for mp3).

But if it works, then it's easy to use.

I'm not sure that I believe the claim that this program reads the disk in a superior manner to other programs.  It's all just data after all.  In fact, an audio-cd reader has a larger margin for error in that it doesn't have to read a CDs data 100%.  Can the human ear actually hear a missed bit here or there?  No.  A computer program, on the other hand, must be 100% exact or the program is corrupt and will not run.  If standard CD reading was so terribly error prone, very few programs loaded from a CD would actually work - which has not been my experience.

I'm just a bit skeptical this morning.  Sounds too much like "hi-fi whoo-whoo" to me.  I'm sure it works great, and since it is free, I guess I should not complain...

Stan

It is true. Audio and data are stored in a very different way on a CD. As you say data needs to be 100% correct, and that is exactly why data CDs have a lot more bits dedicated to error correction and detection. CD-ROM drives are designed to read that, while audio CD players are best at reading audio data. They don't usually even try to get 100% correct playout result, they will interpolate missing data if need be and the ear can never tell what happened. They can't go back and reread as the disk spins at the normal play speed and there's no real buffering. A CD-ROM drive reading a data disk on the other hand will detect the error and repair it with the redundant bits, and if it can't do that, it will try to reread the sector a number of times before giving up.

So this boils down to that you don't usually get the 100% same or original result when playing back an audio CD, you just don't know that you don't Programs like EAC can do a better job, but personally I don't believe it matters unless the disk is damaged.