iTunes, Exact Audio Copy or dBpoweramp?

Last Friday my wife invited some friends and colleagues over and a good time was had by all. That is until I put some music on and we sat out on the patio enjoying the late evening sun, and someone moved his chair to sit next to me.

He said he was moving his seat to get the best audio location. My heart sank – an audio bore. I smiled politely and was pleased when he complimented me on the sound quality. We went through my stereo components and he approved them, although he had ‘auditioned’ my speakers and had gone for a more expensive model. Then the question of CD player.

Actually, I explained, this isn’t a CD player – it’s my iPod. There was a pause. One of the new video iPods? Er, no, this one’s about three years old and its done a million miles, looks like it’s about to fall apart, but sounds good.

“You must have used special software to rip your CDs”. Er, no – iTunes. There was one of those pauses where I’d clearly said the wrong thing. I probed his concern and this was his reply.

“Nobody who’s is halfway serious about music quality would use iTunes.”

That was it. Complete certainty despite the evidence of his own ears. What would be acceptable ripping software? I was given two names – Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and dBpoweramp – which could be relied upon due to the thoroughness with which they read CDs. As my guest explained CDs played via a computer can result in bad CD readings and only advanced software such as these two can read with the accuracy a serious music lover needs. As we later said our goodbyes I thought I’d test that view.

On Saturday I downloaded both applications and set them up on one of my computers. When I set up podServe I’d tried other ripping software so this was a good opportunity to try these, in the case of dBpoweramp re-try. I chose at random five of my own CDs to compare. I wanted to primarily test ripping quality to see if these systems produce better sounds than iTunes.

I started by ripping five CDs into iTunes, stopwatch in hand. Timings carefully noted I repeated the process using EAC. Or at least tried to. EAC is the most confusing product and it took a long time to get a working ripping system. I used the most accurate ripping configuration and eventually the five CDs were added to my hard drive.

dBpoweramp had a more forgiving interface, so I was able to start ripping more quickly. Broadly you can opt for speed of ripping or high accuracy. Thanks to a more communicative interface I could see what had happened when I ripped the CDs. Using the highest accuracy settings each CD had been ripped properly (as was the case with EAC). However it had taken considerably longer to do so – slightly over four times longer.

So I had three sets of rips – iTunes, EAC and dBpoweramp. Bit rates and file formats were the same. Time to sit down and listen for a couple of hours. Did the audiophile rips improve on iTunes? Well not to my ear. As far as I could tell they were identical.
Finally I thought I’d test dBpoweramp’s claim to offer fast ripping. So I switched from great accuracy to speed. Five CDs later I had another set of rips and two notable red flags. On the last tracks of two CDs (The Rolling Stones – Stripped & The Beatles – No 1s) dBpoweramp was flagging ripping errors. What about the speed though? dBpoweramp was marginally slower than iTunes but only by a few seconds. However dBpoweramp got its album data more quickly then iTunes (which was taking a leisurely 15 seconds or more to query CDDB) and at the same time it located the album art. As you may know, iTunes gets its album art in a second pass and only then if its on iTunes.

To be fair to dBpoweramp the fast rips of the good tracks sounded every bit as good as the accurate rips. But there are two tracks where the sound is distinctly flawed, albeit flagged nicely for the user. Given no significant speed advantage I can’t see the point of using dBpoweramp above iTunes.

In this test I found that iTunes was both fast and accurate. It ripped all tracks properly. It ripped all tracks a little faster than dBpoweramp in sprint mode and much, much faster than either EAC or dBpoweramp in their secure ripping modes. And crucially my iTunes tracks sound just as good as the others. Roll on the next home social.