alternative (win7) cd rippers for use with itunes?

[The Boston Dangler]

hi. i've just just bought an ipod nano and i'm totally disapponted by the cd ripping. i'd like to rip my collection using my old favorite, dbpoweramp.

my questions are:
will itunes and a 16gb 6th gen ipod nano correctly sync and play the apple lossless files generated by dbpoweramp? including tag data?

how is album art handled by apple software?

 

[The Boston Dangler]

Q: will it work?

A: hell yeah!

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-m4a.htm

 

[alent1234]

if the art is in itunes apple will automatically add it. otherwise go to bing image search and copy and paste it into itunes

 

[Aikouka]

if the art is in itunes apple will automatically add it. otherwise go to bing image search and copy and paste it into itunes

Don't you have to manually add the album art via the right-click context menu? One thing to be aware of is that if you do that, you have to select each song or it will only put album art in the file you selected. I learned that the hard way when I left off the first song from an album, and I was a bit confused as to why I had no album art.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

in the latest version, dbpoweramp can automatically search for and embed album art for each song as it's ripped. folder.jpeg can also be written to the output directory. unlike itunes, it's very easy to make selections and corrections before mistakes are made, as well as edit them later. itunes and the ipod seem to have no problems with the embedded art, but i haven't tried folder.jpeg on the ipod. i still have no idea how apple handles the album art natively, as i haven't found any pictures and the itunes-ripped songs don't seem to contain the art.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

for win 7 64-bit, itunes stores album artwork not in the files nor in the music data folder, but C: \Users\your name here\Music\iTunes\Album Artwork. i'll assume the ipod caches the art similarly. any way, the compatibility between itunes and dbpoweramp seems to be very good