ryanspicks (freeware reviews): EAC (free CD ripper) and Monkey's Audio (lossless audio compressor)

EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is an audio grabber for CD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers is that it works with a new technology, reading audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player.

I used to just use CDex but I find EAC much faster and able to rip CD's with scratches better, and it just does a lot of stuff that other rippers don't to ensure a perfect copy. If you care about quality then use EAC.

Depending on what you want, EAC can provide several modes. You could choose between speed and accuracy.

Monkey's Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.

The newest EAC has built in support for Monkey's Audio, so you just need to pick "Monkey's Audio Lossless Encoder" as the parameter passing scheme for the external selection, then locate MAC.exe, pick the compression mode, and the other options, and off you go.

EAC can also decompress Monkey's Audio APE files into a WAV file ('Tools->Decompress') and it can split individual tracks of the file into multiple WAV files, based on its cue sheet. This means that you can have perfect sound by ripping a CD album into an APE file with EAC using the Monkey's Audio compressor, and then later decompress the APE inside of EAC into a WAV file--then, by clicking "Tools->Split WAV By CUE Sheet", you can split the WAV into multiple WAV's, based on the track numbers of the album. So, you won't have to listen to just the single APE or WAV file as one continuosly running file.

If you get an error in EAC when you choose "Tools->Split WAV by CUE Sheet" then open up the .cue file inside of notepad and make sure it looks like this: