To encode audiofiles or rip CD’s there are lots of free and paid tools and applications out there.
Most install spyware, are slow and clunky, otherwise unpractical or simply lack the needed features.
What i expect from a decent CD ripper or audio conversion utility:
Multithreading to use all my CPU cores and the most recent CPU features to quickly encode the files.
Batch processing to encode many files with one click.
Tag editor to edit or add tags like the Artist or the Title.
Automatic Artist, Title, Album discovery through CDDB so i don’t need to manually enter the information of bought CDs but have them downloaded automatically from a online database.
Multiple input and output formats like mp3, aac, flac, ogg, wma, m4a.
A way to split big files according to the included CUE sheet description file.
Ability to rip audio CDs to the PC, Apple iPod, iPhone or any Windows Phone, Android Phone or MP3 player.
I’ve tried many programms and some where nice at the beginning, like freemake, but crashed constantly while adding files.
The best one i’ve found so far is Fre:AC which is available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, in Binary as well as in Sourcecode.
If you know any better option, please feel free to contact me.