Help w/bad mp3 rips?



Argh. Help.

I just can't seem to get clean mp3s from CDs for use with my Windows iPod. I'm using an Windows XP box to rip from and encoding at 192 kbps, high quality, true stereo. I've tried several types of commercial ripping software (musicmatch, realplayer using the XING encoder) as well as audiograbber with the LAME encoder. I don't run other software while ripping, and have killed all the background tasks I can find. The best so far seems to be audiograbber, but I still get muted background noises and the occasional skip. Before audiograbber, I got lots of skips. What is up? Any computer-type audiophiles have any suggestions (other than buying an iMac)? Could I have a bad CD reader?

I'm really getting sick of ripping stuff over and over again.
edesilva
use exact audio copy and the fgh radium codec i use this and it puts out some pretty good results. EAC allows error correction during extraction and genreally doesnt screw up. Even better if you can find a way to play ogg vorbis files on your ipod these sound better than mp3s.
agree with sailor720. EAC is the best out there.
I haven't had any problems with MusicMatch software.
Are you ripping to CDR or to your hard drive? I find ripping from CD to CDR causes me errors/skips. I think it has to do with “on the fly” conversion to WAV format while writing to CDR. I rip directly to my hard drive at 320 kbps. If I am going to transfer to CDR, I convert the file to WAV format and then rip to CDR. The extras step provides me clean rips.