Best simple software for ripping a music CD to .wav files

[IO540]

There is a lot of it about, e.g. that monster called Itunes.

I am after something simple, but all the little utilities I have used over the years don't name the tracks; they just call them file01 file02 etc.

What I don't know is whether to get the track names one has to do an internet lookup. Do the track names get stored on the CD somewhere and, if so, is this a recent thing only (last few years)?

I want to rip to .wav files, not .mp3 because I have plenty of storage and don't want any loss of quality.

[ZH875]

Try Audacity , its free http://audacity.sourceforge.net/


Edited after post #3

Apologies, I never realised that, you learn something new every day.

[IO540]

Audacity is a nice enough freebie audio editor but it doesn't read a music CD.

[ZH875]

Have you looked at "Free CD Ripper 3.1" according to its write-up, it should do what you want.

"Free CD Ripper 3.1 is a powerful, professional software which can extract Digital Audio tracks from an Audio CD into sound files on your hard disk. You can save CD audio tracks to CD-quality WAV files or encode them to OGG Vorbis or MP3 compressed audio format. With its powerful sound engine, Free CD Ripper 3.1 extracts with high speed and quality. Free CD Ripper 3.1 supports Freedb and ID3 tagging so you can automatically download CD track information and save them in the encoded file. It supports WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG--these four kinds of popular audio formats, and it would not produce new medium files.

http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025604,39115654s,00.htm

[IO540]

Sadly, while this program works well, it doesn't name the files according to retrieved artist/track etc names.

The free CDDB project is now dead, as of July 2006, according to wikipedia.

Interestingly, Apple Itunes still gets the names from somewhere. I guess they have done a corporate deal with the original CDDB which became a commercial business. Itunes is a ghastly program though...