Looks like that’s one of the options but I’ve always let it default to XLD Secure Ripper.
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Yes, it has a GUI (and I think it’s a little simpler to configure than EAC or dBpoweramp). It’s working fine on my M1 Mac running Ventura.
And the lesson is…
I should have asked around here before embarking on a project. XLD is pretty awesome. And I think I trust the approach - we’ll see how it performs on some of my scratchier disks, but I gotta admit that it’s rereading sectors and hitting accuraterip db, so other than the fact that there isn’t that interface with the blinky red squares that EAC has, it seems to be doing all the right stuff. That said, I didn’t pay for parallels yet, so I’m not out any cash for either and I’ll probably use them both for a couple weeks before I make up my mind. Gives me an excuse to go to Goodwill and pick up a whole pile of CDs 
I might keep parallels even if I don’t use EAC much - because I’d forgotten what a better experience it is to have “real” Excel. [NB: total self-own]
Thanks all!
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I am in the process of ripping my entire music CD collection into uncompressed FLAC using dBpoweramp on my M1 MacBook Pro.
I’ve ripped about 100 discs so far and many more to go. No errors until now and around 95% are tagged correctly right out of the box.
I’ve bought the app recently with a nice discount and it has turned out to be a very good investment.
When I have completed all the ripping then I will add them to my Roon Core replacing the old 320 kbit AAC versions of the CD’s that I have ripped them to in the past.
I guess what you wrote should be classified as opinion…as is what I am about to write.
I have been ripping for years and years and dBpoweramp (plus XLD for problematic discs) is way better than EAC. dBpoweramp is MUCH faster and XLD seems to do a better job with bad discs. I try to avoid highly used and scratched discs. Of course, I am specific about the discs I buy as I look for very specific masterings in the best quality I can find.
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It definitely has a GUI, which I use, but I’m on one of the last Intel MacBook Pros so can’t comment on M1/2 chips.
It’s free so I guess you can give it a go and report back if you get a chance.
[Edit: I’ve since realised lots of you good people have already said it works on M1/2 chips]
Any one have a promo code for dbpoweramp, I might give it a go. 
Sign me up too if anyone has a promo code!
I still buy them, especially box sets, but they mostly get ripped and put it case logic cases in the attic as a backup of the backups.
Though I have about 70 or so in the living room for the first time in about 20 years. The wife gave me the look, but stopped at that. I dust the storage boxes they are in, so I get a pass for that 
It’s not as enjoyable as playing vinyl, but I still enjoy selecting a CD and putting it into the drive and listening to it, just more involved than streaming. Though I stream about 90% of the time. So I guess a change is as good as a rest after all.
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I’ve always heard for years that X Lossless Decoder (XLD) on OSX/MacOs was functionally equivalent to EAC on Windows for making perfect rips. Maybe give that a try so you don’t have to run a hypervisor just to rip CDs.
Thanks for the comments here. I’m apparently the “man from the past” when it comes to ripping. The last time I did a full pass over my CDs was 2009 (based on file creation dates). The may be the last time I bought a CD.
XLD was straightforward to set up including using AWS for cover art. I do have a few CDs kicking around that I never ripped - so thanks for the pointers in that direction.
I have what I hope is a silly question for you folks. Did anything change in FLAC or with respect to the state of the art of metadata that would somehow justify re-rips? I did a quick comparison of what XLD produces using FLAC at the highest compression rate and the resulting files were just about exactly the same size as what I have from 2009. The differences were small enough to be attributable to different album art. Back in 2009 I was clever enough to use large art and embed it in every file, so that alone wouldn’t justify another pass.
Any thoughts?
Probably not worth re-ripping. I’m only doing it because back then hard drives were much smaller and I’ve ripped everything to 320 kbit AAC to save space.
But now having a 2 tb hard drive connected to my Roon Core and an 18 tb media drive connected to my M1 MacBook Pro storage isn’t an issue anymore. So I’m updating my own music CD’s from AAC to uncompressed FLAC.
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If you have Windows available, grab a copy of CUETools (it’s free). It’s the only utility I know of that will actually repair a rip with errors. It can reconstruct a FLAC file based on information in the CUETools Database to fix a rip with bad sectors. There are limits, but when you’re dealing with used CDs, you can still end up with a perfect rip when XLD/EAC/dBpoweramp can’t extract the data securely.
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Thanks @EvilGnome6 - worth playing with.
@Johnny_Ooooops - I just got this working in a Parallels VM on a MacStudio. Took a couple of fixes to get it going. If you want to play with it, you’ll need to download and unzip it, then do the following:
In PowerShell (not a cmd shell), run this:
dir -Path {cue tools path} -Recurse | Unblock-File
That’ll fix an issue that results from Windows setting a block bit on some or all of the plugin dlls included in the package. Without this, the FLAC decoder is unavailable.
Then delete the file called “user_profiles_enabled” in the CUETools install directory. With that file present, it tries to write settings out to your user profile directory and it’s getting blocked. Remove the file and it’ll write settings to the install directory.
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Also, I dunno @Carl about the Tinkering reclassification… not sure ripping in parallels is the same thing as tinkering by running your CORE in a non-supported way, and it devolved into “how ya rippin’ these days anyhoo?”. But doesn’t really matter to me, just saying. I think you mods do a lot of valuable stuff, sometimes I scratch my head, but may just be me. Anyways, thanks for the stuff you do that we all agree is very high value.
It’s not a Roon Discussion, I viewed it as software project which fits #tinkering … see …
It could be argued #audio-gear-talk but I thought here was more appropriate.
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Looking into CueTools - the repair ability is amazing. But I have a question about its ability to split single-album-FLACs… I have about a dozen albums that I ripped to a single file (one .flac file for the whole album, not separate tracks). Somewhere along the way I lost the associated CUE sheets. Is there a place to find CUE sheets? These aren’t super-common albums (Sinatra’s Christmas Album, Solstice by Ralph Townes, Paul Bley Quartet with John Surman, …) so they’re not in Cue Sheet Heaven. I could try to generate my own by ear, or I could dig through crates in my attic and re-rip these albums. Both sounds really really time consuming.
Thanks… and I’m looking forward to getting to know the tool on Parallels! Another reason to keep it.
Not that I know of. If the CUE Sheet is embedded in the FLAC, XLD will detect it and ask if you want to use it. I would be inclined to re-rip but I enjoy ripping. Worst case, you might be able to construct a CUE Sheet with the CD TOC information on MusicBrainz. For example:
https://musicbrainz.org/cdtoc/gexSyZUQ8hEd7utVg2DkCu2CPto-
If you can find your release on MusicBrainz, check the Disc IDs tab to see if anyone has uploaded one.
XLD is pretty awesome. Was ripping an album with dBpoweramp. And it kept crunching on the last 2 tracks. Gave XLD a try and it ripped both tracks without issues.
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One question for all the folks who have been using XLD for a long time…
What about albums that arent in CDDB? I subscribed long ago to GDD3, which means that EAC finds metadata for basically every album. I find that when I’m buying recordings that aren’t available on Qobuz/Tidal, the likelihood that there’s no CDDB entry goes up a fair bit. What do you do - type it in? Switch to a different product?
Thanks!