Enjoy flawless ripping with support of LAME, even VBR, with Exact Audio Copy
Exact Audio Copy will try to read your CD perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you, reporting also the precise time position the (possible) distortion occurred.
Features: Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction); Detection of read errors and complete losses of sync and correction in the secure mode, as far as possible; Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and the possibility to listen to these positions; able to copy ranges of music data, not only tracks; Automatic speed reduction on read errors and fallback to a higher speed afterwards (depends on the used drive);
Volume normalization of extracted audio to a given percentage; Usage of the Windows Audio Compression manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression to e.g. MP3 waves; Support for the LAME DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for on-the-fly MP3 compression; Support of external MP3, WMA, flac and OggVorbis encoders for automatic compression after extraction (supports multi-processor environments); Detection of pre-track gaps (positions where negative track times runs towards 00:00:00); Detection of silence in pre-track gaps, and more.
Exact Audio Copy is also able to write MP3 files in variable bit rate. I use EAC all the time, and never thought of changing it.