Discussion
, but I have heard that k-lite is excellent. Havent heard many complaints, and no spyware!Flintstone said:I use a program called WinDac (click here). It's shareware but at €22EUR (about £15.50) isn't too expensive.
Anyone have any tips on software to convert ordinary music CD's to MP3?
I've been using it for several years. Only trouble is that the author hasn't updated it since May 2002.
It's by no means the only one out there and I have heard good things about AudioGrabber, but WinDac works for me so I stick by it.
I then use BladeEnc to pack the ripped WAV files to MP3, which I have as a plugin to WinDac, so rip & pack is done automatically.
Since filesharing via the internet has certain security/privacy risks and uses a lot of bandwidth, some of my mates started to collect their compressed music files on mobile harddrives. A 160GB one costs around €200 and can be connected to every operating system via FireWire or USB 1.0-2.0. Later PCs have the faster interfaces.
Once connected, you may copy or rip music to that harddrive, as well as transferring it to another, or listening to it from there.
Another advantage of the external harddrive is, that it doesn't use your PC's storing resources.
For ripping CDs, I can recommend Grip http://nostatic.org/grip/ which costs nothing because it is open source software, and allows you to set it up for automatically starting ripping and encoding a CD as soon as you put it into the CD drive. It then looks up the interpret/song names in an internet database, and saves the new files with the appropriate name.
When the entire disk is ripped to the harddrive, it ejects the CD, so you can proceed with the next. It's a handy feature when you're ripping an entire CD collection with hundreds of CDs. Grip does only work with Unix/Linux/*BSD operatings systems though.
Once connected, you may copy or rip music to that harddrive, as well as transferring it to another, or listening to it from there.
Another advantage of the external harddrive is, that it doesn't use your PC's storing resources.
For ripping CDs, I can recommend Grip http://nostatic.org/grip/ which costs nothing because it is open source software, and allows you to set it up for automatically starting ripping and encoding a CD as soon as you put it into the CD drive. It then looks up the interpret/song names in an internet database, and saves the new files with the appropriate name.
When the entire disk is ripped to the harddrive, it ejects the CD, so you can proceed with the next. It's a handy feature when you're ripping an entire CD collection with hundreds of CDs. Grip does only work with Unix/Linux/*BSD operatings systems though.
Flintstone said:
I gave up on MP3 for just that reason.
Anyone have any tips on software to convert ordinary music CD's to MP3?
Can't go wrong with MusicMatch www.musicmatch.com, it's free and gets all the CD details (title, artist, track names etc) from CDDB.
Whilst its probably not the best (ie doesn't use a particularly outstanding MP3 encoder), it's certainly the easiest and quickest to use.
If you're more picky about quality, go for for something that uses the lame encoder.
I've converted my entire collection and it was a mamoth task, however, I'm impressed with the results. Certainly makes sharing music much easier. I tend to cart MP3's around on my iPaq and also run a ICECast server so I can access all my tunes from home via an internet connection.
Steve
>> Edited by fatsteve on Saturday 20th December 23:55
JonRB said:
Anyone have any tips on software to convert ordinary music CD's to MP3?
I use a program called WinDac (click here). It's shareware but at €22EUR (about £15.50) isn't too expensive.
I've been using it for several years. Only trouble is that the author hasn't updated it since May 2002.
It's by no means the only one out there and I have heard good things about AudioGrabber, but WinDac works for me so I stick by it.
I then use BladeEnc to pack the ripped WAV files to MP3, which I have as a plugin to WinDac, so rip & pack is done automatically.
EAC (www.exactaudiocopy.de/) and LAME (http://mitiok.cjb.net/). Free and better.
iTunes is available for windows now.
I use it on my mac and its fantastic although it does save the files in a different format but if you can burn audio cds (both normal audio and as mp3s), link up to iPod. It's just Fab!
www.apple.com/itunes
I use it on my mac and its fantastic although it does save the files in a different format but if you can burn audio cds (both normal audio and as mp3s), link up to iPod. It's just Fab!
www.apple.com/itunes
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff