In 2002, I bought a Ford Mustang GT with a factory MP3 CD player in the dash. About this time in 2004, I moved into a new house and (in the process) a new "computer room" that was about 50-60% smaller than the space I had in the old house. Earlier in 2005, I purchased one of Creative Labs' Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 players. This combination of events made it useful, if not downright essential, that I compress the music in my large (purchased, not downloaded, RIAA!) CD collection into high-quality MP3 files. That way, I could burn several albums to a CD-R and put them in the car without risking someone stealing my original discs. I could transfer them to the MP3 player and carry them with me to work or on vacation. I could also box up those CDs and put them in a safe place in the basement where they wouldn't get damaged, wet, or lost. The real problem, though, was how to get those CDs turned into MP3s most efficiently and effectively. Enter the Audiograbber software by Jackie Franck.
Audiograbber's purpose in life is to rip digital audio from a music CD and turn it into a media file on your computer. Although I used Audiograbber for MP3 files exclusively (and will only be talking about MP3s here), it supports not only the MP3 format but also WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV/PCM. This makes it a pretty versatile ripper. It's also pretty powerful and flexible, as we'll see in a moment.
Music File Management Features
If there is a special place you like to store your MP3 files, such as certain directory on your system or a shared drive on a network server, you can specify that in Audiograbber's preferences and it will automatically rip your CDs into that directory. In addition, you can specify how Audiograbber should name the resulting MP3 files. For example, you might want to include the track number, artist's name, track name, and/or album name in the filename to make it easy to identify the music later. Audiograbber will let you specify how it should build the filename, including what order you want the parts of that filename to appear. Further, you can have Audiograbber automatically rip the MP3s into directories by the artist name or album name, which can help you maintain a rudimentary organization for your discs as you rip them. In addition, Audiograbber will automatically fill in the ID3 tags for the MP3 files, which can save time as well.
Track Ripping Features
Audiograbber can rip tracks from the CD using the ASPI interface, MSCDEX (for pre-Windows XP systems), or even in "Analog" mode through the system's sound driver. This makes it effective for ripping some of the titles locked down with DRM software, though I try not to buy DRM-locked titles as a general rule so I can't say it's 100% effective at getting around things like Sony's ugly XCP technology.
As it rips the tracks for you, Audiograbber can delete leading and trailing silence automatically, or reduce the amount of it. You can rip only part of a track, or the whole track. You can normalize the sound levels so that all the tracks on a given disc play at approximately the same volume, which can be helpful for those "Various Artists" discs and others that don't seem to play at a consistent volume. You can control the more critical normalization parameters as well.
To help make the ripping process even easier, Audiograbber can be configured to automatically select all tracks for ripping by default, to eject the disc when it's finished, prevent the screensaver from triggering while it's ripping, and more.
As if all this wasn't enough, Audiograbber will also look your CDs up in the "freedb" CD databased on the Internet to determine the disc's name, genre, artist, track names, and year produced. These details will be used when naming the MP3 files Audiograbber generates and while filling in the ID3v2 and ID3v1 tags in the MP3 files.
Of course, the quality of the MP3s generated by Audiograbber can be adjusted within the settings as well. Based on the limitations of the MP3 DLL you're using, you can specify a desired bitrate and quality level. Audiograbber will ensure that all its MP3s come out with those settings.
What this all means is that if you take a few moments to configure Audiograbber before you start ripping your CD collection, you can just feed it disc after disc. As each disc is inserted, it will look up the CD's information in Freedb, automatically naming each track to your specifications as it's ripped, and storing it in a directory structure and location of your choice. You might not have to do a single thing with your MP3s when you're done, unless you want to impose a different kind of structure, like separating the music out by genre or something.
Some Assembly Required
When you first install Audiograbber, you'll get a nasty little surprise if you try to rip a CD into MP3s. At best, you'll find that it will only rip the CD at a rate of about 56kpbs, which is really pretty poor quality. To get anything better than that, you'll need to install one of the "codecs" (compressor/decompressor) available for MP3 compression. Fortunately, these codecs are available free of charge and the Audiograbber web site will link you directly to places where you can get them. To use them, you typically need to unzip the appropriate codec and copy it into the directory where the Audiograbber software is installed on your computer. The next time you launch Audiograbber it will "see" that the new codecs are available and allow you to use them.
Getting Ready to Rip a Disc for the First Time
To give you an idea how easy it is to use Audiograbber, let's rip a sample disc into a set of high-quality MP3 files. First, we'll launch Audiograbber, which will bring us to its main interface:
 Main Audiograbber Interface
Now, let's specify where Audiograbber should place the ripped tracks. Under the "Settings" menu, we'll select "General Settings" to make the necessary change:
 General Settings
We click the "Browse" button at the upper-right corner of the screen and select the directory we want to rip the files into. In this case, I'm happy with the directory that's selected so I'm not going to change it. Now, I want to be sure that Audiograbber generates MP3 filenames the way I want it to. I want the filenames to be "Artist - Track # - Title" format (e.g., "AC/DC - 01 - For Those About to Rock.mp3"). Looking above, we see that Audiograbber is not set to generate the filename this way. It's going to do "Track # - Artist - Track Name" (e.g., "01 - AC/DC - For Those About To Rock.mp3"). To change it, I click on "Artist Name" and then click the up-arrow to move Artist name to the top of the list. The window now looks something like this:
 General Settings
That's all I need to change in the settings. (And now that I've changed them, Audiograbber will do its job this way from here on out, so I don't need to do this ever again, unless I want to change something.)
Now, I want to make sure that MP3s are of the highest possible quality and a variable bitrate (to keep file sizes smaller). I adjust the "MP3 Settings" to the following (and again, this is a one-time thing if I want to rip all my CDs the same way):
 MP3 Settings
Let's also say that I'm concerned that the album I'm about to rip may not be consistently mastered for sound volumes, so I'm going to normalize it as well. I bring up the "Normalize" settings and adjust them as shown here:
 Normalization Settings
(As before, these are one-time settings changes, or they can be.)
Next, I check to make sure that the ID3v2 tags will be filled in the way I want them to be:
 ID3v2 Tag Settings
That's all it took to setup Audiograbber to rip discs the way I wanted it to, to where I wanted it to. Now I'm ready to start ripping some discs!
Ease of Use in Ripping CDs
Now that things look right, I'm ready to insert my CD and begin ripping. I place a disc in the drive, waiting a moment for Windows XP to spin it up and recognize it. Audiograbber hasn't seen it yet:
 Audiograbber Main Window
I hit the "Refresh" button on the Audiograbber window.
 Displaying a CD's Contents
As you can see, Audiograbber has recognized the disc in the drive as being Jonathan Coulton's "Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow", recorded in the year 2004, and knows the names of its 5 tracks. I click the "Grab" button to begin ripping the disc.
 Ripping a CD
Audiograbber rips each track from the disc to a WAV file, normalizes that track if its volume gets too low or too high, then compresses it into a high quality MP3 file. It also creates an M3U play list as it goes. When it's finished, it ejects the disc from the drive, displaying the results of the ripping process: After the CD is Ripped
If I wanted to rip another disc, all I'd do it load it into the drive, hit "Refresh", then hit "Grab". This process would continue for as many discs as I liked. When I was done, I'd find the discs ripped in the location I specified in the Audiograbber settings, named the way I wanted them to be, organized the way I wanted them to be, with their ID3v2 tags automatically completed for me.
To show you what I mean, let's look at the directory where the above example disc was ripped on my PC:
 The Ripped Tracks in Windows Explorer
As you can see, Audiograbber put the files in a directory with the album's name as its name, in the location I specified in the settings. It also named each file as I requested, and automatically generated an M3U file that allows me to play the songs with a simple double-click in my default MP3 player software.
What More Do You Need?
I don't know about you, but I don't need any more than this from my MP3 ripper software. Two clicks to rip a disc and automatically eject it, with no additional effort on my part needed to organize the files or fill in their ID3v2 tags.
I've been using Audiograbber for a very long time now. In fact, I think it was once called "AudioCatalyst" and was sold by Xing with its MP3 encoder DLL as a product. (If not, the two products are dead ringers for one another.) It's ripped pretty much every disc I've ever fed it, producing MP3s with the quality level I wanted.
Given its ease of use, powerful feature set, and flexible encoding options, it's the perfect CD ripper for my needs. In fact, it's the tool I used to turn shelves full of CDs into an organized directory of MP3 files on my hard disk. And the price (free!) is definitely right.
If it could legally be bundled with a good MP3 codec, it would get 10 out of 10 from me. But that extra step in installation might be just a little bit more than some novice users are ready for (though it's not that tough, really). For that reason, I'm giving it a 9 out of 10 rating.
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