venta | She's so small, tiny and crushed up

Current Music: [mtv2] Kasabian - Processed Beats

She's so small, tiny and crushed up

I'm working at home today, and am therefore finally getting round to putting software back on my PC after the Great Evesham Wiping Incident.

So, I want some mp3-ing software. I've always used CDCopy, and that seems to work pretty well. I'm just curious, would anyone recommend anything in particular. Any recommendations should do the following:

Run on Windows (XP)

Be free to download ("I'll give you a pirate copy" doesn't count :)

Be easy to install (I don't really want to faff around looking for codecs, etc)

Be friendly to use

Thanks for any help.
And

kneeshooter, once I've sorted this out I'll chuck that track at you :)

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iTunes is surprisingly good. Obviously it would rather create QuickTime music (or whatever Apple's DRM-riddled format is called), but you only need to tell it once to use the MP3 format and it will happily create MP3s in a variety of (optionally variable) bit-rates from then on.

Er, no.

iTunes has pissed me off irrevocably.

zandev tells me that if you want to use it as an all-in-one music solution it's quite nice, but if you want to use it alongside (say) Winamp, it's one of the most antisocial applications I have ever met.

It doesn't respect other applications' rights to associate file extensions, and immediately hogs them all itself every time you start it up, regardless of what options you set (believe me, I've tried). While I could, in theory, stop using Winamp and switch over to iTunes for everything I'm now morally opposed to it.

It's big, it's fat, it's slow to load, I found it difficult to use, and I think its sales policy (for the online music store) is unreasonable.

I don't like iTunes very much.

I haven't used iTunes, but I won't let Quicktime anywhere near my machine for the reasons already cited: it completely trashes your machine.

As you know I also use CDCopy; it works well and is easy to use. As you're already familiar with it I'd say stick with it (although I guess you have Nagging Doubts about it, or you probably wouldn't be asking the question!)

Am I right in thinking CDCopy doesn't do variable bitrate ? I'm just curious.

I'm not sure about the whys wherefores of variable bitrate, anyone is invited to tell my why I would/wouldn't want to do it.

Some applications (essentially broadcast) require that the MP3 stream be at a constant bitrate: a fixed number of bits of MP3 data correspond to a fixed period of time. This makes some things easy: playback devices don't need large amounts of buffer space and can recover the audio clock from the incoming MP3 bitstream. On the other hand it's inefficient: some sections of audio that would otherwise compress very well have to be padded out, and others that might be able to make use of a few more bits have to suffer a reduction in quality instead.

Variable bitrate relaxes the constant bitrate restriction and allows the encoder to use fewer bits in the MP3 stream for simple sections of audio and more bits for more complex sections.

While I'm at it, can I plug Ogg and suggest that storing your music in ogg format instead of mp3 format would be good for your soul?

You're welcome to plug Ogg, though I may ignore what you say :)

Go on: why would it improve the health of my soul ?

I know it's a bit of a feeble response on my part, but I think the "About Xiph" page explains it reasonably well.

Good grief, man, you'll never make an evangelist :)

:-)

I'm better in person, but even then I tend to use rational argument...

I believe cdcopy ships with the blade encoder only. You can point it at a bunch of other encoders (including Lame) if you want, though.

Blade doesn't, as far as I know, support VBR. CD Copy, in its "using Blade" mode, has no aparrent way to select VBR (as you'd expect); I'm not sure whether that would change if you switched to Lame.

Despite CD Copy's general ease of use, I have to say it does not appear to be straightforward if you want anything other than Blade. So if you want Lame (and that's generally considered to be the best encoder) you're probably better of selecting something else.

I use Musicmatch Jukebox, both for playing and recording. Seems to work, doesn't kill innocent passers-by.

Working form home in a fairly loose sense then :P

In fairness, most of the stuff I've been installing has been worky stuff :)

FWIW I've had bad and rather iTunes-esque experiences with MusicMatch.

In particular, it has opinions on which things belong to it. In fact, Scary-2 has been permanently damaged by MusicMatch in that it can no longer autoplay music CDs (because I've uninstalled MusicMatch but don't know how to point the autorun back at CD Player).

I use Musicmatch too. I was impressed with version 7 so I forked out the dough to make my copy legit. However by version 8 it suffered the "oooh lets make it look pretty and unfunctional" thing that popular software tends to go through. I'm using it again with the latest version (9) and although pretty, its still marvellous.

J Rivers Media Jukebox is a close contender. It plays .ogg's which can be useful.....

I think my favourite thing about MM is the helpful hints yuo get on startup. Mine appears to be stuck on,

To play a music CD, insert CD into tray

Audiograbber, although you'll need the LAME MP3 codec which is available from that website as well if you want to make decent sounding mp3s.

Seconded.

I use LAME too, but I haven't tried Blade so that might be better. And the fact that Audiograbber uses freedb rather than CDDB is good both ethically and because it gives more accurate results.

My only real irritation with Audiograbber is that they have slightly funny ideas about how you should enter lots of text into lots of boxes, so in the cases where freedb does screw up and you can't get a good track listing for your CD, you have to pay careful attention to what you're doing when you fill in the track names and artists.

Make sure you explore the options, because it's reasonably configurable as to how it names the files and the directory they go in, and different people have different conventions.

I use Easy CD Extractor which is shareware. All the right options, queries the internet database etc. It does expire after 30 days, but I liked it so much I paid 'em their money a few years ago.

CDex

Certainly fits your first three categories. I think it fits the fourth, but YMMV.

Yeah, I'll second that one.

It works a treat,
it freely downloadable,
easy enough to use and produces high quality recordings

EAC can be found here (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/)).

It costs but a postcard and a stamp (Cardware rather then freeware).

Lame you can download here http://www.bestdownload.com/download.php?sfid=135 (http://www.bestdownload.com/download.php?sfid=135))

Simply unzip lame,
install EAC ... point it at LAME and bingo ...

Lambert

Exact audio copy. Uses the lame encoding wotsit. Alegedly one of the best out there. Very nice UI, does exactly what it says on the web page. Google should find it for you.

Probably the thing to bear in mind when selecting a CD ripper is that it's pretty much a solved problem. If there's anything particularly bad or missing in the ripper you have, then you'll almost certainly be able to find another one that fixes it and is otherwise just about as good.

Since they almost all use the same codecs (Blade or LAME), the actual audio should be the same for everything, so it's mostly down to usability, cosmetics and how well the ripper deals with buggered (including copy-protected) CDs. And even that's largely down to the drive and it's firmware.

Another vote for EAC and LAME.

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She's so small, tiny and crushed up

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EAC and Lame

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