Grabbing From CD's ??

[GhostofJimJess]

I'm seriously considering backing up a heap of my favorite CD's in mp3 form, just in case of burglary or fire or terrorist strike, and I'm wondering what the best free downloadable software you guys have found to do the job.

At present I'm using Audiograbber, but the shareware version is a major hassle as it only lets you grab from half (randomly chosen!!) of the tracks at a time.

Anyone have any better suggestions ?

Cheers.

[The Ewok]

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

[Darky]

I use dBpower music converter, takes about 15-20 minutes to load a 45 minute CD onto my computer. **** easy to use.

[Macca19]

The best thing ive found is to use a program i got with my Mini Discman called OpenMG Jukebox. However it doesnt mp3 your songs...it turns them into files with a .omg filetype. This, in my opinion is better for the following reasons:

1) The sound quality does not change whether you 'burn' the songs at 132kps or 66kps.

2) Instead of a 5 minute song being around the 6MG mark...they are more around 2.2MG for a 5 minute song...which cuts back the amount of disk space you have to use by a truckload

3) The program itself is bloody awesome and extremely easy to use.

I recently...over the last 6 or 7 weeks ripped my entire cd collection (now at an estimate around 625 cds) to these OMG files just in case a disaster happens and they all get wiped out. There is also around about 50 cds worth of mp3s as well. All in all there is over 5,770 song files at 17G of disk space. If i mp3d them all then it would be more around about 60G worth of disk space. So im saving disk space at no reduced sound quality!!

Im planning on investing in a seperate 80G hard drive just for my music that i can take outta the computer anytime just as a backup. Backing up is a very good idea indeed!

[Desredandwhite]

Good idea Macca, but it all depends on you having the right software/hardware to play it all back. I have an iPod which only plays mp3s, so naturally that's what I've encoded everything as. I like to have the files at 160kbps as quite frankly at that bitrate I can't hear any difference between that and CD audio (without an A/B test)

I'm sure at some point mpeg4 audio or Ogg Vorbis or something else will become standard.. and then I'll spend another huge chunk of my life re-encoding all my CDs ;-)

As for the original poster, there's a few mp3 encoders that are free, but they aren't always easy to use. with winXP, you can encode WMA for free - I'm sure others can suggest a couple more.

[Porthos]

Musicmatch is a great program.

[coxon]

Originally posted by Porthos
Musicmatch is a great program.

ah.. havent ripped cd's for quite a while now..

remember spending ages ripping from a cd, then encoding in mp3... which took fricken ages (real-time)..

the last time i did do some, i used musicmatch... nice & easy to use for beginners ~

[oh_my_hat]

I use Audio Catalyst, works a treat for me.

[GhostofJimJess]

Thanks for the heads-up guys ... I'll give a few of these a shot ...

Cheers, Ghost