Audiograbber

An excellent utility for ripping your cd music collection to digital mp3 files as efficiently as possible is Audiograbber. With the click of one button, your cd will be converted to mp3 files, automatically named by any combination of artist, song, album, that you desire, and it even looks up that information for you. You can convert your music collection to mp3 digital audio for your portable digital music player with Audiograbber.

acquisition

Audiograbber is available at http://www.audiograbber.org/

You will also need the lame mp3 encoder codec. Only the sourcecode is available at the lame

sourceforge homepage, so there's no point in windows users going there. Softpedia is a reasonably reliable place to download the windows lame encoder from. As of this writing,

LAME MP3 Encoder 3.99.5 is available at

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-CD-Rippers-Encoders/LAME-MP3-Encoder.shtml

settings

1. Install audiograbber.
2. Open the lame encoder zip. The only file you need from the zip archive, which contains many files, is lame.exe - just copy it into the install directory of audiograbber
3. Open audiograbber.
4. Goto Settings-> MP3 Settings
5. Click the checkbox "External Encoder"
6. Click the browse button and select lame.exe from the install folder
7. for predefined arguments just choose "Lame 128 Kbit/s Joint Stereo (disregard the 128 bitrate, it will be modified)
8. For Arguments enter: %s %d --alt-preset standard

Other settings you will want to observe are:

• Settings -> General Settings -> Directory to store files in
• Settings -> General Settings -> Naming Tab - Check the box named "Advanced" for the ability to highly customize the name and directory structure of the mp3 file output. A recommended set of parameters to put in the "Advanced" box is:  %0- %2\%0- %4

name convention:
----------------------------------------
%0- %4

%0- %2\%0- %4

lame codec parameters
----------------------------------------
%s %d -b 192

%s %d --alt-preset standard

List of recommended LAME MP3 encoder settings - the highest quality MP3 encoder.

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1912

usage

1. Launch Audiograbber. The interface panel will be empty if there is no audio CD currently inserted in your CD drive.

2. Insert an audio CD. Once it is detected, a list of tracks is displayed with the duration and filesize alongside each entry.

3. Click the Freedb option on the main toolbar (an icon of a penguin). This performs a lookup of the tracks based on the number, size and duration. If a match is found, then you will be prompted to automatically apply the track data to the files in the list.

4. Click Grab! to begin ripping the tracks. This process may take a few minutes, but no longer. The progress of each ripped track is shown in the main panel.