Audiograbber

If you own a portable mp3 player the chances are that you?ll either have downloaded a heck of a lot of music (take me, with an mp3 collection approaching 3000 tracks for example ? approximately 15Gb of hard drive space) or you will have got an MP3 ripping program. After all, how do you think that mp3 files are made originally? Friends have often entrusted their musical masterpieces to me for ripping ? not so that I can send them off to people all over the net but so that they can send mp3 demos via e-mail (with is next to free if you are a pikey student and don?t want to get 250 demo CDs rejected which you?ve had to pay for!). In order to rip audio tracks into mp3s, I ...  Read the complete review

The job of an audio ripper is a fairly simple one: to get digital audio data from a CD onto your hard drive without losing any quality at all. It is really the advanced features and the performance of different rippers which sets them apart, and Audiograbber must surely be one of the best in both of these areas. Whilst some programs allow you to rip audio faster than Audiograbber, there may be errors introduced. Audiograbber protects against this by checking the ripped wave file against the version on the CD when it has finished ripping it, and gives you the option of ripping it again if there are errors. Some of the really useful features of ...  Read the complete review

They say that music soothes the savage beast. But music and computers don't always work well together. After all, if you're using the CD-ROM, you can't very well listen to audio CD music, can you? Well, don't be too quick to answer. In case you missed the recent press, MP3, the online music format, is making big waves (or small WAV's - bad joke, sorry). MP3 is a standard for encoding CD quality music to a manageable size for storage and playback on computer. Audiograbber is an application that allows you to create MP3's or WAV's from your favorite CD. The program starts by capturing a song to a WAV file, which takes about 2 ...  Read the complete review

Audiograbber is an essential piece of software if you want to copy your CD collection into MP3 format (legally of course!). There is a free version which will copy a randomly selected half of the tracks on the album each time. Its a simple case of restarting Audiograbber if you want to grab the other tracks, although this can be a bit hit and miss. The program is highly customisable, you can set the amount of silence at the beginning and end of a track to discard, in order to save on file size. It has a CDDB enabled interface, so you can download track listings for your CDs from the web. It also has a very useful normalisation setting, which allows you to ...  Read the complete review

Just about all of the other reviews are in favour of Audiograbber, but I have to say, I am not so sure. It seems to me that AG is very intolerant of errors. I have "grabbed" a number of CD's which I have previously burned on my PC and the results have been so poor (crackles on playing back the result) and have cost me so many replaced CD's that I have stopped using the programme. In fact, so intolerant is it, that a bad track, one with a lot of errors, which on a decent Hi-Fi system with good error correction plays back without problems, can cause the whole thing to seize up solid and the only way out is the reset button. One thing ...  Read the complete review