The best (Audiograbber)

Member Name: SEoD

Product:	Audiograbber
Date:	21/02/01 (1096 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quality and price

Disadvantages: Not all software is as good, so may make you sad when you use other programs

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 Audiograbber aren't immediately obvious until you really need them. For example, if you are low on hard disk space, and intend to rip a CD and encode it to MP3 in one go, Audiograbber will rip one CD track at a time, encode it, and then delete the .wav file before ripping the next track. And it'll even calculate how much disk space you will need to do all this before it does it and warn you. Very useful. The file naming can be setup in a couple of clicks, so you can have any combination of artist, track name, album and track number in any order you like in the name of the files produced.

The MP3 encoding setup is blissfully easy, whether you encode with a CODEC or a standalone program. All your settings are stored, and Audiograbber will retrieve information from your Windows CD player or from CDDB (a huge online database) to get the track, artist and album names and automatically put it into the ID3 tag of the MP3.

The estimates it gives for encoding time are remarkably good, considering how variable it can be with some types of music (music with rapidly varying bass and treble together in particular). They seem to be constantly recalculated during the process to give you a better idea of how long is left.

Support for CD-Roms is perfection itself, with a choice of either ASPI
or MSCDEX, although you shouldn't really be using the latter anymore, as it isn't any good. There are a number of additional advanced setup features for your CDRom, such as rip offsets, but for most they are unnecessary.

The interface is nice and uncluttered with just about all the functions you use regularly within two clicks. All this, and it'll even turn off your PC when its finished if you want. And whats more, it's cheap too. It's difficult to fault this program, and the developer clearly deserves your bucks!

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