CD Rippers
 Choose
your operating system
 What
is CD Rippers?
CD rippers are software that are
used to extract raw audio data from an audio CD and converting
it into a WAV file format. An encoder converts the WAV file into
an MP3 file. Many MP3 programs such as MusicMatch Jukebox and
Media JukeBox contain both rippers and encoders which can bypass
the intermediate WAV stage and convert the raw audio CD straight
to MP3. In this section, you will find reviews of freeware CD
rippers for both Windows and Mac platforms. If you're using or
have used any of these software and want to share your opinion,
please fill in the Contact form and
tell me about it.
 Which
cd ripper?
You should look for CD ripper that
support digital recording. Well, most programs do anyway. Digital
recording is the process of recording from a digital source to
a digital output. It doesn't requires the file to pass through
an analog soundcard. Digital-digital recording sounds a lot cleaner
than digital-analog-digital. Of course, you can convert the data
through your sound card (while the audio is played). However,
this may cause some deterioration in the final sound quality because
the signal has to be converted to an analog signal by your CD
ROM, which is then fed into the sound card and digitized. If your
CD ROM has a digital output, you won't have this problem.
Ripping is faster than encoding.
As a comparison, it takes 45 seconds to rip a 4 minutes audio
track from a CD and another 55 seconds to encode it to MP3 file
format with my Celeron 500 laptop, running Windows 98 with 64
MB RAM. Of course this varies depending on the software you use
(For this test, I use FreeRIP MP3), your computer speed, bit-rate,
and the amount of RAM your have. The more RAM you have the better.
After running this process a couple of times, you may want to
reboot your computer to clean up your computer's memory.
If you choose to rip files into WAV or AIFF format instead of
encoding them to MP3 directly, make sure that you have enough
room on your hard disk. An average audio compact disc holds about
700 megabytes of data!
To produce a good MP3 files, it's
better to leave your computer do the ripping and encoding processes
alone. The MP3 creation process is a CPU-intensive process. Anything
else that you do on the computer such as launching a program will
put a load on the CPU, and might result in unwanted blip in the
final MP3 file. To produce a CD quality mp3 files, try ripping
them using at least at 128Kbps. If you have a variable
bit-rate encoding option (VBR), select that too. 80Kbps is
usually adequate for spoken word records.
 See
also:
MP3 FAQ
- If you're new to MP3, check out this section to learn more about
MP3.
Encoders & Decoders - Learn
about Constant and Variable Bit Rates encoding.
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