http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/
cd ripper and mp3 converter, the best I have used and 100% free.
Anyone know where I can download an MP3 converter?
-
Tahrey1043
- Bling Bling Diamond Member
- Posts: 5184
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2003 1:15 am
- Location: Birmingham! Enjoys: The pseudo-G-Smiles provided by a 1.6 Megane Sport valver...
- Contact:
EAC, CDEx, MMJB are alright as well
In reverse order
If you just want something simple that'll give acceptable quality at 128kbits (maybe not so great at other higher/lower rates) you can do worse than music match jukebox ... best if you try hunting out the earlier versions somewhere though. i'm currently sticking to version 6 as 7 did nasty things to my pc
Simplistic operation, once you've set up a recording folder and a few basic options - insert CD, type in artist/title & tracks or have it find them through CDDB, hit record, have cup of tea, put CD back in box and enjoy fresh new mp3s!
CDEx (standing for... CDEx) should supposedly be as simple, i havent made much use of it yet though. Might do in future however, as it has built in support for the high quality, completely free LAME mp3 engine which i fancy switching to while i still have good enough ears to appreciate it. It's a whole lot slower (gets about 1.5 to 2x speed on my 1.6Ghz duron) and uses about 50% more bits on average (VBR mode) but the quality is *mwah* magnifique.
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is an audiophiles tool more than anything, it does very precise "secure" rips of discs to correct for any dirt and scratches that might spoil the quality, whether obvious or just contributing to background noise. This is quite slow of course!
What it's more useful for, though, is getting the tricky "hidden" tracks off a disc - the sneaky ones that are hidden before track one, that you have to press play and then rewind to listen to on a regular stereo. EAC is the only one i've seen with the ability to extract them (and even then it's an unofficial, mostly manual process)
In reverse order
If you just want something simple that'll give acceptable quality at 128kbits (maybe not so great at other higher/lower rates) you can do worse than music match jukebox ... best if you try hunting out the earlier versions somewhere though. i'm currently sticking to version 6 as 7 did nasty things to my pc
Simplistic operation, once you've set up a recording folder and a few basic options - insert CD, type in artist/title & tracks or have it find them through CDDB, hit record, have cup of tea, put CD back in box and enjoy fresh new mp3s!
CDEx (standing for... CDEx) should supposedly be as simple, i havent made much use of it yet though. Might do in future however, as it has built in support for the high quality, completely free LAME mp3 engine which i fancy switching to while i still have good enough ears to appreciate it. It's a whole lot slower (gets about 1.5 to 2x speed on my 1.6Ghz duron) and uses about 50% more bits on average (VBR mode) but the quality is *mwah* magnifique.
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is an audiophiles tool more than anything, it does very precise "secure" rips of discs to correct for any dirt and scratches that might spoil the quality, whether obvious or just contributing to background noise. This is quite slow of course!
What it's more useful for, though, is getting the tricky "hidden" tracks off a disc - the sneaky ones that are hidden before track one, that you have to press play and then rewind to listen to on a regular stereo. EAC is the only one i've seen with the ability to extract them (and even then it's an unofficial, mostly manual process)
-
Tahrey1043
- Bling Bling Diamond Member
- Posts: 5184
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2003 1:15 am
- Location: Birmingham! Enjoys: The pseudo-G-Smiles provided by a 1.6 Megane Sport valver...
- Contact:
Probably because, from the look of it on the website, it's quite old and stuck in the past.... it still uses Frauenhofer L3Enc for heaven's sake (i left that behind in the 486 / Pentium-1 days!) which is a slow and poor quality DOS-based encoder. Go on, give one of those others a try 
(can offer no comment on dbpowerAmp as i've never come across it)
Converting from WMA is a trick unto itself anyway, though. Particularly if they're protected ones - in that case your best bet is to feed it into a disc-recording output plugin in Winamp or other similar player ... or if that doesn't work, recording it ("live" at 1x speed) using a wave editor program and the internal "Digital audio" channel on your soundcard with all others muted.
(This will of course lead to several big-ass WAV files, but they're only temporary til you can point your mp3 encoder at them)
But, why do you want to convert it from WMA to MP3 anyway? Players that can't handle WMA are VERY few and far between these days - and if you're lucky enough that it doesn't harm the quality, it certainly won't improve it, even if the original file is horrendous and you use maximum encoding quality.
(can offer no comment on dbpowerAmp as i've never come across it)
Converting from WMA is a trick unto itself anyway, though. Particularly if they're protected ones - in that case your best bet is to feed it into a disc-recording output plugin in Winamp or other similar player ... or if that doesn't work, recording it ("live" at 1x speed) using a wave editor program and the internal "Digital audio" channel on your soundcard with all others muted.
(This will of course lead to several big-ass WAV files, but they're only temporary til you can point your mp3 encoder at them)
But, why do you want to convert it from WMA to MP3 anyway? Players that can't handle WMA are VERY few and far between these days - and if you're lucky enough that it doesn't harm the quality, it certainly won't improve it, even if the original file is horrendous and you use maximum encoding quality.
-
Tahrey1043
- Bling Bling Diamond Member
- Posts: 5184
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2003 1:15 am
- Location: Birmingham! Enjoys: The pseudo-G-Smiles provided by a 1.6 Megane Sport valver...
- Contact:
ah, gotcha. MP3 CDs or plain audio ones?
if plain audio just use the ripping to wav method as above and put those files directly into the burning program (whilst you've got them in that state you may want to use something like goldwave or cooledit to check the amp levels, apply a treble roll-off filter to correct for WMA's kooky high-end distortion, etc)
if mp3, carry on thru to making the mp3s as normal just be aware you might want to use a slightly higher bitrate than your regular mp3s, and certainly one or two steps higher than the original wma, to allow for conversion inefficiency between the two formats
if plain audio just use the ripping to wav method as above and put those files directly into the burning program (whilst you've got them in that state you may want to use something like goldwave or cooledit to check the amp levels, apply a treble roll-off filter to correct for WMA's kooky high-end distortion, etc)
if mp3, carry on thru to making the mp3s as normal
just be aware you might want to use a slightly higher bitrate than your regular mp3s, and certainly one or two steps higher than the original wma, to allow for conversion inefficiency between the two formats