BonkEnc can rip music from CDs but also encode music that is already on the computer system into various audio formats including mp3, flac, aac, mp4 or ogg vorbis. It takes only minimal user interaction to rip a CD with the default settings. The computer program will automatically try to identify the CD by retrieving data from free online databases. If the data is found it will automatically be written in the tags of the music files.

Music that the user wants to encode can be added using the built in file browser or by dragging and dropping folders or files into the interface. BonkEnc will display various information about each file including its name, length and file size. Selecting a file will expand on that and display title, artist, album, genre and other tag information which can be changed on the fly.

The selected encoder of choice is Lame Mp3 which can be used by selecting one of the various presets or a custom configuration. Each change aspects of the encoding process including the output quality and several advanced parameters.

BonkEnc is an excellent CD to Mp3 Ripper that can also be used to encode audio files. Users who are already using CDex do not have a real reason to switch to this application unless they experience troubles with the former.

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I did write about some of them here at ghacks already but I guess only the die hard ghacks readers will know about this. I would like to start with a tool that I have been using for some time now. It is called Hamachi and the main benefit is that it is able to simulate a lan over internet. This is great if a game only offers lan play for instance. I do not suggest you use it for the following purpose but it is possible. Many games require serial numbers and those numbers are checked when you connect to a game server on the internet. They are not checked if you create a lan game.

System Tools:

Please insert the CD into the drive and restart the application. I hate this message. Forcing legit users to have the CD / DVD in drive to execute the program is something I never understood. Pirates crack those protections in seconds and legit users have the problems with methods that are supposed to make it harder for pirates. Something is wrong here. I do like Daemon Tools which emulates CDs on your hard drive. Create an image of the CD, mount it in Daemon Tools and you may use the software without the Cd.

That shitty movie is not playing. I don’t see a picture, I hear no sound. Have you ever witnessed something like that ? This could be due to a missing codec on your system. Gspot analyzed a movie file and displays the codecs it is using. Did I say that I hate the fact that there are billions of codecs out there ? Waste of time and energy.

Notepad 2 replaces Notepad which ships with every windows installation. It offers more features than Notepad like syntax highlighting.

Rbtray makes it possible to minimize every window into the system tray instead of the task bar. If you are like me and dislike crowded task bars this tool is for you.

I like my computers as silent as they can be. One method to achieve this is to use a software that is able to control the speed of the fans in your pc. Speedfan is my choice. It displays temperatures for important system components such as processor, motherboard and hard drives and lets you change the fan speed if that is supported on your system.

Vippy the writer friendly cursor changes the cursor into a eye-friendly one. This is great if you have troubles finding the cursor in a text document. Vippy changes the color of the cursor to red for instance.

Internet:

Ghacks is running on a dedicated server and I have to make the connection using a terminal program. I do use Putty for this, it is fast and clean and does exactly the things that I need it to do. I do use WinSCP to connect download backups that I made from the dedicated server. SFTP means secure file transfer.

I have a Skype account to talk to my friends and see who is online at the moment. There is no charge if both users are connected to the Skype network. I do prefer Teamspeak while gaming. Teamspeak has the advantage that more users may chat and talk at the same time while Skype has that limited I think. When I was playing WOW we were using Teamspeak with more than 40 people in one channel. Don’t worry, you can moderate everything.

If you want to view tv on the internet you should take a look at tvu player which offers some interesting channels to choose from. To name a few: ABC, ESPN, Comedy Channel, CBC, Fox and more. All free, with relative good quality. You need a broadband connection for good results.

You need some additional tools if you want to save video streams. Most providers hide the real url to the stream making it impossible to detect it by normal means. Url Snooper comes into play and detects the real address by analyzing all network traffic.

I need a local test installation of ghacks to test new features before I make the upgrade on the running site. XAMPP offers everything I need to have a local Apache installation with PHP and MYSQL support. It is great for learning and testing upgrades.

Security:

You might remember the Sony rootkit incident. They planted a rootkit on some of their CDs and users had a hard time getting rid of it. Rootkit Revealer is one of those tools that helps detecting and removing rootkits.

Other:

I do not buy lots of new CDs but sometimes I buy some used ones on Ebay or Amazon. I don’t have a CD player at all so I have to get the songs from the CD on my computer to be able to play them and transfer them to my Ipod. CDex is the tool I use for that purpose. It is fast, pulls all relevant information from the internet (author, title, songs..) and adds them automatically to the songs.

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You should check the options before you start your first ripping process. Select the Lame Encoder as your Encoder and define a bitrate for the mp3 files that you want to save. You need to add an email to the Remote CDDB tab if you want to use this service. This email is not checked at all, you might want to use a temporary email address. After that you put a music cd into your drive, CDex will retrieve the information but not the title and album information automatically.

You need to select CDDB and click on Read Remote CDDB. All titles and album information will be retrieved and displayed. Once this is done you extract one or all tracks of the CD as compressed audio (mp3 for instance). All titles will be saved to a dir defined in the options and you are ready to transfer the files to your mobile player.

It can´t be easier than that. Let me know if you are using a different tool.

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